Who Wrote Romans?

Who wrote the letter to the Romans?

Now this may sound like one of those skeptical, higher criticism questions. "O No!" you may be thinking, "don't tell me that you are going to cast doubt on the Pauline authorship of Romans." You may even be thinking that this blog will be off your list of regular reads now. WAIT!

Romans 16:22 holds the answer: "I Tertius, the writer of this letter, greet you in the Lord."
Tertius. That's right, the Bible says Tertius wrote the letter to the Romans. Why then does the letter begin with Paul's name, if he did not write it? And why do we say "Paul's letter to the Romans" and not "Tertius' letter to the Romans"?

Paul is the author of the letter, but in his day the physical act of writing was an occupation. It took special skills to be able to compose a letter, but the act of transcribing the words also required special skills. Some theorize that the painstaking process of composing each letter (in a word) would take about one hour for seventy words. The pens and paper were so primitive that it was very challenging to write legibly. If that is the case, then a letter like Romans could have taken weeks to write. It would have taken hours each day.

I theorize that one reason Paul is hard to read is because of the actual process of thinking, speaking, waiting then repeating, over and over, several words at a time. One often senses that in mid-sentence Paul is launching in another direction. Can you imagine his mind racing with a dozen ideas as he waited for his words to be set to paper?

It is not uncommon for me to be asked to write a letter to the whole parish, or some small group within it. I can literally whip up a pretty nice letter in ten to twenty minutes. It is easy to write clearly. Speaking, on the other hand, is more challenging. As we speak our thoughts race in different directions. We head in one direction, then another.

Have you ever read a transcript of how people really speak? Half sentences, phrases, fillers ("like," "umm," etc). People might say two words, then stop. Then start all over again. Sometimes Paul does this. Tonight I preached on Romans 8. Paul begins, "we are debtors" but instead of finishing the thought "to God" he ends up side tracked about "not to the flesh." The sidetrack is still powerful, but one can imagine Paul pausing as Tertius scratched his words. Suddenly, he thought of more nuances to what he was saying.

One of the beauties of incarnation is that God comes to us in human flesh. The real world we live in is the real world of revelation. God respects us, perhaps more than we respect ourselves. Sometimes we want magic. We want God to bust in and free us from the long slow process of real life. My guess is Paul would have loved a word processor. He could have written lots of books. But maybe, in Paul's day, people were able to savor words and understand them better. Maybe having to spend so long to write a letter, one cherished it more. Perhaps needing a team to write a letter, made it more a work of a community. Perhaps we have gained much, but also lost some things along the way.

Next time you read an Epistle, imagine the writing process. Read it the way people talk. See if that makes it easier.