An Introduction to the New Testament

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: THE EPISTLES. OF the twenty-seven books which compose the New Testament, twenty-one are in epistolary form. This species of literature, though it had not been common among the Greeks, was familiar to the Romans of the Empire, with its numberless foreign connections and ramified system of communication. To...
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Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: THE EPISTLES. OF the twenty-seven books which compose the New Testament, twenty-one are in epistolary form. This species of literature, though it had not been common among the Greeks, was familiar to the Romans of the Empire, with its numberless foreign connections and ramified system of communication. To the early Christian Church it became a necessity. Novel difficulties arose in the young communities, and these could best be removed by a direct appeal to the Apostles. Information which Paul received regarding any of the Churches in which he took so intense an interest naturally elicited from him some expression of joy or gratitude or disappointment. He seems never to have thought of writing a book; and ceaselessly moving as he was from place to place, and burdened with a multiplicity of cares, any extended literary labour was out of the question. He did not even take any steps for the wider publication of his letters, except on those rare occasions when he in- A recent writer says: The Greeks . . . did not write letters. They, the great originators of the world, had the magnanimity to leave this little corner a blank for their viciors and imitators.?Spectator, 4th Sept., 1886. structed two Churches to interchange the letters he had sent to them (Col. iv. 16). Some of his letters, indeed, by their elaborate and argumentative treatment of a theme, present rather the appearance of essays; but their epistolary character is maintained by their being addressed to a definite class of contemporaries resident in a particular locality. Other letters in the New Testament are little more than private notes. Six are addressed to individuals, ten to local Churches, and five to Christians in general, though in the group commonly entitled Catholic Epistles seven are included. ...