Abstract
When the New Testament and early Christian writings are considered as situated, culturally mediated and historically functional events, the pitfall of a binary contrast between literacy and orality should be avoided. Focus should be on the physical and experiential aspects of ancient writing. Discussions of posture, education, cost and the amount of time involved in physical writing in Greco-Roman times are concluded by an analysis of the disposition of subservience that surrounded writing.�
Highlights
It has become quite fashionable to emphasise the pitfalls of anachronism when attempting historical interpretation of texts, and rightly so; proper contextualisation is of considerable importance to responsible analysis and understanding.A seemingly innocuous question concerns the physical and material aspects of writing in antiquity
The following article proposes that we will gain a better historical grasp on the early Christian texts when we study the realia of writing
Such physical constraints affected the appearance of ancient writing
Summary
Article #209 Verbum et Ecclesia ‘I am writing this with my own hand...’: Writing in New Testament times. Affiliation: 1Department of New Testament and Early Christian Studies, University of South Africa, South Africa. Postal address: Department of New Testament and Early Christian Studies, UNISA, PO Box 392, Pretoria, Gauteng, 0003, South Africa. How to cite this article: Botha, P.J.J., 2009, ‘“I am writing this with my own hand...”: Writing in New Testament times’, Verbum et Ecclesia 30(2), Art.
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