How did Paul use his secretaries? Did he rely on co-authors? Did his rhetorical education affect the way he organised his material? This book confronts these questions on the basis of extensive quotations from classical Greek and Latin authors. A synoptic survey of the beginnings and ends of the letters brings out the extent to which Paul both used and adapted current epistolary conventions. The intention of the book is to humanize the Pauline letters and make their complex theology less daunting. (Adapted from back cover).

This clear and user-friendly introduction to the interpretive method called "epistolary analysis" shows how focusing on the form and function of Paul's letters yields valuable insights into the apostle's purpose and meaning. The author helps readers interpret Paul's letters properly by paying close attention to the apostle's use of ancient letter-writing conventions. Paul is an extremely skilled letter writer who deliberately adapts or expands traditional epistolary forms so that his persuasive purposes are enhanced. This is an ideal supplemental textbook for courses on Paul or the New Testament. It contains numerous analyses of key Pauline texts, including a final chapter analyzing the apostle's Letter to Philemon as a "test case" to demonstrate the benefits of this interpretive approach.

Informed by the historical evidence and with a sharp eye for telltale clues in the Apostle Paul's letters, E. Randolph Richards takes us into his world and places us on the scene with Paul the letter writer offering a glimpse that overthrows our preconceptions and offers a new perspective on how this important portion of Christian Scripture came to be.

Honest, insightful, funny - a brilliant memoir about writing and teaching and life from one of Australia's most loved children's authors. In the telling of his own tale, children's author and screenwriter Paul Jennings demonstrates how seemingly small events can combine into a compelling drama. As if assembling the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle he puts together fragments, memories and anecdotes to reveal the portrait of a complex and weathered soul. The accounts of the trials and joys of turning his stories into episodes of the television program Round The Twist will be of special interest to the millions of fans of this series. Untwisted is revealing, moving and very funny. Paul Jennings has crafted perhaps his most masterful story yet ...the story of his life.

With original artworks throughout, an extraordinary fusion of memoir and artistic biography from the acclaimed artist and author of Self-Portrait. Dearest Gwen, I know this letter to you is an artifice. I know you are dead and that I’m alive and that no usual communication is possible between us but, as my mother used to say, “Time is a strange substance” and who knows really, with our time-bound comprehension of the world, whether there might be some channel by which we can speak to each other, if we only knew how. Celia Paul’s Letters to Gwen John centers on a series of letters addressed to the Welsh painter Gwen John (1876–1939), who has long been a tutelary spirit for Paul. John spent much of her life in France, making art on her own terms and, like Paul, painting mostly women. John’s reputation was overshadowed during her lifetime by her brother, Augustus John, and her lover Auguste Rodin. Through the epistolary form, Paul draws fruitful comparisons between John’s life and her own: their shared resolve to protect the sources of their creativity, their fierce commitment to painting, and the ways in which their associations with older male artists affected the public’s reception of their work. Letters to Gwen John is at once an intimate correspondence, an illuminating portrait of two painters (including full-color plates of both artists’ work), and a writer/artist’s daybook, describing Paul’s first exhibitions in America, her search for new forms, her husband’s diagnosis of cancer, and the onset of the global pandemic. Paul, who first revealed her talents as a writer with her memoir, Self-Portrait, enters with courage and resolve into new unguarded territory—the artist at present—and the work required to make art out of the turbulence of life.

The author provides the most extensive analysis available of ancient Jewish letter writing from the Persian period until the early rabbinic literature. In addition, he demonstrates the significance of Jewish letters for the development of early Christian letter writing.