Did Phoebe Interpret Romans?

Continuing with yesterday's theme. 

A new commentary on Romans from a major New Testament scholar explains (in the midst of its 15-page discussion of Phoebe).

Phoebe would have been able to provide the recipients in Rome with further information, for instance, on the complex theological contents of the letter. In antiquity, the recipients commonly expected the letter carrier to convey additional news or information. [Here he cites Richards 2004: 183; see below.] This has occasionally been mentioned in such letters. [Citing P.Col. 3.6; and Epp 1991; see below.] Phoebe would then have been in the position of negotiating the complex issues advanced by the letter in a manner typical for the ancient world. She would have answered questions in case something remained unclear; she would have added her own Midrashic comments to passages if they were too lengthy or too concise or too complicated. (Christian Eberhart 2025: 328–29). 

Hmm. What are the chances that anything remained unclear for the people who first heard Romans read aloud? Has anyone ever thought after reading Romans that the letter was too complicated? 

Uh, yes. Like, everyone ever. I have 100% confidence that after a first reading of Romans some things would have remained unclear. 

And Phoebe was the one to solve the problems. 

I love how Eberhart says that in thus providing theological commentary to Paul's densest treatise, Phoebe would have been acting "in a manner typical for the ancient world." 

Oh, yeah, for sure. This kind of thing happened all the time. Letter carriers would deliver theological treatises to the intended recipients and then would explain anything unclear in the treatise. We have loads of evidence for this. 

You want to know what the evidence is? 

Here we need to go back to that Peter Head article from 2009 that everyone cites now about ancient letter carriers.

Head (p. 283) says that out of the 450 letters published in the Oxyrhynchus series, a hundred of them provide some information about their delivery. 

I noted last time that Head was unable to find any direct evidence that the letter carrier was also the letter reader. "We did not find any evidence that any particular letter-carrier was also expected to read the letter aloud to the recipient" (297). 

But Head did find some evidence that "the letter-carrier can have an important role in the communication process, in supplementing verbally material that appears in written form in the letter, continuing or extending the conversation of the letter" (289–90). I think this is the evidence that has led some people to suggest that Phoebe may have provided theological commentary on Paul's letter. So let's look at what evidence Head has uncovered. 

Head's examples include: P.Oxy. 2.296 (here); P.Oxy. 59.3990 (here); P.Oxy. 10.1295 (here); P.Oxy. 6.937 (here); P.Oxy. 34.2727 (here; image); P.Oxy. 14.1679 (here); P.Oxy. 51.3644 (here); P.Oxy. 56.3853 (here). I'll let you, dear reader, work through those papyri yourself, or get Head's article to see what he makes of them. The links provided in this paragraph take you to transcriptions for each of the papyri, and English translations for about half of them. 

A further section of Head's article (pp. 291–96) examines three letters that demonstrate that "the role of the letter-carrier was not exhausted by the physical delivery of the letter, but the letter-carrier had an important role in continuing or supplementing the conversation initiated (or at least expressed) by the written letter" (296). 

The examples (for which Head provides a complete translation) are the following: 

1. P.Oxy. 1.113 (second century; here; image). This letter seems to have been carried by two men, who both had additional duties mentioned in the letter aside from delivering the letter. For example, the letter says: "Take care that Onnophris [one of the letter carriers] buys me what Irene's mother told him." 
2. P.Oxy. 46.3313 (second century; here; image). "Serapas will tell you about the roses—that I have made every effort to send you as many as you wanted, but we could not find them." Head (p. 294) comments: "In this way Sarapas is expected to be able to supplement the emphasis of the letter itself with his own testimony about the crucial point: the problem of the roses." 
3. P.Oxy.49.3505 (second century? here; image). Head (p. 295) comments: "Alongside the letter [Didymus] will be able to declare the exact number of sheepskins that he has brought. This immediately suggests that Papontos regards him as a trusted courier...." 

How does this evidence relate to Paul's letters? According to Head, "The papyrological evidence surveyed here supports the further idea that in the Pauline tradition the accredited letter-carriers functioned not only as personal private postmen, but as personal mediators of Paul's authoritative instruction to his churches, and as the earliest interpreters of the individual letters. They related the specific material in their letter to what they knew of Pauline teaching more generally" (298). 

I am skeptical. (If you haven't already picked up on that.) 

I see that letter carriers were sometimes expected to perform basic tasks in addition to carrying the letter. They were expected to explain some things mentioned in the letter, like why so few roses were sent along with the letter. I find it interesting that we know letter carriers sometimes did this because it is mentioned in the letter. 

Also, letter carriers could be expected to provide details about the situation of the author of the letter (cf. Eph 6:21; Col 4:7). Richards (2004: 183–84) cites several examples, mostly from Cicero, in which this role of the letter carrier is mentioned in the letter: P.Col. 3.6 (here; see the last line); P.Mich 8.492 (here); Cicero, Fam. 4.2.1 (plus many more Ciceronian examples). The upshot is that we have evidence that carriers often provided news about the sender. 

Theological commentary strikes me as a completely different thing. 

Reporting the number of sheepskins transported is one thing. Explaining the Pauline doctrine of Justification is another. 

Maybe Phoebe did this, of course. Maybe Paul discussed the contents of the letter with Phoebe before she traveled to Rome. Maybe Phoebe contributed to the composition of certain passages in the letter. Maybe she read it aloud to the various house churches in Rome. Maybe she answered theological questions arising from that reading. 

But we shouldn't pretend that we have evidence for any of this. Neither the Oxyrhynchus papri nor any other collection of ancient letters suggest that the role imagined for Phoebe in the previous paragraph was typical for letter carriers in antiquity. 

The Oxyrhynchus letters (at least, the ones highlighted by Head 2009) are uniformly personal and not communal, not in any way philosophical or theological treatises. So they are not close parallels to Paul's letters. But certainly there is no evidence I have seen from Oxyrhynchus that the letter carriers were empowered to explain the theology of the author of the letter

The only evidence I have seen that a letter carrier probably had a larger role (larger than the roles mentioned in Head's examples from Oxyrhynchus) having to do with the reception of the letter involves another major early Christian treatise, 1 Clement, and I quote here the very end of another article by Peter Head (2015). 

Although it does not appear to be understood that they [the letter carriers of 1 Clement] would have read the letter themselves (since they are not mentioned until the very end of the letter [= 63:3–4; 65:1]), it is understood that they would be present in Corinth for the hearing and reception of the letter—in fact they are an integral part of the communication process between the two churches, and would have been understood as essential to gaining a successful reception of the epistle (from the Roman perspective). (Head, p. 493)

These inferences about the role of the letter carriers of 1 Clement arise from a reading of the letter itself. Is anything similar suggested for the carrier of Paul's letter to the Romans? Or have scholars recently imagined a large role for Phoebe because they think that letter carriers typically performed such tasks? My impression is that the latter is the case, and that evidence for that view is lacking. That doesn't mean Phoebe didn't perform the tasks imagined by scholars recently, but it does mean that we do not have evidence for it. 

Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence—or evidence of any other kind. 

The comments of Paul S. Minnear seem to me to say just about what we can say about Phoebe's mission: "It is likely that she carried the letter with her. It is therefore possible that she also had oral instructions for securing specific help for Paul from the recipients of the letter" (p. 6).