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Commentary Index | Return to PrayerRequest.com | DownloadGreater Men and Women of the Bible by James Hastings: 676. Tertius the Amanuensis
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Tertius the Amanuensis
When God would do anything among men He chooses and uses a man. When He wanted to grow a nation that would stand for the highest ideals of revealed religion, even as later Greece stood for letters, and Rome for the power of organization, He chose a man up in the Euphrates Valley. And about this man, Abraham, He began slowly to build up that strange people which has had the greatest influence of any upon the nations of the earth. When that nation, not yet fully born as a nation, was in sore danger of being throttled in its birth, He took a man, Moses, chosen from his birth, graduate in the highest learning of earth's best schools, who has left the indelible marks of his native gifts and special training upon that people, and upon the life of the whole race.
With deepest reverence be it said, when God would redeem a world He sent a Man_1:1 [Note: S. D. Gordon, Quiet Talks on Personal Problems, 81.]
“'Tis God gives skill,
But not without men's hands: He could not make
Antonio Stradivari's violins
Without Antonio.” 2 [Note: George Eliot, Stradivarius.]
2. A Christian, thinking of the pretty editions of the Bible that we have, would say that Tertius, when he wrote St. Paul's letter to the Romans, must surely have used those large and fine letters which we call uncials. But those who know what people at that day were likely to write would say no. It was a letter that Tertius was writing, even if it was a very large letter. It was an essay, a treatise, an article; but it was the habit then, as it often has been since, upon occasion, to write such an essay in the form of a letter. And such a letter would be written, not in the formal stiff capitals, but in the running hand. A running hand was just what the name says, handwriting written at a run, written in a hurry, as so many people write to-day. The letters were at first, we might say, just like those capital letters. But the swiftness of the strokes had impaired the form of the letters. If we look at many a handwriting that we see to-day and ask how much a d or an m or a u looks like the printed form of those letters or like the forms given in copy-books, we may understand that in the same way the writing that Tertius wrote in all probability contained many strange-looking letters. The letters will often have been written close together, and all joined together without respect to the division between words. We cannot at all tell how well Tertius was able to write. We do not know whether he wrote a clear hand or whether he wrote a bad hand. The chances are that he wrote well. That may be the reason why he, and not Timothy or Lucius or Jason or Sosipater, who were all there at the time, was asked to do the writing.
Ruskin very rarely dictated, but it was one of the duties of his personal servant-successively “George,” Crawley, and Baxter-to make fair copies of his rough drafts; a task often undertaken in later years by Mrs. Severn.1 [Note: E. T. Cook, The Life of Ruskin, i. 366.]
3. One would like to know whether Tertius appreciated the Epistle to the Romans. Doubtless he did, as well as one could then. But he could not value it as we do after these centuries, during which it has instructed and warned and chided and comforted hundreds of thousands of Christians.
Judging by his name, he was probably a Roman, and possibly had some connexion with Italy, but clearly he was a stranger to the Church in Rome. We do not know whether he was a resident in Corinth, where he wrote this Epistle, or one of St. Paul's travelling companions. Probably he was the former, as his name never recurs in any of St. Paul's letters. One can understand the impulse which led him for one moment to come out of obscurity and to take up personal relations with those who had so long enjoyed his pen. He would fain float across the deep gulf of alienation a thread of love which looked like gossamer, but has proved to be stronger than centuries and revolutions.
But all that we really know of Tertius who wrote the Epistle is that he wrote it. He ventures, however, in closing it, to add his salutations to those to whom the Apostle had directed him to write. He appears here for a moment and is gone, just as a star sometimes for an instant emerges from a cloud, shines brightly and is swallowed up again by the darkness. This one utterance, however, gives him an immortality.
Probably he did not know a single Christian in Rome. All those people were strange to him, and they did not know there was such a man. But Tertius, lonely, homesick for love and fellowship, puts in his little love note on the margin, saying, in substance, “I Tertius, Paul's amanuensis, who wrote down this epistle from his holy lips, I, too, am a Christian, and I salute you in the Lord. You don‘t know me, and I don‘t know you, but we both know the Lord, and I think you will like to know when you read these words of Paul that it was a faithful Christian hand which wrote them down for you.”1 [Note: L. A. Banks, The Great Saints of the Bible, 318.]
Tradition reckons Tertius one of the Seventy and as having become Bishop of Iconium. The same traditions are stated in the Menologium Basilianum, where he is commemorated on November 10, together with Olympas, Rhodion, Sosipater, Erastus, and Quartus, and in the Acta Sanctorum, where he is commemorated on June 20, together with Jesus Justus and Artemas (June, vol. iv. pp. 7 and 8).2 [Note: E. Basil Redlich, St. Paul and his Companions, 278.]