There have been xmas days off. Letters and writing have receded from central place. Minds have been blank. But then a voice from the radio – some lines from St Paul’s letter to the Romans (Rom. 1, in fact) as set to music by Schutz in 1648. Like other letters by Paul, this too raises questions of an epistolary character. Who exactly was the addressee or addressees, did Paul physically write it or was this the amanuensis glimpsed in other letters, was it sent when Paul was in Corinth, were the Romans in question actually other Jews and not gentiles, did anyone get to answer back in comparable terms, is it a letter or an epistle or on the borders of both or… The music is superb, the words less so, and the questions raise perennial issues for epistolary scholarship.