Prepared by Ken Edgecombe
When I was a kid, I went through a phase of collecting autographs of famous people, as a lot of kids do. I still have the book, replete with signatures from Stirling Moss and Peter Snell, a complete All Black team, Edmund Hillary, sundry cricketers including Neil Adcock and JR Reid, and Everton Weekes. Cliff Richard’s in there too, and various others. I can still remember bailing Murray Halberg up under the grandstand at Eden Park and talking him into signing: he didn’t want to, for some reason. But the brush with the famous was worth talking about later, and the signature was there to prove it.
A signature: great. But what about a whole letter, that the famous person had chosen to write of their own accord — would you value that, or what? For the church at Colossae, Paul was a celebrity, and a letter from him would have commanded both respect and attention. And they were also asked to share it with the pc3 churches in the neighbouring valley, and to read the letter the crowd at Laodicea had received. I’ll bet they did it, too. And then, at the end, he says, “I write this with my own hand. Grace be with you.” I wonder who souvenired the original, after all the copies had been made?
