While embedded in contemporary letter-writing conventions, early Christian letters also were instrumental in the creation of a distinctive Christian worldview. Fundamental to letters of all types, 'real' and fictional, is that they respond to, and hence negotiate and seek to overcome, actual and imagined spatial and temporal distance between author and recipient. In practice and as cultural symbols letters, sent and transmitted in new contexts, as well as letter collections, produced in the

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... stian imagination new trans-locational and cross-temporal dynamics of relationality that can be mapped onto the standard epistolary topoi -'absent as if present', half a conversation, a mirror of the soul.