Amanuensis (ah-man-you-EN-sis, plural amanuenses ah-man-you-EN-seez) is a Latin word derived from the phrase ab manu, which means "by hand." The term refers to a servant or slave who has secretarial duties.
In the Roman Empire, aristocrats would buy or hire amanuenses to write letters on their behalf. Like secretaries today, amanuenses had varying levels of skill, education, and political power. Some were like what we would call temps, offering their handwriting to whoever would pay for it. Others became very important figures in noble households, overseeing the master's correspondence and possibly acting as an editor or advisor as well. Unlike secretaries today, scribes in ancient Rome were generally men, though Kim Haines-Eitzen has made the case that there were some women among them.
The role of the amanuensis adds a very interesting complication to the study of the New Testament. We know for a fact that Paul had at least one secretary. In fact, we even know his name! At the very end of the epistle to the Romans, Paul is sending some personal greetings and local news to the church at Rome. In verse 16:22, we suddenly encounter this sentence:
And I, Tertius, who wrote down this letter, greet you in the Lord.
For just a brief moment, Tertius "takes over," bringing his own voice into a letter that Paul composed. The fact that Tertius was permitted to do this suggests that Paul trusted him, and that he was not simply a hired, um, hand.
Just how much influence did ancient scribes have over their masters' correspondence? I've worked as a secretary myself, and I've corrected a lazy engineer's grammar or deleted a harried lawyer's redundancy on more than one occasion. I also know that I've been tempted to rewrite bits of letters (very often my bosses would not read the final product after having dictated it), and I might well have gone through with it if I'd known for sure that I wouldn't be caught. Would Tertius have felt those temptations? Would he have succumbed to them?
A new generation of Biblical scholars, including Harry Gamble, Bart Ehrman, and the aforementioned Kim Haines-Eitzen, have been reconsidering the issue of scribal influence on texts. Rather than assuming that the amanuensis mindlessly and mechanically transcribed the words of his master, these historians are making the case that he may have contributed in a very real way to ancient documents -- either through personal influence (conversations with employers, power within the household), or, more directly, by quietly editing passages that did not appeal to them.
Then as now, the fact that someone used a scribe's services does not mean that he himself was illiterate. We know that Paul was well-educated; he could write his own letters and occasionally did. For example, he announces that he is writing "in his own hand" in 1 Corinthians 16:21 and Galatians 6:11 ("see what large letters I'm making!"). In 2 Thessalonians 2, Paul complains about people who forge letters in his name, then fill the forged letters with false prophecies. He concludes that letter by saying,
I, Paul, write this greeting in my own hand, which is the distinguishing mark in all my letters. This is how I write.
The irony is that there is a very good chance that this letter is
itself pseudonymous. This is not the node for a detailed discussion of the authorship of the Thessalonian correspondence, so for now I will simply say that history has not left us with
autographs of any Biblical text, "large letters" or otherwise. This means that we have to establish each text's provenance using tools other than the one that Paul apparently wanted us to use.
It does seem odd, doesn't it, that your printed Bible doesn't change typefaces for Galatians 6:11?