Why a pen name
The name on my book isn’t the one I was baptized with. I say so here, on the About page, and in the book itself, because a book about prayer shouldn’t begin by pretending. The best reasons I found for the choice are in the Bible.
The Letter to the Hebrews is one of the great texts of the New Testament, and it never says who wrote it. It ends like a real letter. The writer asks the readers to ‘endure the word of exhortation’, tells them that ‘our brother Timothy has been freed’, and passes on greetings: ‘The Italians greet you’ (Heb 13:22–24). The one thing missing is his name.
In the third century Origen, the great scholar of the early church, studied the Greek and concluded that the thoughts were Paul’s but the wording was someone else’s. Then he wrote a sentence I find very freeing: ‘But who wrote the epistle, in truth, God knows’ (Eusebius, Church History 6.25.14). Just before it he says that if any church holds the letter to be Paul’s, ‘let it be commended for this’. The church kept reading the letter. It still does.
Hebrews isn’t alone. None of the four Gospels names its writer in its own text. Luke writes in the first person and tells his reader why he’s writing and for whom: ‘it seemed good to me also … to write to you in order, most excellent Theophilus’ (Luke 1:3). He never says who he is. John’s Gospel points to ‘the disciple whom Jesus loved’ and adds, ‘This is the disciple who testifies about these things, and wrote these things’ (John 21:20, 24). It doesn’t give him a name. The names we use for these books came later, from the church that received them.
These writers seem to have understood something simple: the weight of what they wrote didn’t depend on who they were. It depended on what was written, and on the one it was about.
My book is about the Lord’s Prayer, and the prayer comes with instructions. Just before Jesus teaches it, he says: ‘Be careful that you don’t do your charitable giving before men, to be seen by them.’ And: ‘don’t let your left hand know what your right hand does’ (Matt 6:1, 3). Then he tells us to go into our room, shut the door, and pray (Matt 6:6).
I don’t think this forbids anyone to sign a book. But I couldn’t write about praying in secret while making the book about me. I wanted it to point at the prayer, and at the one who gave it. A name you can’t look up is my small way of keeping the door shut.
The Bible is also honest about how its books were made. Near the end of Romans the man who wrote the letter down greets the readers himself: ‘I, Tertius, who write the letter, greet you in the Lord’ (Rom 16:22). First Peter says it was written ‘through Silvanus’ (1 Pet 5:12). Paul dictated, someone else held the pen, and nobody hid it.
My book had help too, and its preface and acknowledgements say what kind. If Tertius could greet the readers in his own name, the least I can do is say plainly how my book came to be.
Paul knew the real danger. He warned one church not to be shaken ‘by letter as if from us’, and in his next letter to them he signed the greeting himself: ‘I, Paul, write this greeting with my own hand, which is the sign in every letter. This is how I write’ (2 Thess 2:2; 3:17). What worried him wasn’t a missing name. It was a borrowed one—words claiming an authority they didn’t have.
I won’t cross that line. Samuel Matthis claims no authority he doesn’t have. I’m not a pastor and not a scholar, and the book doesn’t pretend otherwise. The stories in it happened to me. Whatever authority the book has sits in its notes, where any reader can check a quotation against its source.
Hannah named her son Samuel, ‘saying, “Because I have asked him of the LORD”’ (1 Sam 1:20). For a book about asking, that seemed right.
Matthis comes from Matthias, which means ‘gift of God’ (Easton). Matthias is the apostle chosen by lot to take the place of Judas: ‘the lot fell on Matthias; and he was counted with the eleven apostles’ (Acts 1:26). After that one scene the New Testament never mentions him again. He was counted, and then he did the work. I like that very much.
The name, then, says what I believe about this prayer. We ask, and what we receive is a gift. The words were never mine. Jesus gave them, the church handed them on, and every one of us receives them before we understand them. A book about given words can live with a given name.
Sources
Easton, M. G. Illustrated Bible Dictionary. 3rd ed. Thomas Nelson, 1897. S.v. ‘Matthias’.
Eusebius. Church History. Translated by Arthur Cushman McGiffert. Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, 2nd ser., vol. 1. 1890. Book 6, chapter 25, quoting Origen.
Scripture is quoted from the World English Bible, British Edition, which is in the public domain.