Why a Pen Name

Samuel Matthis is a pen name. I say so here, on the About page and in the book itself. A declared pen name is an old convention. A hidden one would be a small lie, and that is the wrong way to begin a book about prayer.

So this note explains the choice. The best reasons I found are in the Bible.

A letter without a name

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.”¹ 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.”² The church kept reading the letter. It still does.

Hebrews is not an exception. None of the four Gospels names its writer in its own text. Luke writes in the first person and tells his reader why he is writing and for whom: “it seemed good to me also … to write to you in order, most excellent Theophilus.” He never says who he is.³ 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.” It does not give him a name.⁴ 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 did not depend on who they were. It depended on what was written, and on the one it was about.

The door that is shut

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.”⁵ Then he tells us to go into our room, shut the door and pray.

I do not think this forbids anyone to sign a book. But I could not write about praying in secret and then make the book about me. I wanted it to point at the prayer, and at the one who gave it. A name you cannot look up is my small way of keeping the door shut.

The hand that holds the pen

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.”⁶ First Peter says it was written “through Silvanus.”⁷ Paul dictated, someone else held the pen, and nobody hid it.

My book had help too. It was written with an AI model, under my direction. I decided what the book says, I revised it, and every quotation in it is checked against its source. The book says this in the preface, and I say it here. If Tertius could put his name to his part, I can at least name the tool.

A name that borrows nothing

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.”⁸ What worried him was not a missing name. It was a borrowed one, words claiming an authority they did not have.

That is the line I want to keep. Samuel Matthis borrows nobody’s authority, and he has no invented life: no made-up degrees, no ministry, no stranger’s photograph. I am not a pastor and not a scholar, and the book does not pretend otherwise. The stories in it are mine, and they happened. What this site tells you about me is true. Only the name is chosen. Whatever authority the book has sits in its notes, where any reader can check a quotation against the page it came from.

Why this name

Hannah named her son Samuel, “saying, ‘Because I have asked him of Yahweh.’”⁹ For a book about asking, that seemed right.

Matthis comes from Matthias, which means “gift of God.”¹⁰ 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.”¹¹ 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.

So the name 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.

Like the book, this note was written with the help of an AI model. The reasons in it are my own.

Footnotes

1. Hebrews 13:22–24. Scripture on this site is quoted from the World English Bible, which is in the public domain. ↩

2. Origen, quoted by Eusebius, Church History 6.25.13–14, trans. Arthur Cushman McGiffert, Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, second series, vol. 1 (1890), newadvent.org. Just before this sentence Origen says that if any church holds the letter to be Paul’s, “let it be commended for this.” ↩

3. Luke 1:3. ↩

4. John 21:20, 24. ↩

5. Matthew 6:1, 3. The prayer follows in verses 9–13; the room with the shut door is verse 6. ↩

6. Romans 16:22. ↩

7. 1 Peter 5:12. ↩

8. 2 Thessalonians 2:2; 3:17. ↩

9. 1 Samuel 1:20. ↩

10. M. G. Easton, Illustrated Bible Dictionary, 3rd ed. (Thomas Nelson, 1897), s.v. “Matthias,” biblestudytools.com. ↩

11. Acts 1:26. Matthias appears only in Acts 1:23–26. ↩