Was Jesus Literate?

Faith & Science Conversation
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And are they based on uncritical readings of Josephus?

There were no book stores and writing was relatively expensive and arduous especially compared to today. Are we to imagine every Jewish home with an Old Testament Bible in It for the first born son? Or written documents? This is all pre-printing press.

Jesus may have acquired a Torah education and some basic literacy in synagogue. It’s certainly not impossible but probability wise, it seems less probable than not.

Though Torah education might more have been: this is what Torah says, memorize it. I suspect books were hard to come by for the ordinary person in most of “antiquity.” But yes, there is some evidence literacy was becoming more important at that time in some circles.

Even Papias writing ca 110 favors the living and abiding voice.

Edited to add:

and the perpetual virginity of Mary takes exception to you thinking Jesus is the eldest son. Half brothers are all older :wink:

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Why should we have a problem with a literal account that Christ was born in a manger? I do not see what this has to do with literacy given the biblical reasons for why Mary and Joseph ended up there in the first place (A census that saw thousands flock to their home towns)

Your second comment…one can find plenty of significant resources that completely discredit that claim…including that of apparent textual errancy ( i like Bart Erhman but he’s demonstrably wrong on this)

Your third comment…What is the problem with ancients being literate exactly even if this extended across palestine or the world for that matter? Are you worried that their somehow being smarter than you discredits your world view and therefore cannot be tolerated? That is rather ironic given i find no competition in ancients literarcy and my world view…it supports my world view and is also consistent with the biblical narrative. BTW, in what age is it claimed Socrates existed…470-399BCE? Apparently a man who wrote nothing down, was a drunk, a slob, and yet apparently very literate!

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Remember that even many of the upper echelon of society in OT times were probably not very literate. That is why they had scribes to record important documents for the royal courts and such. No doubt by Jesus’s day more were literate but still not common. Why learn to read, when there was nothing much to read. A few scrolls in the synagogue and a few inscriptions on the monuments. Jesus commonly said, “You have heard…” but never said “you have read…

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And in the Masoretic text there is a bunch of sheer gibberish in the minor prophets, faithfully copied from obviously corrupted texts.

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The Greek there is interesting due to the use of the present tense for the Greek ἀναβαίνω (ah-nah-BAI-no); it can be rendered as “I am not going up presently”, which doesn’t exclude going up later. I wish I had the Aramaic at hand to look at the verb there, though the Aramaic texts extant may have been back-translations from the Greek and in that case would not be helpful.

[Found a source for the Aramaic and it turns out that it isn’t helpful.]

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I’m blanking on the names at the moment but I know I’ve read two other scholars who say the same. Also, if something was written down that didn’t come from oral tradition, it was still meant to be read aloud, e.g. Paul’s letters.

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τέκτων refers to a craftsman, which doesn’t really qualify as “menial labor”.

A broader possibility spread upwards increases the likelihood of the actuality being higher.

Now that is significant.

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Just as an fyi, this topic was moved.

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I don’t recall Josephus being mentioned.

Where did that come from? Scrolls were at the synagogue, though it’s an interesting question how much of the Old Testament was at any given one. Most likely they would have had the Torah, the Psalms, and Isaiah, with other texts there if someone wealthy enough to pay for copying a scroll decided their synagogue should have one.

Ha ha.

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Reading was done out loud, so even for someone who could read the scrolls “you have heard” still applies.
This appears, BTW, in a common term used during what to us is the canonization process, i.e. “what is read in our churches” – it meant read aloud during worship, a practice inherited from the synagogue.

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The other explanation I heard was that Jesus wasn’t going this brothers or at all. The father then told him to go in the interim. He went.

Neither is super satisfying. They are just easier to swallow than the more uncomfortable alternative.

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That’s just silly. The use of the present tense, though, is at least one that wasn’t uncommon – I’d have to haul out my old Greek grammar book to see how much it was actually used and if there are any indicators that would show that intent. Of course it could be an instance of Jesus letting his brothers think one thing while He meant something else.

Just as a matter of interest, several variant readings from probably independent manuscripts insert “yet” into the passage. The reason is obvious, but putting it in baldly ruins the point of Jesus not wanting His brothers to know He was coming since He didn’t want anyone else to know.

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So here’s a little thought to add to your discussion: On the cross Jesus calls out IN ARAMAIC, a quotation of a Psalm. Unlikely that one would translate from Hebrew to Aramaic in one’s death throes, so that could be taken as evidence that Jesus memorized Scripture in his first language, Aramaic, not in Hebrew. Scholars say WRITTEN copies of the Targum (MT translated to Aramaic) didn’t exist until after AD 70 and the oldest surviving copy is second century, I believe. But they think ORAL translations of the Hebrew existed and were used in synagogues prior to the written recording. So, yes, we have the passage Jesus reads in the synagogue that was probably Hebrew. But MAYBE, he actually memorized and studied the Scriptures in Aramaic, from oral teaching.

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Take it for what it is worth. From Douglas Carson’s Pillar Commentary on John:

“This interpretation is well-nigh necessitated by the final words of the verse: for you any time (kairos) is right. In this reading, kairos makes sense: i.e. Jesus’ brothers are free to go up to Jerusalem for the Feast any time they like, while Jesus is under special constraint (cf. v. 8). Jesus’ words become more biting when Odeberg’s evidence (pp. 270–281) is taken into account. He lists numerous Jewish sources which, largely building upon Ecclesiastes 3:1ff. (‘There is a time for everything, and a season for every activity under heaven…’), delight to appeal to divine sovereignty to give significance to the diversity of things that can befall both the created order in general and the individual in particular. In that light, Jesus’ brothers would not be upset to hear Jesus say his time had not come, but they may well have been scandalized to hear him say for you any time is right. It is almost as if they are being excluded from divine sovereignty–not that God suspended his providential reign in their case, but that what they did was utterly without significance as far as God is concerned. This interpretation is confirmed by the next verse.”

“7. Jesus’ brothers lack an appointed time because they belong to the ‘world’ (kosmos; cf. notes on 1:9, 7:4). The world cannot hate you, Jesus tells them, for they belong to it, and the world loves its own (15:19). By contrast, the world hates Jesus, not only because he does not belong to it, but because he testifies that what it does is evil (cf. 3:19–20; 7:19; 8:31–59; 9:39–41; 16:8–9). The world always hates to have its evil exposed, to be convicted of its sin. That is why the brother’s suggestion, that Jesus should show himself to the world (v. 4), was so misplaced. By ‘the world‘, they mean ‘everybody’, but Jesus knows that ‘everybody’ belongs to ‘the world’ in a far more negative sense, already summarized in the Prologue (1:10).

Thus v. 7 simultaneously explains why Jesus will not rise to the challenge set him in v. 4, and why, for the brothers, any time is right. Their alignment with ‘the world’ means they know nothing of God’s agenda. They do not listen to his word, do not recognize it”

“when it comes, and cannot perceive the Word incarnate before them. They are divorced from God’s kairos, his divine appointments,264 and so any time will do. All appointments that ignore God’s kairos are in the eternal scheme of things equally insignificant.

8–9. So let the brothers go to the Feast whenever they will. Their decision is without significance. But Jesus, whose itinerary is regulated by the Father, must at this point decline, because (he says) for me the right time (kairos; cf. v. 6) has not yet come. The early textual witnesses are divided between I am not yet (oupō) going up to this Feast (NIV), and ‘I am not (ouk) going up to the Feast’. The word oupō may have been an early scribal ‘correction’ to remove the obvious difficulty that arises in v. 10: Jesus does go up. But even if the reading ouk (‘not’) is correct, the difficulty is superficial because the context supplies a condition. Jesus’ response to his brothers is not that he is planning to stay in Galilee forever, but that because his life is regulated by his heavenly Father’s appointments he is not going to the Feast when they say “he should. The ‘counsel of the wicked’ (Ps. 1:1) cannot be permitted to set his agenda. His ‘not’ turns down his brothers’ request; it does not promise he will not go to the Feast when the Father sanctions the trip.”

“The verb rendered ‘going up’ (anabainō) is also used to refer to Jesus’ ascent to the Father through death (3:13; 6:62; 20:17), and some see a similar allusion here. That is just possible, even though the brothers also ‘go up’ to the Feast, in the purely mundane sense that anyone travelling to Jerusalem from any point on the compass was said to be ‘going up’ to the capital. If such an allusion is intended, the idea is that Jesus’ ‘going up’ cannot possibly be like the ‘going up’ of other pilgrims.

  1. The assumption in this verse is that the Father has signalled Jesus in some way, so Jesus goes to Jerusalem, leaving Galilee for the last time before the cross.”
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And here is Keener in his Commentary on John:

John illustrates how dangerous Jerusalem had become for Jesus; he acted secretly until the midst of the feast, when he could draw the largest crowds (7:14). That Jesus went up in “secret” (7:10) could suggest that he misled his brothers in some sense (7:6–8).47 Ancient readers might have differed among themselves whether Jesus misled his brothers here; not telling an interested party one’s plans could be viewed as deception (Gen 31:20).48 In gen- eral, ancient peoples, both Jewish49 and Gentile,50 condemned lying, but those who com- mented on it sometimes allowed exceptions.51 Scripture certainly permitted deception under extreme circumstances, especially to save life and sometimes (with prophets) to let the wicked remain in their folly.52 Later Jewish teachers also approved of deception to fight oppressors (Judith 9:10, 13) or to save one’s life from oppressors.53 Telling the truth could merit damnation if this act constituted betrayal of another to an oppressor.54

But whereas Jesus might have left an impression different from his plans, he does not explicitly lie here; he did remain in Galilee until it was time for him to go to the festival (7:9), and then eluded capture and stoning because his hour had not yet come (7:30; 8:20, 59). Changing one’s plans after having spoken differently was not viewed as lying, but could merit the accusation of fickleness (levitas), sometimes requiring a defense of some sort.55 Yet Jesus did not change his mind in this passage, for as in 6:6, he knew his own intentions in ad- vance; his “time” had not yet come (7:8). Later pagan writers actually used this passage to charge Jesus with fickleness, but the text’s point, by contrast, is “Jesus’ firm resolve to do ex- actly what the Father gives him to do, and at the Father’s time (cf. 5:19ff.)."

I think the “left an impression different from his plans” is the problem here. It is hard to avoid the charge of being misleading in that scenario.

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Stumbled across this:

John 7: 15 The Jews were astonished at it, saying, “How does this man have such learning, when he has never been taught?” 16 Then Jesus answered them, “My teaching is not mine but his who sent me.

Kind of dumps the Jesus was trained idea on its head. Crossan argues the text of Mark 6:3 does the same . I was perusing Chris Keith’s 2015 work Jesus’s Literacy (again) and came across both references.

As far as I am concerned, coffin—meet nail. That book is highly worth the read. Luke rewrote Mark’s synagogue passage (Markan priority) and turned Jesus from a wood-worker into an elite scribe.

Also, for your opening comments, the Mishnah was written hundreds of years after Jesus. It’s not the most reliable source for ascertaining what life was like in the first third of the first century. I think it’s a myth that so many young Jewish men were trained in reading Torah. And I think it comes from there.

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This depends on the familiarity with the text. There are parts of the Pentateuch I can read fluently out loud because I have done so more than once before, but I would stumble over passages just following that I wasn’t familiar with.

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I think the question ‘was Jesus literate?’ is misleading. The question should be ‘how well could Jesus read and write?’.

Being literate could mean different levels of reading, from barely understanding what was written to being a fluent researcher and writer of philosophical texts. My ‘educated’ guess would be somewhere between. There are hints suggesting that Jesus had at least some ability to read written texts and possibly ability to read notes needed in the profession but no hints of Jesus ever writing long texts.

Very basic teaching would be enough to learn reading. For example, I learned to read without getting any teaching. I watched TV programs for kids with subtitling in another language. I knew both languages. That was enough for me to learn what was written and my parents were surprised when they noted that I was actually reading aloud the subtitles. They had been careful not to give me any teaching in reading because they assumed it would be better that I learned the skill when I would later start the school. Dont know why they had that assumption, my guess is that they thought that I would get bored in the school if there were no challenges.

If I could learn reading without getting any teaching, why would Jesus not learn reading if he got even basic teaching? Jesus had the advantage that he was told and he memorized passages from the scriptures and at the same time, he probably had at least occasionally access to the same texts in written form. That would probably have been enough for me to learn reading and I cannot think that Jesus would not be able to learn what I could have learned.

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I think you are missing the point. Locating the passage is a huge part of the problem. Jesus has to unroll a long scroll with no chapter divisions, paragraphs, punctuations, etc. Luke makes sure we know Jesus was given a scroll and unrolls it himself and finds the passage right there in front of everyone on the spot. He is clearly presenting Jesus as a master scribe. Not only can he read but he can find a passage tucked away with ease in his non-native tongue, an ASTONISHING feat at the time. John 7 tells us the opposite and the reaction to him in the synagogue in Mark 6 confirms this. I take Marcan priority as the overarching principle of gospel composition (much like evolution is the overarching theory of biology). Luke is reworking that scene.

I think the majority of us realize there is a spectrum. This thread was split out of another one as the topic became about Jesus’s literacy.

You had subtitles on tv available to you all the time. What subtitles does Jesus have? Books were expensive and hard to come by in antiquity.

You are assuming Jesus received teaching on how to read. If that were demonstrated the issue would be settled. If Jesus did receive teaching on how to read I don’t think anyone thinks he was not intelligent enough to learn to do so. His exegetical prowess shines through in the Gospels. You also must realize literacy is far more important in our world than during Jesus’s day. We are falling victim to anachronism.

And also, as @Christy has reminded us, Jesus spoke Aramaic. That was his Native language. If Jesus spoke Hebrew that would have already been a second language to him and probable not very useful in the crowds he preached to

From zondervan Academic

  1. The overwhelming majority of documents and inscriptions recovered from the era are in Aramaic. Although documents do exist in Greek, Hebrew, Latin, and other languages, they are a minority. And even though many religious texts are in Hebrew (for example, of the Dead Sea Scrolls, 15% are in Aramaic, 3% are in Greek, and the rest in Hebrew), most nonreligious texts—contracts, invoices, ownership claims, and other kinds of ordinary communication—are in Aramaic.
  1. The second, and perhaps most convincing evidence of Aramaic primacy is that the Hebrew Scriptures were being translated into Aramaic. There may be many reasons why the Scriptures were being translated, but the most likely one is the simplest: most ordinary people could no longer understand the Scriptures in Hebrew.

Zondervan also writes (I am not 100% convinced this means “reads Hebrew”):

Although Jesus knew Hebrew and could speak it, in reality, he probably only spoke it in the synagogue or while discussing the Torah with his peers. Outside of these contexts, it’s unlikely anyone would have understood him. Jesus’s first language—the language he used in ordinary conversation, the language he used to teach the crowds—was Aramaic.

Though they did earlier reference a crowd Josephus spoke to in Hebrew. But if Jesus picked up any literacy from day to day interactions, it was probably in Aramaic, not Hebrew. So is Jesus now literate in two languages? Hebrew and Aramaic?

Rather than Jesus picking up things and reading in Hebrew, maybe in an oral dominant culture it’s better to think he learned some functional Hebrew in an oral capacity.

Luke Makes Jesus an elite scribe. he unrolls a scroll of Isaiah and immediately locates a passage in a work that has no paragraphs, chapter headings, chapters, verses, punctuations, divisions, spaces etc. It’s just a big block of letters. Unrolling a scroll and doing this is clearly a strongly educated act that does not match up with John 7:15. Luke is not presenting a Jesus as one who just picked up some functional literacy. He is reimagining an illiterate (or barely literate) woodworker from Nazareth as an educated religious scribe. Unlike the author of the Gospel of Luke, I have absolutely no shame in the humble beginnings of my Lord and Savior. When I see them I am awestruck by the depths of the Divine Condescension.

Jesus may still have possessed some form of functional or basic literacy, but the most direct evidence we have for it is clearly Luke turning Jesus from a woodworker into an elite scribe.

Vinnie

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  • What’s the possibility that Jesus’ older brother, James, could write an epistle, unless of course James and Jesus had no relatives in common. On the other hand, if Mohammad was illiterate, Jesus must have been, too,eh?
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