I think this is a more difficult question than it seems – far more quantitative than either-or. I very much doubt that Jesus could write. The tools for writing were not so easy to obtain. And how literate can you be when you have little access to books to read? Yet I think Jesus could read better than most, possibly even taught to read by Mary (remember that she at least was from a prominent family and unusual). I think women are overlooked more than they should be. Human beings are not all the same. There have always been women with interests outside the norm. I am no Catholic to believe such things as immaculate conception, but I still think there are signs that she was not the norm for women of her time. We don’t know all that much of Jesus’ childhood, but it certainly doesn’t sound as if he were uneducated. You don’t impress older men without real knowledge and I don’t believe Jesus had such simply by divine magic.
And just how literate did he need to be to be crucified, resurrected, and to ascend into Heaven.
A good teacher might have pointed that out earlier. Nails in coffins are pretty irrelevant.
Zero. Nothing at all. Yet some Christians fight tooth and nail against this because in our world being illiterate carries the connotation of ignorant or being stupid and 1) they can’t fathom Jesus as such and 2) the Gospel of Luke explicitly makes him literate.
I think on point one they are in good company because the author of Luke found it embarrassing and decided to change Jesus from a wood worker into an elite scribe.
You can certainly claim Jesus reading is a divine miracle. That is unfalsifiable and not at all suggested by scripture in my opinion, but you are free to believe it.
And one can tell a generically true story about Jesus while inventing details. It’s extremely naive to suggest otherwise and is completely ignorant of how ancient bios actually worked. It was a very creative process.
I pointed out a lengthy piece from Christ Keith outlining 5-6 problems with Luke’s portrait as a rewrite of Mark. I also pointed out how John 7:15 confirms this. You can dialogue with them if you wish.
And any historical claim requires positive historical evidence. You can believe everything the Bible narrates about Jesus is literally true much in the same way YECs believe everything the Bible narrates about creation is true. I find both misunderstand the Biblical genres we are working with. Not to mention we can probably all cite plenty of verses that say something quite obvious yet we Christians completely ignore/disregard them.
You are just assuming what you believe to be true. You are producing no evidence Jesus, who most likely taught in Aramaic to people, needed or wanted to learn Hebrew. You are also being anachronistic. You need to demonstrate all these points and to do so you need to travel back in time before the printing press when 95% of the population was illiterate, and owning books was extremely rare. This is just projecting Jesus in our own image.
Should we likewise assume all Christians today would naturally want to learn Greek and Hebrew and do so because it’s the language the word of God is originally written in and things get lost in translation? I assure you most people will not attempt this and are fine with their translations. There is ultimately no need for them to do this. Jesus lived in an oral dominant culture. Whether he could read himself or not he had access to the scriptures and memorization of them in the most common mode of discourse available.
Edited to add: Also I don’t believe Jesus was the first born child. Joseph had older sons from a previous marriage. If I am accepting the virgin birth on the basis of tradition, I’m going the full Monty. There are definitely some scriptural challenges but Brant Pitre put out an excellent book on this.
I also think the claim that this was true of the first-born son is one of those myths that gets regurgitated over and over again. I’m guessing it comes from an uncritical reading of the Mishnah which presents an idealized view hundreds of years later. Even if it was a policy, there is no reason to suppose it was even enforced in various regions. Critical scholarship is actually quite critical about everything including all supposed ancient historians. There is no secret plan to destroy the Gospel.
I certainly don’t think Jesus was anything like an elite scribe. He doesn’t identify with the the Pharisees and scribes at all. He very much identifies with the working class. Yet this doesn’t mean Jesus was completely uneducated either. That also seems very unlikely to me. Someone simply doesn’t impress so many people otherwise.
I think it likely that Jesus was both - trained as a carpenter by His father and taught quite differently by His mother.
I don’t think Vinnie’s characterization of some gospels as outright lies and fantasy is in keeping with the tradition of Hebrew scripture which is dominated by a remarkable degree of honesty in telling the stories of its founding fathers – more about the goodness of God than its human leaders. Instead, I think it is more believable that what we are seeing is a matter of interpretation and emphasis. Some saw Jesus more as a common man and others saw Him more as one who was very knowledgeable. The truth was probably somewhere in-between. Frankly, the truth usually is.
Ironic that you decry tradition otherwise. Do you have good scholarship and erudition to support Mary’s perpetual virginity?
Huh? Who said anything about perpetual virginity? That one is impossible to believe. She was married… with children.
Huh yourself. 
It was easy to infer from what he said about Joseph having older children, and it is also what the RCC teaches from tradition.
Yeah… I found that on a Catholic site after I wrote that. I guess agreement with this RCC position is how you interpret “full monty” and the claim of Joseph having sons from a previous marriage. It was a bit of a shock… to me. Of course I think this is all complete nonsense – a total fantasy like the creationist notion of a world without pain or death before the fall.
Where are these brothers and sisters in Bethlehem? And the description in Matthew 1 certainly doesn’t agree with this claim of no marital relationship after Jesus was born.
Again that depends on familiarity. I had reference books I could open right to where I wanted without having to look up page numbers or scan for what I wanted, because I’d used certain sections so often. Use a scroll often enough and you’ll be able to unroll it to familiar places because muscle memory knows how far to unroll it. Assuming Jesus had the synagogue training He could have well been familiar enough with some passages to be able to get within a dozen lines of what He wanted.
Besides that, at over 25k words, Isaiah wasn’t likely to be on a single scroll; longer scrolls were more expensive than that same length in shorter scrolls. There is evidence that Isaiah was commonly on two or even three scrolls, which would cut down on the search time.
I’ve never read anything coming from the Mishnah. I’m relying on articles about the literacy rate in Jerusalem, in military posts, and in towns (interestingly, apparently there were a lot of people who could read Aramaic, Greek, and sometimes Hebrew who couldn’t write those languages – not something we find much of today). One article estimated that literacy that included writing during the Hasmonean period among the military was around 15% and if those who could only read are added in then it could have reached 20%. Another study concluded that most of Jerusalem was bilingual and that more residents there spoke Greek as their first language and Aramaic only to communicate with the locals – a conclusion that shocked me. Stranger still was the assertion that more slaves and servants per capita were able to both read and write than free men!
I bumped into other interesting items along the way, such as that the Pharisees apparently only had text for the purpose of learning it; all debate and disputation relied on having texts memorized. Small “handbooks” of important passages have been found that may have belonged to Pharisees for refreshing their memory or possibly for teaching students. And apparently many Pharisees could read but not write Aramaic, Greek, and Hebrew, relying on scribes to do the writing (note the common linkage in the Gospels between “scribes and Pharisees”).
A lot comes down to how large Nazareth was. Some put the population as low as 120, a figure that – if correct – throws into doubt whether there even was a synagogue and thus the entire episode is suspect; others go as high as 400, a large enough number to make a synagogue probable. Nazareth’s size is related to the economy, and it is frequently asserted that most residents of Nazareth would have actually worked in the city of Sephoris, where literacy would have been higher.
One other thing: just teaching in synagogues is no big deal; traveling Jews often got invited to address the assembly (though I suspect they were more interested in news from other places).
BTW, I couldn’t figure out what the bits of alphabet salad – pv y, fyfryyft, hfu – were about.
He could almost certainly use Greek letters as numbers or Aramaic ones. What’s interesting is that it wasn’t at all uncommon back then for people to be able to read but not to write, and indeed to read but not speak a language.
Or to still a storm, turn water to wine, or heal a paralytic?
Oh yeah! Then there was that story of Jesus writing on the ground. Hmmm…
Of course, that is in the Pericope Adulterae and maybe not the best reference. (But it would certainly support tradition!)
There is no idea what he wrote or drew so using it to infer his level of literacy is just wild guesswork.
Edited to add: I have seen major commentators (E.g. Brown) suggest he may have even doodled in the ground or drew lines just indicating he wasn’t Impressed by their charges!
It was canonized. Only those who believe in the myth of “autographs” reject it.
Vinnie
You assuming the high numbers of 15% are correct? I see scholarly estimates at 3-10% and the lower end has just as much of a chance at being correct as the higher end until qualified. Not to mention, if 5% of the population could read how skewed is that in terms of wealth? What percentage of the peasant class would be able to read? Once we remove the priestly class and wealthy, what’s left for a backwater hamlet like Nazareth that is so obscure some doubted its existence! I highly doubt it’s 5% across all demographics unilaterally.
The Greek didn’t copy/pasta well. I wasn’t fixing it.
That doesn’t change the question. What are those modern articles estimating data based for Palestine based on? Surely they state where there data comes from? If not the Mishnah or Josephus, what else?
Which makes Jesus an elite scribe or he just memorized that exact location in that exact scroll from the text of Isaiah so someone 2,000 years later could argue it’s a legitimate account despite clearly being reworked form Mark and it being know. (John 7:15) Jesus did not possess those kind of skills.
Vinnie
It is interesting to consider. We really do not know what Jesus did between pre-teen to age 30. I rather expect he had some formal rabbinical training. If you take it seriously that Mary and Joseph were fully aware of his messianic nature and future, you would have to assume they would do everything they could to prepare him for it. I know my rather uneducated farm parents were very supportive of me in studying science, and they had not been visited by angels.
It is a very reasonable argument but rests on a big if. It certainly won’t win over any historians but I think almost all Christians believe in the virginal conception. Of course, John 7:15 suggests they didn’t send him to rabbinical school. Even if they did it doesn’t change the fact the Luke reworked Mark here. Luke doing that does not necessitate Jesus could not read either.
For all we know, Mary and Joseph could very well have been told by an angel not to have Jesus trained as a Rabbi. Jesus had table fellowship with tax collectors and sinners. Maybe “theologian” wasn’t in the cards for him. He debated with Jewish leaders but they never seemed to be his main, target audience. Maybe God didn’t want him going that route. It’s just speculation. Maybe instead they sent him to “zealot school” to learn how to kill people since they thought he would overthrow Roman rule. Of course, strategy would be another reason to teach him to read. Or maybe they simply couldn’t afford to school him so they had him learn as much Torah and Prophecy as possible orally. There is just a lot we don’t know and we don’t know how to see reading as it was in the ancient world. We give it so much importance it skews all our thoughts.
And after Herod (assuming we are accepting that detail which I am skeptical of), the tendency may have been to hide Jesus out of fear. But even if Mary and Josephus did not know all the details, if there was just a miraculous birth and they were told he would be special they could have prepared him for that in numerous ways.
Several historical Jesus scholars have advanced the argument that Jesus started out as a Pharisee as well! Imagine that!
The only sources for that claim are all pseudepigraphal.
Actually Roman Catholic sources I find tend not to support the idea that Joseph had children from a previous marriage. The more common RC view is that those “brothers” were sons of Mary of Clopas, and thus cousins.