I heard from a Benedictine monk the idea that Jesus was writing the names of the accusers’ mistresses. He treated it as fan fiction.
A Lutheran pastor maintained that He was making tally marks, counting the seconds going by.
Brown’s proposal is far more likely.
Estimates of population distribution back then are hard to find or trust, but it’s safe to assume that at least four of five Jews at the time were rural, and the sources I’ve found agree that rural literacy was zero – they might have been able to write their names but little more; that drives the number down right from the start. So the portion of the total population that is literate is going to be the city- and town-dwellers.
I remember an autograph we read in grad school where “town” in Israel was defined as a group of dwellings large enough to have its own synagogue, so presumably Nazareth counted as a town.
And I just noticed that I’m brain-dead after two hours of shopping for rather obscure items . . . .
I tried to relate those consonants to Greek with no luck.
Primarily from ostraca, which were the notepads of the ancient world. At military outposts it’s pretty straightforward: sort the ostraca by handwriting and compare the number of different hands from the number at the outpost (orders apparently didn’t come on ostraca, so all the writing at the outpost was from officers there; this is corroborated by the subjects written about). At villages it’s not quite so easy; one big difference between villages and outposts is that outposts tended to have one trash heap. That means that the numbers found from villages may well be skewed. Another big difference is that the populations of outposts are mostly known exactly, while those of villages are frequently guesstimates (e.g. the situation with Nazareth; its population is estimated at 120 to 500).
Literacy in Jerusalem is far more complicated and involves assumptions, such as with the priesthood: priests came from other locations to serve at the Temple, and the best assumption is that their literacy rate reflected where they were from. The ‘bureaucratic’ (for lack of a better term) priesthood are usually assumed to be literate in terms of reading, enough to read Hebrew out loud (though not necessarily with understanding). There are also estimates based on the presence of inscriptions on walls, a fair number of which seem to have been something like signposts and/or directions. A good example is an inscription telling non-Jews not to go past it, and that was written in Greek, as were others. From those estimates claim that at least 50% of foreign Jews visiting Jerusalem were fully literate and the rate of foreign Gentile visitors was somewhat lower. At any rate, estimates for full literacy of Jerusalem’s permanent residents fall into the range around 20%.
It’s worth noting that Jesus is only described as reading in that one instance, so He may well have known right were to find that passage in that synagogue’s Isaiah scroll(s), which would have been the only place He was reading anything much more than work orders for Joseph’s shop. I think if Luke was really trying to show Jesus as an elite scribe the other instances would have mentioned reading as well.
Another possibility was mentioned to me by a rabbi I knew: that Jesus was talking His turn among the men of the village at reading on the Sabbath. In this case Jesus would have spent time in the synagogue, first locating what He wanted to read, then practicing reading it, so that He would have known just how far to roll the scroll and would have read it smoothly. After the discussion here so far, I’m starting to think that is not at all unreasonable.
That is Pitre’s arguments. I’d like to see the opposite case argued because at first glance, his work is convincing. Several in the early church made the claim they were from a previous wife though. RCC does seem to side on cousins.
If you are interested in seeing them I could screenshot the text for you.
The mother of God is not “tradition” akin to “who authored these books” in my mind. It’s more serious, like Nicene creed “tradition” where she is mentioned.
Pitre does a surprisingly good job arguing for cousins based on the text itself. It shocked me how strong his arguments were because I expected them to be special pleasing going in.
As for the “did not know her line” he says this:
He notes in a footnote:
This point becomes even stronger when we realize that the Greek verb “to know” in Matthew 1:25 is in the imperfect tense, not the aorist. It could be translated (roughly) into English as “Joseph was not knowing her until she bore a son” (author’s translation). By using the imperfect tense, Matthew puts stress on the duration of the period of abstinence, without reference to what happened afterward. See McHugh, The Mother of Jesus in the New Testament, 204.
I find his cousins argument stronger but he couples this with evidence Mary had made a life long abstinence vow. Her response to the angel makes no sense otherwise.
Vinnie
That’s why the largest category among spurious writings about Jesus are about things He did between 12 and 20.
Though the rabbi I knew in the Midwest told us confidently that as one of the more well-to-do men of the village Jesus would have engaged in Torah study at least once a week.
I think he was the one who told us that while Jewish women gossip, and Jewish men argue Torah, so that Jewish men know God while Jewish women know everything.
Good point. And as a craftsman Joseph would have had the social standing to wrangle an arrangement with whoever was in charge of the synagogue (there was no set pattern to how that worked, though in larger towns apparently the Pharisees had managed to get control of most of the synagogues, and there were appointed readers and authorized teachers.
From the Gospels we can conclude two things in relation to this: Nazareth’s synagogue was probably run informally, and Jesus was probably not an authorized teacher.
In Nazareth? I find that highly unlikely – Nazareth was most likely beneath their attention.
Though nearby Capernaum almost certainly had a Pharisee-ruled synagogue, and possibly more than one.
I’ve always gone with what an old icon depicts: the words from Gabriel going through Mary’s ear and on to her womb. I don’t know who first said that Mary was the only woman ever to get pregnant through her ear, but that humor reflects the understanding that it was God’s Word delivered through Gabriel that ‘did the deed’.
Gee, Guess God didn’t raise no dummy.
A friend who was a Greek Orthodox priest could have told me but I heard he passed away a decade back. I saw it in connection with another icon, and my mind can’t settle on whether it was Annunciation icon or the St. Michael icon that was fifth century and which was twelfth.
I’m going to say the St. Michael icon was twelfth century as it wasn’t as stylized as the Annunciation one, exhibiting influence from tenth- or eleventh-century Western art.
I got the one I posted from Wikipedia Annunciation (Memling)
It doesn’t take much to be a critical scholar. I occasionally read a critical scholar when I’m not reading cartoons.
That’s an interesting one since it shows multiple angels.
The one I’m thinking of was definitely Byzantine in style.
If you read the wiki page article, you’d find the artist, as is typical, had a reason for everything in the portraid, I just didn’t want to cut and paste the whole thing.
Early enough to have inspired Mohammad’s receipt of the whole of the arabic Qur’an, directly from God, via Jibril.
And where is any of that in scripture? There is nothing in the account to suggest that. I’m not inclined to believe God impregnated (raped?) a young teenage girl without her consent first (1:38).
It is amazing how much we are allowed to weave from whole cloth. There isn’t a shred of evidence for any of that.
Four completely unsubstantiated claims.
I don’t treat Christianity like a license to make things up. At every step of the way you just offer views that could possibly make what you believe be true. The defense reeks of harmonization.
Isaiah was broken into three scrolls. Jesus was very familiar with them already. Jesus spent time searching them while others read. No dialogue with the many given reasons showing how Luke changes Mark. No dialogue with John 7:15 or the responses in Mark that Luke is based off of.
How does one ever arrive at truth if their beliefs are unfalsifiable? Baby dinosaurs on the ark. It boggles my mind that Christian apologists are so accustomed to this sort of thinking they do so without flinching.
In this entire thread @jpm is the only person that brought forth a single cogent argument in favor of Jesus’s literacy, and it was done cleverly through an acceptance of the virgin birth.
Vinnie
? I have no issue with the creed and endorse it heartily. We were discussing her perpetual virginity.
Dale
You seem to have overlooked @Terry_Sampson’s most cogent argument against it, one that I don’t recall you offering in this entire thread, certainly not memorably.
Dale
A woodworker was a craftsman. It’s part of the meaning of the word, and it was skilled work.
Recent work suggests strongly that it includes the sense of “builder”.
In a small village, a craftsman would have higher standing.
Given the above, yes.
Why wouldn’t he have?
That was common.
You mean the guesswork. And your charge is inaccurate; everything I wrote is engaging with what Luke wrote.
And I built on it.
Seriously, I swear you get negative just to be contrary.
I agree that it does not matter much if Jesus was literate or not.
Yet, it is always good to remember that whatever our conclusions are, they are based on some assumptions. If the basic assumptions are wrong, then usually the conclusions are also wrong.
If we believe the descriptions of Jesus life we can read from the gospels, that is based on an assumption that the gospels tell about real events. It may not be word-to-word description of everything said but as honest description as was possible, based on what the eyewitnesses told. Luke may well have read text that Mark had written as part of his investigations, so it is no surprise if Luke took parts from what Mark had written and mixed that with what the eyewitnesses told to him. That would only push the question of reliability further, as then we would need to ask if what Mark wrote was reliable.
If we assume that the gospels include fabricated narratives, that is also based on assumptions. The assumptions behind critical reading are mostly not facts, they are interpretations based on scanty historical pieces of evidence and some assumptions about reality. Someone concludes something and others treat the conclusion as a valid description of reality and use it as a basic assumption. I am not an expert of the topic and cannot therefore list which assumptions seem to be facts and which are educated guesses.
Anyhow, the basic pattern is there: the conclusions are based on some assumptions and if the assumptions are wrong, then the conclusions are likely to be wrong.
Edit:
The same basic principle should be remembered in all interpretations of the scriptures. For example, all interpretations about the first chapters of Genesis rely heavily on the basic assumptions we make. If our assumptions are wrong, then our conclusions are also wrong.
“Let your conversation be always full of grace, seasoned with salt, so that you may know how to answer everyone.” -Colossians 4:6
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