Was Jesus Illiterate (II)?

It has become popular, among skeptics who admit he existed, to claim that Jesus could neither read nor write.  After all, they say, Jesus was a lower-class peasant or worker in an era in which 95% of Jews were illiterate.  Christians sometimes too easily go along.



I answer this objection on pages 12 to 14 of Jesus is No Myth: The Fingerprints of God on the Gospels.  I had already posted an answer on this site, offering thirteen problems with the argument.

But here is the form recently given this argument by David Chumney, a former Presbyterian ministry and author of a new book, Jesus Eclipsed.  He was interviewed by the often gullible Valerie Tarico here, then wrote the following insulting response to an always-polite poster by the name of Don Camp on John Loftus' site in a thread responding to that article:

"Don, when one looks up the word 'obfuscation' in the dictionary, one finds your picture by the word. The gospel writers were obviously literate--after all, they wrote the gospels. However, research indicates that 95-97% of the Jewish people were illiterate at the time of Jesus, so that suggests that Jesus and his followers couldn't read or write. When Mark wrote his gospel some 40 years after the death of Jesus, he wrote stories that depicted Jesus fulfilling Scripture, but such stories had no connection to memories of actual events in the life of Jesus.

"Even if you don't read my book, you should read more than you apparently have so far."

Given the tone, I felt justified in responding with a perceptible tone of reproof:

"David: That's poor logic. First, males were more likely to be literate than females. Secondly, those who migrate to cities were more likely to be literate than peasants. Thirdly, those who attempt to transform a nation by challenging its standard interpretation of its most sacred texts are more likely still to take the few hours it takes to learn their letters. Four and most important, direct claims within the gospels that Jesus read, and his masterful familiarity with the written tradition of his people, constitute strong positive evidence for the literacy of Jesus, at least. You don't throw out positive historical evidence on such vague and weak a priori grounds.

"Fifth, Mark may have written his gospel earlier than that, as many scholars suppose. Sixth, since Jesus died young, and his followers would be younger (you don't run around the countryside following a young preacher if you're 85), 40 years is well within the bounds of direct memory for many aging, but still middle-aged, followers. (My father-in-law remembers the atomic bombing of Nagasaki, 72 years ago.)

"I am continually amazed at how many skeptical NT scholars manage to overlook such obvious facts -- even people like Paula Fredriksen at Harvard.  But those are only a few of many, many telling facts you guys tend to overlook."

Ex-Pastor Chumney "answered" as follows: 

"David Marshall, you talk about logic when you ought to be talking about evidence. I am astounded by how uninformed you are concerning literacy in the ancient world. I realize I'm wasting my time providing a reference that you will likely never read, but I'll do it anyway. Take a look at Catherine Hezser, Jewish Literacy in Roman Palestine (2001), which is the definitive study on this issue. What you describe as Jesus' "masterful familiarity with the written tradition of his people" is nothing more than a pious fiction created by the gospel writers who projected skills they possessed onto an illiterate peasant.

"Historical Jesus scholars such as Fredriksen don't overlook "obvious facts;" instead, they read and interpret the biblical text independently of the religious norms of various faith traditions--as opposed to accepting them uncritically as you do. If you (as a believer) want to waste your time and energy preaching to skeptics, knock yourself out, but don't come here thinking you can spout your unsupported faith claims and pretend they're based on credible historical research. Critical thinkers will not be swayed by your naïve devotional reading of the gospels."

My response to that is the final post in the series, so far -- but I'll expand on these points a bit below.  

"David: You are wasting your time indeed, until you learn to read yourself better than you appear able to now. I made no comment whatsoever on your estimate of literacy in the ancient world. I took your estimates for granted (I've seen such before), then explained a series of facts which you overlooked that would set Jesus into a more specific reference class with far higher literacy. You ignore all those points, along with the fact that I don't challenge your overall estimate, apparently for no other reason (unless it is that literacy problem) that you can't answer my real arguments.

I just described six obvious facts that you and Fredriksen, and your like, overlook. What, do you deny that Jesus was male? Do you deny that males were more likely to be literate than females? And still you dare talk about "dealing with (the facts) critically!" Putting your head in the sand and saying "I see NUUUTHEEENG!" is your idea of dealing with facts critically? Unbelievable.

And "unsupported faith claims" is completely shameless. Every fact I mentioned above is supported with strong evidence. Or show me a country with a low literacy rate in which the lite."

Let us now consider these six points is a bit more detail.  

Six Deadly Arrows into the heart of the Illiteracy Argument

(1)  "First, males were more likely to be literate than females." 

In the modern world, the Wikipedia article on literacy notes: 

"On a worldwide scale, illiteracy disproportionately impacts women.^[24] According to 2015 UIS data collected by the UNESCO Institute for Statistics, about two-thirds (63%) of the world's illiterate adults are women. This disparity was even starker in previous decades: from 1970 to 2000, the global gender gap in literacy decreased by roughly 50%."

As late as 1982, 40% of men in China over the age of 60 were literate, but less than 5% of women.  

Like early modern China, the Roman Empire was extremely sexist.  Furthermore, most girls married at a very young age -- Stark calculates that 44% were married by their 15th birthday. (Rise of Christianity, 107).  Men dominated the priesthood, military, and politics, in which literacy would have been at a premium, especially in leadership roles.  

It is therefore a safe bet that if 3% of the general population was literate, then some 5% of males were literate.  If 5%, then perhaps 8%.  

(2) "Secondly, those who migrate to cities were more likely to be literate than peasants."

Farmers have had neither need nor leisure to read in most agricultural societies.  Cities were centers of economic, cultural and administrative life: great philosophers and scientists were concentrated in Athens and (later) Alexandria, theologians in Jerusalem, administrators in Rome and every important town.  A UNESCO report explains, in a chapter entitled "The Making of Literate Societies:" 

"As Graff (1987b) notes: ‘In earliest times, literacy was highly restricted and a relatively unprestigious craft; it carried little of the association with wealth, power, status and knowledge that it later acquired. It was a tool, useful firstly to the needs of state and bureaucracy, church and trade.’ In short, the spread of literacy skills was, until the eighteenth century, primarily limited to religious leaders, state servants, far-travelling traders, members of specialized guilds and certain nobility."

All of those functions are, of course ,concentrated in the city, not in the village or peasant home.  And on men.  Young men migrating to the city would have been far more likely, then, to gain literacy in the process -- indeed ambitious young people still migrate to the cities for education, I can attest as a teacher in East Asia. 

These first two points seem quite beyond dispute.   And given that the urban population was probably no more than 10% of the total, this implies that urban literacy would probably have been much higher for men than 5-8%: maybe a quarter.  

(3) "Thirdly, those who attempt to transform a nation by challenging its standard interpretation of its most sacred texts are more likely still to take the few hours it takes to learn their letters."

I learned the Greek letters, initially, in about 45 minutes of study, though I had to review later.  Of course, I didn't know Greek words at that point.  But someone surrounded by the Greek or Aramaic language, once having conquered their letters, would have had little further barrier but practice to mastering reading.  He would have known the grammar already, even if roughly at first, and most of the vocabulary.  (Though ambition, if we are talking about an ambitious person, would drive him to expand that vocabulary.)  

The founder of Christianity was either an exceedingly ambitious young man, or the most ambitious mortal to touch down on this planet yet.  He certainly wished to effect a revolution -- even Reza Aslan and John Crossan acknowledge that.  And the key to revolution, in Jewish culture, is mastery of a set of written texts -- the Septuagint.  

Jesus may have read the Jewish Scriptures in Greek, or he may have aimed to learn them in Hebrew.

Consider a parallel.  In the 19th Century, an age of widespread illiteracy in China, the most influential new religious leader was a revolutionary named Hong Xiuquan.  By modern skeptical logic, one must assume that by all odds, Hong was illiterate, since most Chinese were in the late Qing Dynasty.  

But in fact, Hong was highly literate, which is what allowed him to attempt the dramatic reinterpretation of Chinese tradition that lent his movement its ideological force.  Hong was a frustrated scholar, in fact, who had a nervous breakdown after failing the Confucian exams for the third time.  Vincent Shih describes in detail the mix of Confucian, folk, and Christian teachings which inspired his movement.      

(4) "Four and most important, direct claims within the gospels that Jesus read, and his masterful familiarity with the written tradition of his people, constitute strong positive evidence for the literacy of Jesus, at least. You don't throw out positive historical evidence on such vague and weak a priori grounds."

There are at least two direct claims to Jesus' literacy in the gospels.  One, of course, may be disputed -- the description of Jesus writing on the ground in what is now John 8.  The story probably came from elsewhere originally, but that doesn't mean it isn't true.  It matches Jesus' concern for those on the margins, and his tendency to draw down the arrogant in their favor, for instance.  It matches Jesus frequent kindness to women, and the desire of the authorities to trap Jesus. 

Jesus is also depicted as reading from the Scriptures in a synagogue.  

There is nothing implausible about either story.  Jesus hoped to announce the fulfillment of God's long-proclaimed kingdom, as I show numerous complex and mutually-supporting threads of Scripture describe Jesus as doing (Jesus is No Myth, 182-195)-- you can't purge this element from the gospels, anymore than you can pick the quartz out of a granite boulder.  Given that ambition, how could Jesus not learn to read and write, at a minimum? 

Having studied them both, in the context of their traditions, I find Jesus a vastly greater genius with Jewish tradition than Hong Xiuquan was with the Chinese.  By comparison, Hong was a crude bumbler, picking and choosing what he liked and confusing such distinct concepts as, say, the Jade Emperor and the Shang Di of the classical Chinese.  You will not find anyone with a greater genius for reinterpreting his tradition than Jesus showed: more like an Olympic skateboarder on his favorite board than like a man on a runaway horse.  The idea that Jesus could not read the original sources for the tradition which he so masterfully reinterpreted (read NT Wright!), seems absurd.  

Chumney replies that all this scriptural tweaking was the early Christians' doing.  Sorry, that won't work.  Mark may have been clever in some ways, but he was not that kind of genius.  And much of the most brilliant such interpretations come in Matthew and in John.  The simplest, the only credible solution, is that there is one genius behind all of this and more, the one whom these writers invested their lives to follow.  

 (5) "Fifth, Mark may have written his gospel earlier than that, as many scholars suppose."

This is true, but a relatively unimportant point.  Whether Mark wrote in 70 AD or in 60 AD, Jesus would have only been gone for 30-40 years by then.  I hope to carry memories which are already that old for many years, yet.  

(6) Sixth, since Jesus died young, and his followers would be younger (you don't run around the countryside following a young preacher if you're 85), 40 years is well within the bounds of direct memory for many aging, but still middle-aged, followers.  (My father-in-law remembers the atomic bombing of Nagasaki, 72 years ago.)

I often wonder how such elementary mathematics can fail to occur to so many skeptical NT scholars.  I deal with this point, and objections (such as that people died at a younger age in the ancient world), on pages 115-119 of Jesus is No Myth.  

These six points are, I think, more than enough to shatter the myth of Jesus' illiteracy, and also make one wonder "what they teach them in these (biblical deconstructionist) schools."