The various letters date as early as 50 AD. The Gospels date -Mark 64-70 AD. So, a decade or two. John, however, wasnt written util 90AD or so.
It is strange- apparently some small level of literacy was common among Roman city dwellers, as they wrote and understood massive amounts of graffiti and elections stuff. Mind you, these days, that would be called 'functionally illiterate". Also in Israel the various schools did teach bible studies.
That’s my understanding also. It is remarkable how little the characters in Judges knew about Torah Law. No one seemed to until the text was “found” in the Temple.
The Ark is mentioned, but having something like that for a tribe is perfectly reasonable.
As for the main topic, I spent four years in Hebrew school learning much about the Torah and later books, but it is remarkable how many stories they skipped over, stories I never learned until I read the Bible all the way through.
The way the Bible is presented to the general public is thought out to emphasize the good parts and not the bad parts. Children’s Bible books have pictures of the happy giraffes on the deck of the ark, not of the drowning children left behind.
Off-topic, but there’s an old Scottish joke about a minister devoting a sermon (in the days when the different Presbyterian sects used to sermonise at length) to ranking the significance of all the OT prophets. He made the mistake of asking a rhetorical question - “And where, my friends, shall we place Habakkuk?”, only to get a reply from the gallery -“Ye can pit him doon here in ma place - I’m awa’ hame!'”
So afaik they were not too different to homilies or sermons today. They wouldn’t quote large passages of scripture verbatim but would discuss the passage that had just been read and teach on it in a way that would, in theory at least, have been relevant to the congregation. Possibly in the days when the scripture would have been read in a language the congregation didn’t understand it would have been necessary to go into more details of the scripture in question.
In medieval Europe there was nothing else like that happening for you average illiterate peasant. So the priesthood was incredibly important.
I’m not going to go another round with you about the Gospels, but I have to ask what you mean by this. Bible studies in what era? For whom? What part of the Bible?
And most importantly - schools?
It’s my understanding that this is one of the many ways real Bible scholars (as compared to amateurs like myself), have been able to unravel the different parts of the Tanakh. Two Gods (El and Yahweh) and at least two main storylines, one basically about the House of David and its lineage. The other from the POV of a very vengeful and fearsome deity.
I believe that the Catholic Church did not want people to read the bible. Very few people were literate before Gutenberg. In the early 1500s, a man named William Tyndale (there are variable spellings of his name) translated into English (late middle English) a large part of the bible and was executed for his efforts. Later when England became Protestant, the King James translators used large portions of the Tyndale bible. Less than a century separated the two.
You can find justification for just about anything in the Bible. You need the Authorities to cherry pick the correct justifications.
Wasn’t a similar dynamic at play with the Methodists splitting from the Anglican Church (Catholic Lite - same liturgy, half the guilt) - lay people shouldn’t read (or at least interpret) the Bible, hold communal prayer, etc.?
Eleven years of Catholic school and two decades of going to church and I had never heard of “Habakkuk” until this post. I had to look it up, it does sound made up. My first reaction was “gesundheit”.
Wow, this sounds so much like the revelation at the end of Fahrenheit 451. I wonder who got stuck with Habakkuk (probably the troublemakers)…
" Romanes eunt domus"
Torah schools for the jews.
lol
Around the time when the Roman church expelled it’s English wing, efforts were made to reform the church. Including education and examination of the English clergy. Many of which were unable to recite the Lord’s Prayer or the Ten Commandments.
I have not seen a comparable record of examination of the laity, but I think it’s fair to assume that their knowledge did not materially exceed that of the lower priesthood.
Well the stories appear to be longer and more detailed. These 2 pages chosen by (pseudo) random number generator provide flavor. The first is from Easter, which is probably non-representative since the priest would be celebrating Christianity’s biggest holiday:
Here’s another page, with more action:
Yeah, presumably as the priest could not assume the congregation actually understood the scriptures that had been read in Latin.
Also presumably the homilies that were written down and survive to the modern day were a hell of a lot more erudite than the sermon your average illiterate medieval peasant would have received?
There was a long late-20th-century historiographic tendency, only just now encountering a backlash, to pretend that nothing in Western Europe actually “fell” or “declined” with the transition to the early medieval period and there was no “Dark Age” in any sense. This can’t really be reconciled with the fact that the vast majority of free Roman males knew how to read, almost nobody in the chaos of the 6th century did, and literacy rates, while improving a bit around the “High Middle Ages” period, never again approached the Roman level until the 1700s.
The lectionary does not include every verse in the Bible. Only selected verses that alternate through the tests. A typical lectionary cycle is 3 years. For my church, Lutheran ELCA, it is 3 years commonly labeled A, B, and C.
Until the Bible was translated into the people’s language and widely distributed by printing press, almost every lay person only received the lectionary contents — essentially selected excerpts of the Bible. Not every verse in its 66 books (39 OT, 27 NT).
That said, I’m not certain when the lectionary started and how long it has been in practice. Is probably easy to look up.
Added — Per wiki, a 1 year lectionary was in place until Vatican II of the early to mid-1960s. Then, the 3-year Revised Common Lectionary cycle was used, and is still currently used.
➜ Lectionary - Wikipedia ■
How much was left out?
OK, so I can only speak to 14th-15th century England, but there were a LOT of channels through which people could potentially learn about the Bible, and a really determined illiterate person, like Margery Kempe, could acquire some very sophisticated knowledge, enough to cite specific – and not especially famous – passages to defend herself against heresy charges.Some scholars think Kempe was lying about or exaggerating her inability to read in English in order to look less like she was interpreting the Bible for herself, but she definitely couldn’t read Latin, and she mentions getting a priest friend to read books to her, including a Bible with commentary. This might be a Latin Bible that he translated for her, or it might be a (banned) Middle English Wyclifite Bible, we don’t know for sure. Importantly, the crackdown on English translations only occurred after they had been circulating for a few years, and it wasn’t consistently enforced, especially if they were in the hands of the “right” people. (This is why we have surviving copies of the Wyclifite Bible – they were often hiding in plain sight. Many of the ones we do have are incomplete – e.g., just the New Testament, or the Gospels alone, or Gospels plus selected parts of the Old Testament, with Psalms and Proverbs being particularly popular. This probably tells us a lot about which parts of the Bible people thought were important!)
There were also authorized, church-sanctioned retellings of Bible stories in English, some of which would have been accessible to the illiterate, like mystery plays. For those who could read, there was also Nicholas Love’s Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ, which was a retelling of the Gospels intended for lay people. Love spends lots of time conveying the Church’s “official” interpretation of particular passages, and he smooths over the contradictions between the different Gospels and knits them together into a single story, but you would still learn a lot about what the Bible actually says if you had access to the Mirror.
And, most importantly, there were English-language sermons, which weren’t always part of the regular church service, but popular preachers drew huge crowds. Sermons often involved translating and explicating particular passages, as well as storytelling in general (not all of the stories would have been from the Bible, but many of them were). It’s fictional, but the sermon in lines 483-659 of Chaucer’s Pardoner’s Tale is a plausible example of how a traveling preacher would have used the Bible: he cites lots of biblical examples – Lot, Herod, Adam, etc., clearly assuming his audience will recognize the stories and names, as well as a few direct quotes from St. Paul and from the Ten Commandments; at one point he pauses to specify that the Bible character he’s talking about is the obscure Lemuel and not the more familiar Samuel; but many of these examples are out of context or used in service of a slightly idiosyncratic point, such as treating the Adam and Eve story as a warning against gluttony. The Pardoner isn’t meant to be a good example of a preacher – he’s all kinds of crooked and self-serving, and most clergy were probably more scrupulous about HOW they used their biblical source material – but their general approach, and the level of prior knowledge they expected from their audiences, were probably similar.
ETA: So, as to the specific questions in the OP, I’d say the most likely answer is “yes to the more salacious bits” (the Pardoner expects his audience to know that Lot slept with his own daughters), but “no to obscure prophets,” unless, like Jonah, they come with interesting and colorful stories.
Right, and there are contributions from two others and an editor also. It has been a while since I looked at this.
But the main thing is how odd it is that the most important document there was got misplaced. It is kind of like if the US was running on common law until someone found the Constitution in the basement of the Supreme Court, and claimed it was 200 years old.
Right.
That makes a certain amount of sense. If you’re doing a competent job of weeding the crops, it’s pretty much a waste of time to do it EVERY day.
Not an easy answer to determine, but there’s likely some sites that have that information.
That would be interesting to determine, though.
Added – more on this. The churches when I was growing up only had lectionary excerpts, and they never had the complete bible in any of the pews. I didn’t like that, only having carefully-selected excerpts available to you but not the entire bible. I was a kid, and never owned a bible until many years later.
Later, the churches I went to had full bibles in the pews and I would jokingly say, “Hey! So that’s what the bible looks like!”
The lectionary is designed to cover all of the New Testament, but it doesn’t get anywhere close to all of the Old Testament. The Old Testament reading each day is chosen to correspond in some way to that day’s Gospel reading (so, for instance, in any Gospel passage where Jesus quotes a bit of scripture, the bit he’s quoting is probably in the Old Testament reading).
There’s also a Psalm every day at Mass, but there’s a little more flexibility there: Typically, any given day will have four or five psalms to choose from. I imagine all 150 are covered somewhere or other in there, but any given congregation might not hear them all, if the priest or music director likes another one better.
Aside from a handful of readings from the deuterocanonical/apocryphal (depending on who you ask) books, Catholics, Lutherans, Anglicans, Presbyterians, and a few other sects all use the same lectionary.
They only have the lectionaries in the pews. Every church I’ve ever heard of has multiple complete bibles available, and will gladly let you read them if you ask.