I find some of the answers here, while technically correct, to be misleading. More specifically, it doesn’t matter in the least whether the biblical Jesus was educated.
Education and religion have little to do with one another. Illiterate Christian peasants from the time of Rome right through the present day were well acquainted with their Bible, even if they could not read a word of it. I have no doubt this was and is true for illiterate Muslim peasants as well.
And the Hebrew Bible would certainly have been completely familiar to every person who lived in a Jewish community. This is especially true in a nation-state that was itself almost entirely Jewish.
Every male in those days would have been taken to the synagogue from about the time he could walk. Studying the scriptures would have been a major part of his life prior to his bar mitzvah. Prayers would be said several times a day (a practice still followed by Orthodox Jews and copied over into Islam).
The idea of a prophet figure not knowing every word of the Bible, commenting on it, and preaching its meaning is oxymoronic. It would be as weird as an alien lobster coming into Jerusalem and pretending to speak meaningfully. It cannot even be considered.
Not can there be much doubt that the Hebrew Bible would have been written in Hebrew. It’s true that some Dead Sea Scrolls have been found in Aramaic and Greek, but I believe that most of these are community, commentary, and apocryphal texts rather than pieces of the torah itself.
It’s true that in today’s world Bibles may be bilingual with the local vernacular (and I suppose it is theoretically possible that a Reformed congregation in the U.S. might use an all-English text, although I have never seen one), but traditional torahs were always in Hebrew.
Now, whether the traditional texts were collected, arranged, and organized as they are today is a different issue. But their equivalent existed and were widely known, regardless of formal education.
