I thought it was traditionally understood that the Jews were very big on teaching their children - the boys, at the very least - to read and write.
There are also at least two instances where Jesus is described as reading from scrolls in the temple - the first in Jerusalem when he was around 12 years old (causing the priests to marvel at his knowledge) and again at age 30, in Nazareth, when he read a prophecy from Isaiah and declared himself the fulfillment of that prophecy (prompting the people there to try to stone him for blasphemy).
Not before the diaspora and not in 1st century Palestine. According to NT schoalr, John Crossan, an estimated 95-98% of the Palestinian state was illiterate during the time of Jesus.
“Mary, take a lithograph.”
I originally wrote “take a plinth” because plinth is a funnier word and it makes a funnier phrase but I changed it because this is after all the Dope and I don’t need any o’ y’all ancient scholar types getting all up in my grill about my ostensible failure to distinguish between one stone object and another.
Well, in a word, yes. Apparently, Jesus didn’t know some things. Surrounded by a crowd of people, he asks, “Who touched my cloak?” If he was fully omniscient, he would know. He also indicated that concerning the end times, no man - not even himself - knew when those things would happen, but only the Father in heaven.
On the other hand, he knew some things: like who would betray him, details about people he hadn’t met (like the woman at the well). So I’ve heard this referred to as “limited omniscience.” I’ll try to find a cite.
Okay, here is a short argument against Jesus’ total omniscience, although I strongly disagree with the author’s conclusion. It has been more traditionally argued that Jesus accepted limits to his divine attributes when he incarnated.
I figure he avoided leaving a written record in order to preserve plausible deniability.
Man, if someone wants to seriously debate the exact nature of limits on a mythological character’s omniscience, I imagine they’d fit right in with a discussion of Tom Bombadil’s origins and the Balrog’s wings.
He said, once or twice, “I only do what I see my Father doing”. I’ve heard the idea that his omniscience was a matter of his Father telling him what he needed to know, when he needed to know it. Direct line to God, and all that.
Regarding “who touched me?”, I suspect that he knew good and well who touched him. But he wanted her to identify herself as a display of faith/belief. In the stories of Jesus healing people, he didn’t just walk up to sick people and heal them. They had to ask for it. My pastor pointed out that the woman with the discharge of blood was perpetually unclean according to Jewish law, and it was forbidden for a man to even touch her. Jesus made a point of specifically identifying her and asking her to describe her problem before he healed her. In this way, it was obvious to all witnesses that he knew exactly what her problem was, and that he was aware of her “uncleanness”, and that he touched her anyway. He didn’t want anybody to be able to make an excuse for him, ala “Well, he touched her without realizing she was unclean.” He wanted to show that she was not unclean in God’s eyes.
For a similar idea, look to Peter’s vision in which God presented him with a number of “unclean” animals and told him to eat. Peter refused, saying, “I have never eaten any unclean thing!” God told him, “I have cleansed it! Do not call it unclean!” This was in response to Peter not wanting to go and preach to gentiles; his Jewish upbringing made doing so unacceptable, because gentiles were “unclean”. The vision was God’s way of telling him, “I consider the gentiles to be clean. Shouldn’t you? Now get busy!”
This argument assumes that the Hebrew text of Isaiah we have now is closer to the original Hebrew than the Septuagint is. This is a major assumption, considering the amount of textual variation in Isaiah, and considering that the Septuagint translation is much older than any Hebrew text we currently have.
However, if you compare the Dead Sea Scrolls text of Isaiah 61 (Qumran Isaiah Scroll Translation) – which dates to ca. 100 BC – to what Luke’s gospel presents, you’ll see that Jesus’s words actually match the Dead Sea Scrolls text more closely than the Septuagint text.
Now, add on top of that the fact that Luke’s gospel is reckoned to have been written at least 40 years after Jesus’s death and the fact that the author of Luke would have had more ready access to a Septuagint than a Hebrew scroll of Isaiah (to verify what Jesus was reported to have said), and it becomes pretty likely that there will be some similarities between the Greek Isaiah and Luke’s story.
One minor edit: I should have said “as closely as the Septuagint text,” instead of “more closely.” My point is that the DSS text and LXX are pretty much identical in that section.
It’s not an argument, it’s an observation (that the passage in Luke quotes directly from the LXX in Greek…it quites two different passages, actually). That observation has nothing to do with any assumptions about the Hebrew text.
However, if you compare the Dead Sea Scrolls text of Isaiah 61 (Qumran Isaiah Scroll Translation) – which dates to ca. 100 BC – to what Luke’s gospel presents, you’ll see that Jesus’s words actually match the Dead Sea Scrolls text more closely than the Septuagint text.
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Huh? How can a direct quote in Greek from a Greek text more closely resemble a Hebrew text than the text it quotes directly from?
How would that verify anything that Jesus said?
Luke used the LXX because he didn’t know Hebrew. All of his source material was Greek. I say I think the passage in Luke is a literary creation of the author because (like Mark and Matthew before him) the author seems to be starting with an LXX passage and then building a story around it rather than relating anything which has been translated into Greek from an Aramaic oral tradition.
Suppose Jesus had written something down: then what would he do with it? He couldn’t have sent it to a book publisher or newspaper editor, or put it up on his web page. If he wanted multiple copies, he or his followers would have had to copy them out by hand. And then who would they have given them to? Passing around copies of important writings only really became practical once Christian communities, like the ones Paul wrote to, sprang up.
In those days, if you wanted to spread a message and get it to as many people as possible (many of whom were illiterate), it would have been easier to do it orally, by word of mouth. And back in the days before printing and widespread literacy, people were better at remembering things and passing them along orally.
Perhaps I was unclear. My point is that it’s insignificant that Jesus’s reported words in Luke 4:18ff are nearly identical to the LXX. The Qumran document shows clearly that there is no reason to have translated Jesus’s quotation(s) any differently than what Luke’s gospel has.
Again, “verify” is not the best word to represent what I meant. Luke 1 makes it pretty clear that the author of Luke’s gospel was not an eyewitness. Therefore, he took somebody else’s account of an event that occurred at least 20 years prior and made it part of his account. The account was likely relayed to him in Aramaic and described a reading that could have been in Hebrew or Aramaic. Then Luke (I’ll call him that for simplicity’s sake) set out to record this quotation in Greek. Of course he’s going to check the quote against the LXX.
Now this chain of events I describe is obviously speculation – but it is no more speculative than your claim that Luke starts with an OT passage and builds a story around it. It’s much more likely that Luke started with Mark’s gospel and the Q document and came up with a way to work in additional material from his own sources. My point is simply that your original claim that Luke 4:18ff’s similarity to the LXX translation of Isa. 61 shows that Luke made up the whole story is baseless.
For the record, if it weren’t for the Luke passage I would have no problem with the claim that Jesus couldn’t read. I would no more expect him to be able to cook a perfect flan or know the rules of basketball, since it is otherwise not probable that he would have learned to read in his culture.
It was more like 60 years prior (Luke was probably written in the 90’s CE) and there is no evidence that Luke had access to any sources in Aramic or Hebrew, nor that he would have had the ability to read them if he did. There is also no reason to believe he ever spoke directly to witnesses nor does he ever claim that he did.
As others have pointed out, while Jesus may have been literate himself, who was he going to write to? Most of the people in his community were illiterate. And his personal presence was a major portion of his message - it wouldn’t have had the same effect if he had sent out pamphlets saying “Hi, I’m Jesus the son of God. Maybe you’ve heard about me. I’ve done some really cool miracles but you kinda had to be there.”
Well, there was the king of armenia, as I said above. Most people think the supposed letter is a later forgery. I do, too. But it does present a case of someone he might write to.
Most of the foregoing is just flimsy excuse. You can’t tell me for a moment that a man who had the followers that he had couldn’t have rustled up a scribe and writing implements if he’d wanted. Furthermore, while it may well be true that he was appealing mostly to illiterate people, that doesn’t mean that (if his aim had been to spread his words as widely as possible) writing his thoughts down and sending them to other literate people to be read to the masses in other places wouldn’t have been an effective strategy.
Failing to write things down is of course consistent with the view that Jesus was just a nice, humble guy with some creditable views on appropriate behaviour who did not see himself as a deity and was not trying to continue or start a religion.
