How come Jesus never wrote anything down?

Factual Questions
41

Hence “at least.”

If Luke was a Syrian (per Fitzmyer’s interpretation of the early prologues), I would certainly hope he spoke Aramaic.

I don’t recall claiming that he spoke to primary witnesses. I am more inclined to believe he was informed by the early Christian communities he chronicles in Acts. But since you brought it up, what evidence is there against Luke having spoken to eyewitnesses? When does any other gospel writer cite sources?

Regardless, this is beyond the point. The point is that the Luke 4 story is not especially likely to be a fabrication, aside from the unlikelihood that someone of Jesus’s social status in his setting could read.

42

Most people (probably more than 90%) of the people in Jesus’ era were functionally illiterate. The word “functionally” is important in this statement–they might be able to recognize key words in passages of the Torah, and hence be able to “read” the Torah, but that is a far cry from being able to read anything in writing, much less be able to write information down themselves.

As an example of what I mean here–my younger sister was able to “read” the poem “The Owl and the Pussycat” when she was about three years old. However, it must be noted that our mother had read this poem to us over and over again several times a week, with both of us looking over her shoulder as she read, using her finger to point to words as she read them. My sister could recognize the poem from the title alone in any book she found it in, just because of the words in the title. Because she had memorized the actual text of the poem, it was relatively easy for her to pretend to read that text when we went to our grandmother’s house, which had the same poem, but in a different book. However, she had a very hard time actually learning to read books on her own.

In the period and geographic area in which Jesus was supposed to live, only a very small percentage of the population was functionally literate, in the sense of being able to read new words in new contexts, much less be able to write down new sequences of words that weren’t copied from an existing text. Most of the functionally literate people were either wealthy people who were educated in the Roman system (where Greek was typically taught as THE literate language, like Paul), or they were Rabbis, who were the learned class of the Jewish society. Jesus could probably recognize words enough to identify the passages from the Torah that he had heard often, but that is hardly the same as being functionally literate. (Based on the New Testament, Jesus’ family was NOT wealthy, although it is possible that Joseph was part of the Pharisees (the class that operated the Temples and ordained the priests)).

Given the emphasis on oral–rather than written–traditions that existed 2000+ years ago, it would not be surprising to me that Jesus was functionally illiterate. Nor would I necessarily expect someone from that era to feel that it was necessary to put down in writing every event that occurred to him–just as I would not expect someone in 1990 to have a blog–yes, the technology existed (barely), but it was not prevalent.

In the long run, how many of your life’s precepts do you actually record?? From every verse in the Gospel, Jesus did not believe that he was more important than any of his disciples or followers. He felt he was simply the “son of Man,” who was supposed to pass on the Word of God. Nowhere in the Gospel does Jesus claim that he actually IS God, although this interpretation occurs elsewhere in the New Testament (most of which was written long after the crucifixion).

43

Yet if he had managed to find a scribe, his words would be on a web page today. So the question remains: Why didn’t he write or arrange to have written anything?

Which is exactly how all texts were reproduced, as I’m sure you’re well aware. So what’s so unlikely about that? We have a vast amount of literature that long predates 30 CE, and all of it was reproduced the hard way.

These difficulties were hardly unique to early first century Palestine, and as I pointed out above, these problems were very often overcome anyway. They could well have been overcome in this instance, too.

These and similar objections don’t really hold water. The original question seems roughly akin to Aquinas asking about angels dancing on pinheads. What if there weren’t any angels?

If Jesus actually existed and thought he had a special relationship with a deity, it is most likely that he would have found a scribe of some sort within his lifetime in order to immortalize or otherwise spread his and/or his deity’s message as directly and authoritatively as possible. I mean, ask yourself: Why do people write at all if not to disseminate their words and ideas? And whose words and ideas would such a person feel a more powerful need to disseminate than their deity’s? And let’s not grant much if any credence to the notion that the end of the world was thought to be imminent and hence writing was pointless, since in my (albeit limited) understanding, the coming of the ostensible Son of Man was not thought to be equivalent to the end of all existence, hence Jesus’ writings would still have value nonetheless.

No, I submit that the lack of any writing or other first-order evidence of Jesus’ existence where there should be some is prima facie evidence for seriously doubting his existence, either as a human or as a deity (or sub-deity). In this scenario (which I consider by far the most probable), Jesus didn’t write anything because Jesus didn’t exist.

This, of course, is not the only reason to doubt Jesus’ historical existence. See: The Jesus Puzzle Home Page. To see a brief overview of Doherty’s thesis, see:The Jesus Puzzle: Pieces in a Puzzle of Christian Origins.

44

Exactly!

45

There are no limits to omniscience, mythological or otherwise. See my cites.

If you find debates about mythological characters so comical, why are you even contributing to the thread?

46

You’re thinking, like a modern person, that writing things down is a more “direct” and “authoritative” way of conveying a message than transmitting it orally. But as I understand it, in Jesus’s day, if you had a message to spread, your first thought wouldn’t have been to write it down, but to tell it to people, and tell those people to spread the word to other people—which is what Jesus is depicted as doing in the gospels.

And his teachings did get written down, if the things he’s depicted as saying in the gospels really came from him—which you can doubt, of course, but if he had written anything down himself, there would still be room for doubt: how would you know what really came from him?

Another point is that, at least from the Christian point of view, Jesus’s “message”—the reason he came—was not just what he said, but also what he did and who he was. (In the terminology of John’s gospel, he was the Word.) In other words, he wasn’t just a prophet, whose job was to speak for God (like the Old Testament prophets, many of whom did write things down).

47

Just observing as to its ludicrousness.
Tis a shame all the folks around Jesus were illiterate.
Too bad there wasn’t anyone around who could - say - miraculously change that.
Hell, he could have just created TV and broadcast his sermons!

Its all fine and dandy if for whatever reason someone gets comfort out of convincing themselves that there is something mystical or unexplainable out there. But when folks actually get so foolish as to think they can intelligently debate various specificities of a story that is - at least in large part - made up of whole cloth… Well, I think there is value in reminding those folks that whatever they are doing, it is far removed from rational discussion of fact.

(I might feel differently if this were in IMHO, or - probably more appropriately - MPSIMS.)

48

So, did the Corinthians ever write back?

49

Dimsdale, given that a clear majority of people believe that Jesus existed*, whether or not they think there was anything divine about him, and given that quite a few serious scholars, both religious and non, have devoted considerable time and effort investigating what can be known about Jesus, his time, and the movement that sprang up after him, I think Jesus is fair game for General Questions.

*including Cecil:

50

(Sorry, Dinsdale—didn’t mean to misspell your name.)

51

No, you are not just observing. You are participating. Unlesss you meant by ‘observing’ you meant ‘offering a comment,’ in which case your answer begs the question. Let me ask it again. If you find such mythological questions so comical and ludicrous, why even post, unlesss you are simply trying to goad someone? If that is the case, you are correct. You are definitely in the wrong forum.

52

_#3$$3P 4.3 7|-|3 |/|33|{, _33%47(|-| !!1!one!

53

Fitmeyer thinks he recognizes a few Aramaic idioms in Acts but scholarly consensus is that Luke was a Greek. His primary sources are Greek (Mark and Q) and when he quotes the Tanakh, he quotes from the LXX.

No other Gospel writer spoke to witnesses either.

The evidence against Luke having spoken to witnesses is that he is dependent on secondary sources (something which would be unnecessary if he had access to direct witnesses), the passage of 60 years between the crucifixion and the writing of Luke-Acts (by which time most or all eyewitnesses to Jesus would have been dead), that it was written outside Palestine, after the destruction of Jerusalem (which further reduces the possibility of access to witnesses) and because it’s not a claim that Luke ever makes for himself. Luke-Acts also contains some factual errors (some of Luke’s own, some imported from Mark) which would not have come from – and should have been quickly corrected by – anyone who had been a witness to the events involved. In short, there is no evidence FOR the proposition that Luke interviewed witnesses, and much circumstantial evidence AGAINST it. The majority of NT scholars do not believe that any of the Gospels were written either by witnesses or by anyone who spoke to witnesses.

Well that in itself is a good reason to suspect fabrication, is it not? In conjunctin with the fact that so much other material in Luke is demonstrably ahistorical, literary in creation or even impossible (and I’m not just talking about miracles), and that he had no access to witnessess, then that renders the entire of his Gospel historically suspect. Any historical authenticity would be uncharacteristic and the burden to prove that a given pericope is uncharacteristically historically authentic lies with the claimant.

54

No. Fitzmyer attributes Luke’s “Aramaisms” to use of the LXX just as you do. However, he makes a very logical argument that Luke was an ethnic Syrian.

55

Well, yes, I know the definition of omniscience, thank you. “Limited omniscience” is a shorthand way of saying that Jesus’ omniscient aspect - which he has as a person of the Godhead - was limited during his earthly minstry. So while the Jesus who sits today at the right hand of the Father is omniscient in every sense, during the 30+ years he was incarnate he was not fully omniscient. There were things he didn’t know.

56

I thought He did

57

Here’s an earlier thread on more or less the same issue:
http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?p=7599205&highlight=jesus#post7599205
And some of what I posted:
Here’s a good site:
http://www.basarchive.org/sample/bs...e=4&ArticleID=4
On stone ossuaries the names of the dead were often scratched with something pointed, perhaps a nail, or they were scribbled in charcoal. The way the names are written makes it clear these notices were, for the most part, not the work of professional scribes, but of family members wishing to identify their relatives for posterity.
These ossuary inscriptions, especially the so-called graffiti inscriptions that were scrawled by non-professionals, testify to a higher level of literacy in Jesus’ Israel than is sometimes supposed. Even those people who had difficulty writing plainly and clearly knew how to read and were prepared to make a stab at writing, even on something as important as the ossuary of a family member…
Jesus himself almost certainly knew how to read and write. He read from the scroll of Isaiah in the Nazareth synagogue, according to Luke (4:16–17). He also quoted widely from the Jewish holy books. Yet he would rarely have needed to write. In fact, the only instance in the Gospels of Jesus writing occurs in the case of the woman caught in adultery;f when she is brought before him, he writes some mysterious words on the ground with his finger (John 8:1–11)…
Some scholars contend, with Stephen Patterson, that “very few people could read or write [in Jesus’ day].”g But such statements are no longer supported by the evidence. Not everyone could read and write. And some who could read were not necessarily able to write. But archaeological discoveries and other lines of evidence now show that writing and reading were widely practiced in the Palestine of Jesus’ day"
From Wiki

*Other scholars, such as Jewish Historian Shmuel Safrai, have argued that the majority of Jewish children in first century Judea received education at schools, a program instituted by Simeon ben Shetah (c. 103-76 BC) and later Joshua ben Gamala (c. 63-65). However, our accounts of this in the Talmud were written down about 200 years after Jesus’ boyhood. The references from Philo and Josephus probably only refer to the public reading of the Torah in the synagogue. Any school system would have to be reinstituted after disruption during the two Jewish revolutions around 70 and 130. Many scholars consider the educational program of Simeon to be a later legend: “What elementary education did exist was carried out within the family, and most often it simply involved instruction in a given craft by the father.” (page 273, see also Craffert-Botha, below). Meier writes:

“Hence, despite inflated claims from some modern authors, we are not to imagine that every Jewish male in Palestine learned to read - and women were rarely given the opportunity. Literacy, while greatly desirable, was not an absolute necessity for the ordinary life of the ordinary Jew. … Taken by themselves, therefore, such influences as reverence for the Torah and respect for literacy do not prove that Jesus was counted among those Jews who could read and study the Scriptures; they simply show what might have been.” (pages 275, 276)
Still, Meier argues that the debates of Jesus over the Scripture in the synagogues and other details suggest that Jesus had the ability to read the sacred Hebrew texts.

“To sum up: individual texts from the Gospels prove very little about the literacy of Jesus. Instead, it is an indirect argument from converging lines of probability that inclines us to think that Jesus was in fact literate. … [S]ometime during his childhood or early adulthood, Jesus was taught how to read and expound the Hebrew Scriptures.” (page 277, 278) "*

The point is- graffiti is endemic in ancient sites. If only 5% of the population could read it, why was it being written?

58

I’m thinking that’s probably the best answer. Since Gutenberg, we assume communication through texts. I’m not sure the ancient world would have made that assumption as readily.
That could be tested, if someone on the board has a grasp of the evidence. Did Socrates write anything? There seems no evidence of it. Is there evidence that the major rabbis whose teachings are quoted in the Talmud wrote their teaching?

I’ve never been able to get a confident handle on literacy in ancient Judea and Galilee. Modern writers often claim a literacy rate of 5% or less; but as far as I know, that’s rooted in extrapolations from modern non-industrial societies. May well be accurate; but it is an extrapolation, rather than direct evidence.

For what it’s worth: I’m confident many people were functionally illiterate. (I once had the opportunity, in a class, to edit a document written on papyrus – a “letter to the tax assessor” kind of thing. Looking at the actual object, you could see the interplay between the client and the scribe, in such things as corrections mid-word for a change of wording.) And there are interesting paintings from Roman-era Egypt, in which upwardly mobile people take care to be painted holding a scroll or writing tablet.
But Galilee and Judea under the Roman Empire were not Palestine under the Ottomans. From Egypt, we’ve got surviving letters on papyrus which seem to have been written by rather ordinary people. (Written poorly, perhaps; nevertheless.) And in Pompeii and Herculaneum, we’ve got graffiti, and shop signs painted on the outside wall. While full literacy was probably more an elite thing, I’d expect shopping for olive oil to have been more left to slaves; so there seems some reason to think that a fair number of people might at least have been able to sound out a word.

59

Because he had a really good memory.

60

Perhaps Jesus also knew that humans, being who they are, would promptly turn anything he wrote down into a “sacred relic” imbued with sacred magical powers, and would worship and venerate that relic by locking it up in a box and enshrining it in some secure, “holy” place where nobody would ever get to read it. And some would come to believe that touching or possessing the relic would grant them some sort of magical benefit, and all manner of wars would be fought over possession of the relic.

See The Spear of Destiny, The Holy Grail, and The True Cross.