This is overstating it rather: I was looking at ancient literacy last year for a post, and found Hebrew literacy at that period to have been around 3%; and, as the author, Meir Bar-Ilan, pointed out, reading was not an economic necessity in a rural land, and this was still 6 times better than the Egyptians of long before: Even if we assume that in cities (as happens all over the world in urban areas in comparison to rural areas), such as Tiberias, for example, the literacy rate was double and even triple in comparison with the towns, still the figures of literacy are around 2-15%. With the assumption that the rural population was around 70% (with 0% literacy), 20% of urban population (with 1-5% literacy), and 10% of highly urban population (with 2-15% literacy), the total population literacy is still very low. Thus, it is no exaggeration to say that the total literacy rate in the Land of Israel at that time (of Jews only, of course), was probably less than 3%.
At first glance this figure looks quite low, and maybe too low. However, in a traditional society, knowing how to read was not a necessity: neither for economic reasons, nor for intellectual ones. On the contrary. Why should a farmer send his son to learn how to read when it entails a waste of working time (=money)? Why should he himself learn how to read if his culture is based on oral tradition (though with a written Torah)? According to the Torah, there is no need to read or write, except for writing the Mezuza, Tefilin, and the Torah itself. However, for these purposes there was always a scribe, so a Jew in antiquity could fulfill the commandments of the Torah while being illiterate. Not only that, but 3% of the total population seems to be high in comparison with other cultures. In ancient Egypt, a land with a lot of scribes, only half a percent were literate. Were People Literate in the Time of Christ ?
Further, other cultures, such as the Druids and the Axtecs managed Law and Theology fine without writing. It may even have given the clerics more power since there was nothing to check their decisions against.
Only to of the gospels are traditionally attributed to apostles (Matthew and John), and even those traditions are regarded by modern scholarly consensus as spurious (Matthew patently so, John perhaps based on some kind of authentic anecdotal core, but one which is still greatly larded with succeeding layers of fictional miracle stories, post-apostolic theology, invented speeches and other appended elements).
It’s highly unlikely that anything written by Jesus himself would not have been preserved, revered and endlessly copied from the start. It’s also highly unlikely that the existence of anything written by Jesus himself would not have been mentioned anywhere in any early Christian literature.
True, in the absolute sense. But, AFAIK, no mention of such a document has been made in the next 200 years of writings, which tends to discount that possibility. And I just noticed that DtC is saying much the same thing.
Answered in my above post, re-posted below. It is a bit hard to understand, because of the concept of ‘oneness’ is hard to understand. God’s way is anti-individuality. In the Kingdom of God everyone is God’s child, and there is also only one child at the same time, and will forever only be one child of God, yet that one child will be all of us. It is the meaning of the statement that Jesus and the Father are one, and that God is one.
Because the saints are also every bit as Jesus as Jesus, as they wrote it was Jesus writing. Jesus as the man we know from scriptures, was not meant to be the one who wrote, that was the job of other men, but the same God.
I appreciate you taking the time to respond but I really don’t understand what you’re trying to tell me. This all sounds very metaphysical. You seem to be suggesting that, in some sense, any time anyone writes anything down at all, it is actually God doing the writing. Is that it? What sect of Christianity would this be?
The Gospels don’t actually say that Jesus was a carpenter anyway. They say he was a tekton (or at least the son of a tekton), which does not mean “carpenter,” but literally means “builder,” and refers to an underclass of what were essentially day laborors - basically people who were hired to do piece work for any number of building or repair projects, including cutting stone, laying brick fixing walls or buildings or docks - grunt work for a day or two often not even paid for with cash but with food. It was a hand to mouth existence, and a social class below even that of the peasants who farmed or fished.
Another possibility: He did write it down and between the Roman destruction of Jerusalem (which more of less wiped out the Jews who believed Jesus was the Jewish Messiah not the start of new religion) and the campaigns of Paul to make Christianity a new religion among the Gentiles, the writing were destroyed. There is vast difference between many of the religious views attributed to Jesus and the religious views attributed to Paul and that’s just in the books that survived to be accepted by the Christian mainstream. The writings may have existed, but been declared herectical.
No problem. My reading and research on the highly stratified, and brutally repressive, economic and social classes of the world Jesus lived in have been highly enlightening to me. Understanding that context really provides a lot of insight into his mission and his appeal. Here was a guy who was saying that those on the very bottom, those below even the peasant classes - the utterly destitute, the prostitutes, the beggars, the lepers, the winos and the cripples - were the heirs to the Kingdom of God. That “the last will be first and the first will be last,” that there would be a complete reversal of the social order and the “rich” (a word which had much different conotations in Jesus’ time than it does now - he was talking about a very small and extremely brutal and exploitive overclass in a system which had virtually no vertical mobility) would find themselves with nothing, while the poor and oppressed would find themselves with everything. It’s no wonder that Christianity was exceptionally popular with slaves, and that they were among the largest segment of early converts in the Roman empire.
Very interesting too. I’ve learned more about the bible, biblical records and life during Jesus’ time here on the boards than I ever did prior to joining. Thanks again.
Any idea about the reasons for such an apparently irrelevant interpolation (“at some point, for unknown reasons, Jesus wrote nobody knows what in the dust” doesn’t seem like something one would feel an urge to add)?
