As one author said, the past is a foreign land, they do things there differently. Reading sources written thousands of years ago always serves as a reminder of how much truth there really is in that statement. One of those things that were different is certainly the literacy level and the position of education. Nearly everyone you come in contact with today can read and write on at least an elementary level. Most people can, for example, read a book without a problem (assuming they have the will to do so – which is a problem of its own). A couple of years ago I got really interested in the simple but quite fascinating question: Could Jesus read or write? This took me on an exploratory journey that ended with an article I wrote in 2019. To be honest, I didn’t even try to put a definitive answer to the question that has interested many scholars over the last hundred years. But, as it turns out, to fully understand the question I posed myself, one has to forget all of the modern conceptions of education and literacy. In reading sources from the 1st or 2nd century, it is imperative to leave behind all the contemporary notions about mass education and high percentages of literacy. So, I dig deep into the broader question of education and literacy in antiquity.

As a matter of fact, studies have shown that things have not always been this way – widespread literacy and education are purely a modern phenomenon. Pre-industrial societies had neither the incentive nor the means to provide mass education in literacy for their children. They had no real incentive because the means of production didn’t require that everyone read. Furthermore, there was no central government with a policy of expanding and controlling the education and literacy level. Literacy and education were solely private enterprises. Consequently, only upper-class families could afford to educate their children. In other words, education and literacy were reserved for the rich and powerful. There were exceptions, of course, but they are exceptions indeed!  Such societies were far more dependent on the spoken word than a written one. Unlike the popular imagination, even ancient Greece and Rome (despite the numerous classical writings they left us) were places where the majority of people couldn’t read or write. Estimates of the level of literacy vary, but several important studies have concluded that the percentage of educated people was approximately 10-15 %. concentrated in urban areas. In other words, 85-90% of the population couldn’t read a Gospel of Matthew or any of Paul’s epistles. Needless to say, I’m not saying that these people couldn’t learn what the author of the Gospel of Matthew said. That is because in antiquity even literary texts were oral phenomena: books were made to be read out loud, often in public, so that a person usually “read” a book by hearing it read by someone else. Even as these societies developed a certain dependence on texts (wills, taxes, contracts, etc.) they did not promote literacy for the masses. Instead, those who were literate began to hire out their services to those who were not. I assume that the reason is quite simple: the ancient economy was agricultural and the backbone of a state or empire was physical labor. In that social constellation, the state didn’t need to pursue an idea of widespread education. Education remained in the hands of a cultural elite that made up only 15 percent of society as a whole. Everybody else had to work to sustain the economy. Whether Jesus, who wasn’t from the upper class could read treaties and write narrative accounts such as the epistles or the gospels is highly questionable. Sources about his reading or writing skills are quite vague and therefore it is impossible to prove it one way or the other. The only piece of evidence comes from the story of Jesus in the Synagogue (Lk 4,16-30) where the author (unlike Mark and Matthew!) presupposes that Jesus is a scribal-literate teacher. But everything we know of the society in which Jesus lived and his social (family) background points more to the idea of Jesus being able to read or write only on an elementary level (in that sense the idea of gradation of literacy in antiquity is very important!). Some scholars tried to argue otherwise citing an old idea according to which all the Palestinian Jewish boys in the 1st century were educated in elementary schools that were situated in synagogues. However, these theories rely too much on the later (rabbinic) evidence and the problematic interpretations of Philo and Josephus – individuals who were exceptions in so far that they belong to the upper-class. Their perspectives can’t be an objective presentation of the lives of the “common” people in 1^st century Palestine. Does that mean that Jesus didn’t know the Scriptures (Old Testament)? Of course not! He could hear about it from his parents and others. Looking at the gospels we can see that he certainly showed high knowledge of Jewish’ scriptures.

Finally, it is sometimes said that oral cultures could be counted on the preserve their traditions reliably, that people in such societies were akin to remember correctly everything they were being thought. This is, however, one of those myths that can be seen even in some scholarly works. Studies of literacy done by cultural anthropologists and historians have shown that people in oral cultures do not share the modern concern for preserving traditions intact and do not repeat them exactly the same way every time. On the contrary, the concern for verbal accuracy (word for word) is a modern phenomenon! Oral cultures understood traditions differently, and the change in the content of the story wasn’t considered to be a bad thing. You could hear the same story in a different way, but the people in oral cultures would tell you it is the same story nevertheless. So, the oral traditions about Jesus’ life were in circulation for decades after his death. This development didn’t stop when the Gospels were written. On the contrary, we have solid evidence that the traditions continued to thrive for a very long time. Hard evidence comes from Papias (a bishop of Hierapolis, who wrote somewhere in the middle of the 2^nd century). Papias tells us how he even preferred orally delivered reports from people who had been companions of the elders, who, as he said, had known the apostles.

Unlike our modern world where everything is written and recorded, and where most of the people have (at least) the elementary level of education, the Roman world (where Christianity emerged) was quite different. Education and literacy were reserved for the rich and powerful. First Christians lived in an oral culture where stories were mostly passed around by the word of mouth. This fact doesn’t preclude the existence of a written text, and Christianity (having been a religion that emerged from Judaism) holds high esteem for written documents. But they were always accompanied by the oral presentation without which most people in the 1st or 2nd century couldn’t learn anything about their faith or about Jesus and his life.