Literacy in the Time of Jesus

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How likely is it that someone would have written down and collected Jesus’ sayings into a book in Jesus’ lifetime? Several lines of evidence converge to suggest it is quite probable.

The first factor to consider is how prevalent literacy was in Jesus’ time. Full literacy means being able to read and write proficiently, but degrees of literacy vary; people who can read, for example, may not be able to write. A common view is that of W.H. Kelber, who claims that, in first-century A.D. Palestine, “writing was in the hands of an élite of trained specialists, and reading required an advanced education available only to a few.”¹ It is often asserted that writing was restricted to government and 038religious circles and would have had no place among the peasantry of Galilee, where Jesus did much of his teaching. If this statement were true, there would be more validity to the widely-held opinion that knowledge of Jesus’ words and deeds depended on oral tradition—people passed on what they saw and heard by word of mouth—until about 70 A.D., when the earliest of the Gospels, the Gospel of Mark, was composed.

However, the evidence showing that reading and writing were widely practiced in Jesus’ age grows with every discovery of a new inscription. Much of this evidence comes from religious and governmental circles, but a great deal of it does not.

The library of Qumran—otherwise known as the Dead Sea Scrolls—includes mostly religious texts, to be sure, but significantly, these represent both the continued copying of the sacred scripture and other religious books, and the creation of new ones. Members of the Jewish sect based at Qumran—commonly thought to be Essenes—must have been expected to read the Law regularly, since they produced so many copies of religious texts.

During the Second Jewish Revolt against Rome, led by Simon Bar-Kokhba in 132–135 A.D., refugees from the invading Roman army fled to remote caves near the Dead Sea, south of the Qumran area where the scrolls were discovered. Some fragments of Biblical scrolls were found in these caves, but also an array of letters and legal deeds. A number of the letters are from Bar-Kokhba himself, or were addressed to him. One archive, belonging to a woman named Babatha, had been packed in an old wineskin and included deeds written in Greek and Aramaic; they concern ownership of property, debts, and marriage and divorce settlements.^a Some of them date from the middle of the first century A.D., or just after, so they exemplify the sort of legal documents that were being written in the Gospel period. One deed of divorce is similar in many ways to the traditional Jewish kethubah (marriage contract) and also to a particular deed of divorce between two Idumaeans drafted on a potsherd in the second century B.C., which was found at Marisa.²

A deed of debt, dated 55–56 A.D., was discovered among the Second Revolt documents and may be an example of the debt notes Jesus referred to in the parable of the Shrewd Manager; in the parable, the manager instructs his master’s debtor, “Take your bill, sit down quickly and write half the amount” (Luke 16:6–7). It is taken for granted that an ordinary man would be able to write out a numerical sum.

Papyrus and leather documents have not survived from most of Palestine, only from very arid regions such as the area around the Dead Sea. These materials rot in damp soil. The fact that they have not been discovered does not mean, therefore, that they did not exist. 039The first-century A.D. Jewish historian Josephus reports that, when the First Jewish Revolt against Rome broke out in 66 A.D., one of the rebels’ primary targets was an archive building in Jerusalem that housed debt records they wanted to burn.³ They knew the power these records could have over them. The second-century A.D. legal papyri from the Bar-Kokhba caves include several that are signed by the scribe and also by witnesses. Some witnesses signed in flowing, easy script, others with laboriously written letters, and still others not at all: In the case of those who were illiterate, the scribe signed on their behalf.⁴ Whatever their level of skill, all were aware of writing.

Every year, hundreds of small bronze coins minted by Jewish kings in the first century B.C. come to light in Israel. Those struck for Alexander Jannaeus (103–76 B.C.) bear his name and titles in Hebrew and Greek or in Hebrew and Aramaic. The coins of Herod the Great and his sons have only Greek legends. The same is true for the coins of the Roman governors of Judea. Every dutiful Jew paid the annual half-shekel Temple Tax (see Matthew 17:24–27), which the Temple authorities demanded be paid in the silver coins of Tyre (these also bore Greek words).^b However, when the First Revolt broke out, the rebel leaders put anachronistic, pre-Exilic Hebrew characters on the coins they minted.⁵

The prevalence of the Greek language in the first century A.D. is also apparent from Greek public notices set up in Jerusalem. Most notable are the stones warning non-Jews not to enter the sacred courts of Herod’s Temple. One had to be able to read to know what the signs said.

Let us turn from religion and governmental inscriptions to more personal ones. In first-century A.D. Jerusalem it was customary to leave the body of a deceased relative in the family cave tomb for a year, then collect the bones and put them into a box, or ossuary (now a familiar term, following the publication in this magazine of the ossuary inscribed “James, son of Joseph, brother of Jesus”).^c Some ossuaries were wooden and have decayed, 041but many were made of stone and survive. 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.

While most materials that were written on—leather, papyrus and ossuaries—were expensive, one writing material was free and readily available: the potsherd. Ancient crockery was usually simple earthenware (terracotta), which broke easily. Pieces lay scattered in the streets and courtyards of towns and villages—free scrap paper. You could scribble a note on a suitable sherd, then throw it away once you were finished. A Hebrew alphabet found on a potsherd at Qumran is a good specimen of a pupil’s attempt at learning his letters.

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Many inscribed potsherds, called ostraca, were found in the excavations at Masada and were left by the Jewish rebels who held out against the Romans until 73 A.D., three years after the Romans destroyed the Jerusalem Temple. Excavators at Masada found notes in Greek about supplies of barley and notes in Hebrew about deliveries of bread. The people mentioned include “the Gadarenes” and “Bar-Jesus” [son of Jesus]. Many small sherds bear a single name and one letter of the Hebrew alphabet, while dozens have only one Hebrew letter (both the pre- and post-Exilic forms were used) or a Greek letter. These were probably coupons for a rationing system used during the Roman siege. That is the most likely explanation, too, for the sherds bearing a single name, which chief excavator Yigael Yadin surmised might be the lots the last defenders of Masada drew to decide who should kill the last of them in their mass suicide.⁶

Therefore, among Masada’s stalwart defenders, many of whom were ordinary people, there were some who could read three different scripts and at least two languages.

Before the rebels occupied Masada during the First Jewish Revolt, the site had served as one of Herod’s magnificent palace-fortresses. In the ruins of Herod’s palace were found pieces of pottery jars with notes of their contents written in ink. These were not written in Hebrew, Aramaic or Greek, but in Latin. Many of the wine jars (amphoras) were prepared in Italy for Herod’s cellar. They were marked with the date and the vineyard, followed by the Latin phrase “for Herod king of Judaea.” Another jar was marked garum, the salt-fish paste so beloved of the Romans. One jar might bear the word “apples.”⁷ Evidently some kitchen staff in Herod’s court could read enough Latin to select the right wine, savory or dessert. So by Jesus’ lifetime, Latin was already current in Judea’s royal pantries.

True, all these examples come from Judea, rather than Galilee, but this is largely because sites in Galilee continued to be inhabited; later remains in these towns destroyed or covered earlier ones, as at Capernaum. Only at Gamla, in the Golan, has a first-century A.D. town been extensively explored.^d8 Moreover, two of Galilee’s cities, Sepphoris and Tiberias, were founded in the first century A.D. With such large-scale construction, a lot of writing must have been going on. In addition to instructions for builders, accounts of payments made and lists of supplies for the royal palaces and villas of the nobles, there would have been the normal records of the tax collectors and customs officials, such as Levi (Matthew 9:9; Mark 2:14). So far archaeologists have cleared only small areas of first-century occupation in these towns. Even though writing was used extensively in daily life, ostraca with ancient writing are not commonly found at the sites. Large caches usually come to light only when ancient rubbish pits—where the ostraca were dumped—are excavated.

This brings us back to Jesus’ words. It is sometimes said that, for example, “it is incontrovertible that in the earliest period there was only an oral record of the narrative and sayings of Jesus.”⁹ The evidence we have just adduced, however, suggests that many ordinary people knew how to read and probably also to write.

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Luke tells us that he sought out the most reliable sources when compiling his Gospel—sources that “were delivered to us by those who from the beginning were eyewitnesses and ministers of the word” (Luke 1:2). We may assume that he could read notes made by eyewitnesses to Jesus’ ministry. It is true that none of these sources survive, but the common currency of writing makes the assumption plausible. The shared content of the three Synoptic Gospels (Mark, Matthew and Luke) could well derive from a very early written text (the hypothetical document scholars call Q, to account for this shared material.)^e

The letters of Paul and others preserved in the New Testament prove writing was current in the early decades of the Church’s existence, and the importance of written texts in the Church is evident from the number of papyrus fragments from the mid-second century A.D. onward found in Middle Egypt. There is no reason to believe the Egyptian Church was unique in having these written texts; their survival in Egypt is purely accidental. Other texts would have circulated across the Roman Empire and farther east.

It is not hard to imagine someone in first-century Israel coming home one day and writing out the memorable words he had just heard: “Blessed are those who mourn for they shall be comforted” (Matthew 5:4) or “I and the Father are one” (John 10:30).

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 045ground with his finger (John 8:1–11).

It is sometimes said that a rabbinic rule forbade writing down a teacher’s words or anything with religious content, apart from the Scriptures, lest other compositions be confused with the sacred texts. In fact, rabbinic sources did allow for written notes of a teacher’s words to be kept on tablets.¹⁰ Now, a remarkable document from among the Dead Sea Scrolls, known as MMT (“Some Teachings of the Law”) upsets this supposed rule. MMT is written in the first person and contains the rulings of some unnamed authority. These rulings are said to contradict the tenets of another sect, a sect that can be identified with those who later became the dominant rabbis in Judaism. The attitude reflected in MMT is similar to the attitude of Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount: “You have heard it was said…but I say to you” (Matthew 5). A leading Dead Sea Scroll scholar does not doubt that the document was written at the time the rulings were made.¹¹ Clearly some devout Jews in the first century were happy to keep their teachers’ words in writing. Actually, six copies of MMT existed at Qumran, showing it was a widely read book. Nor was Qumran the only place where the Essenes lived, read and wrote; Josephus says they were settled in large numbers in every town,¹² so they were likely to have some of the Scriptures and their own writings with them in places all around Israel.

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. And if that is true, there is no reason to doubt that there were some eyewitness records of what Jesus said and did.

How likely is it that someone would have written down and collected Jesus’ sayings into a book in Jesus’ lifetime? Several lines of evidence converge to suggest it is quite probable. The first factor to consider is how prevalent literacy was in Jesus’ time. Full literacy means being able to read and write proficiently, but degrees of literacy vary; people who can read, for example, may not be able to write. A common view is that of W.H. Kelber, who claims that, in first-century A.D. Palestine, “writing was in the hands of an élite of trained specialists, and reading […]