Could Jesus Read and Write?
Misquoting Jesus with Bart Ehrman
Chris Huntley
4.8 • 745 Ratings
🗓️ 7 November 2023
⏱️ 39 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Nearly everyone today assumes that Jesus could read and write. But is that historically plausible? There is only one story in the New Testament where Jesus is shown to be able to read (Luke 4) and he is never said to be able to write (except in the story of the Woman Caught in Adultery that was added by scribes only later John 7-8).
In this episode we consider the literacy rates of antiquity (very low!), and discuss who could learn to read and then write, how they were educated, and whether it is likely that an impoverished dayworker from a poor family in a remote backwater of the empire was one of them.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to Misquoting Jesus with Bart Ehrman. |
| 0:07.3 | The only show, where a six-time New York Times bestselling author and world-renowned Bible scholar, |
| 0:13.3 | uncovers the many fascinating, little-known facts about the New Testament, the historical Jesus, and the rise of Christianity. |
| 0:23.4 | I'm your host, Megan Lewis. Let's begin. Hello everyone and welcome back to misquoting Jesus. The ability to read and write is a |
| 0:30.1 | necessity to live and thrive in modern Western society, and reading and studying the Bible has |
| 0:34.8 | been of great importance to many Christian groups. This hasn't |
| 0:38.1 | always been the case, and for much of human history, literacy was severely restricted to train |
| 0:43.1 | scribes and members of the elite who had enough leisure time to spend learning these skills. |
| 0:48.5 | So what about the figures we know from the New Testament? Could they read and write, and if |
| 0:53.2 | they couldn't, then who exactly was |
| 0:55.1 | responsible for writing the various documentation of these early Christian groups? Before we dive into |
| 1:01.1 | that, but good morning. How are you? Yeah, I'm doing well. So this is Election Day, not the |
| 1:07.3 | election day, which is in 2024, but already everybody I know is on edge because, |
| 1:14.7 | you know, we're not taking political stands in this podcast because it's not about that, |
| 1:20.5 | but it's a fraught time for many people and who are, I think, on all sides concerned about |
| 1:27.1 | what's going to happen with |
| 1:28.2 | our country and where it's going. |
| 1:30.3 | You would wish that at some point there could be, like, sensible and charismatic people |
| 1:35.4 | who weren't on the extremes. |
| 1:37.9 | But they seem to be few and far between. |
| 1:40.9 | Apart from nerves, I'm doing fine. |
| 1:42.4 | How are you doing today? |
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