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Reading and Writing in the Time of Jesus (Biblical Seminar)

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As anyone interested in ancient history knows, all the ancient libraries, like the fabulous library of Alexandria with its reputed 500,000 roles, have vanished. "The major Greek and Latin texts we possess today are copies of copies, almost all from the Middle Ages" (p 19). Only a few precious papyrus fragments are left, and most came from rubbish heaps in Egypt where the dry heat contributed to their survival. Tragically, most of the books written in Roman times have vanished forever.

Also we can't even figure out what percentage of the population was literate. Scholars have come up with wildly varying guesses--ranging from a low of 5% to 50%.

Milland does an impressive job capturing every shred of evidence he can to answer the problem. He not only lists all the evidence, he also supplies pictures, making this book invaluable to anyone interested in the subject.
I can't think of another book quite as thorough. And it has lots of pictures, so you can judge items yourself.

One surprising place where he finds evidence for multilingualism among Jews is at Masada. "It is on the ostraca and labels on jars...There are ostraca in Greek, Aramaic, and Hebrew, to indicate...which...was ritually pure"(p 136). Clearly, "On Masada there were people who could use three scripts and write in three languages"(p 138).

Indeed, the Jews may have been the most literate group in the Roman empire. They shared a strong tradition of education and thought that, in theory at least, every man should be able to read from the scriptures in synagogue. We do know that Simon ben Shetach, in about 100 BC, said that every child was to attend school.

What about the rest of the empire? Some scholars argue that only a few of the wealthy were truly literate. Yet we have "graffiti from Pompeii, made by a fuller, a weaver, and other craftsmen" (p 155) not to mention the Roman habit of putting placards everywhere (such as on top of the cross of Jesus Christ) that would suggest a far greater number of people
could read.

One very interesting section concerned the possible way that the gospel was written. Many people carried note-books which they "carried for their day-to-day business, perhaps hung at the belt"(p 223) where they have have noted any striking sayings of Jesus.

Altogether, an outstanding book on the subject. No one interested in literacy in the ancient world should be without this.

One of the mysteries of Christianity is the lack of proof that Jesus ever existed. Most of what we rely on is found in the New Testament, none of which was penned during Christąs lifetime. Pauląs letters to various Christian groups around the Middle East were written about twenty years after Christąs death ­ and Paul never met Christ while He was alive. The four Gospels all appear to date to after 70 A.D., and it is unlikely that they were written by writers who ever met Jesus. So, all of our main writings about Christ are second hand accounts.

This begs the question of why Jesusą followers werenąt furiously taking notes while He was alive. Had Christ arrived today, he would have easily entered peopleąs diaries, emails, newspaper articles, magazine profiles, police crime reports, probably even some television broadcasts. In short, anyone who was making this much of an impact on even a small number of people would have created a paper trail. Indeed, in Brooklyn right now, a Jewish sect called the Lubavitchers are furiously debating whether their latest rebbe, who died in 1994, is really a Messiah who will return from the dead. That debate is creating a big paper trail. Was life so different in Jesusą time that no one took notes? Were diaries unknown? Why didnąt the Romans, a bureaucratic state with a paper obsession, at least record some details of Jesusą death?

One possible answer to this mystery is provided by Alan Millard's book, Reading and Writing in the Time of Jesus. Millard has studied the state of literacy and writing in the first century and beyond in Judea. Much of his evidence is fragmentary - pieces of broken pots were used as scrap 'paper' during this period, showing that non-scholars often wrote down messages to each other. Erasable wax tablets shaped like books were often used on the job for writing down accounts and ledgers. The weekly services at the Jewish synagogues required the men to be able to read from the scared scrolls. Millard concludes that literacy certainly existed among common Jews, so there's no reason to believe that Christ's memory could only be handed down orally.

The problem, Millard argues, is that so little written material of any kind has survived the ravages of decay. There is precious little original documents written by Roman officials from first century Judea, Millard argues, so we shouldn't be surprised at the dearth of letters and messages describing Christ's actions. Lots of people could have been writing down their impressions of this new Jewish teacher, without any of it having survived. Indeed, Millard argues that the few documents we have from this period come from the arid deserts of Egypt, where the environment preserved scrolls written at this time. Moisture, and the constant recycling of written material, may be the prime culprits for the absence of additional written evidence of Christ's life.

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I was very interested in the topic, and the book provides the information, but it is not an easy read. There is more information than style. It was sometimes rather tedious to read - but provides lots of specific examples to back up the author's premise. I read some of the chapters out of order, as the later chapters were my main interest, and the chapters were stand alone to a certain extent.