The question of why Jesus of Nazareth didn’t write down any of his own teachings has puzzled many Christians and non-Christians alike. From the perspective of a literate person in the twenty-first-century west, it makes little sense why a person who saw himself as a prophet would not bother to write down any of his own ideas. Most of us are accustomed to getting our information about religion from books, so we tend to assume that it would have only been natural for Jesus to write down his teachings.
The problem with this assumption is that Jesus was not a twenty-first-century literate westerner, but rather a first-century CE Jewish itinerant preacher from Galilee. Although the canonical gospels consistently seem to portray Jesus as literate, it is an open question whether the historical Jesus was actually literate. Furthermore, even if Jesus was indeed literate as the gospels portray him, there are several good reasons why he might have decided not to write down his teachings.
The Gospel of Mark’s portrayal of Jesus as a literate rabbi
All the oldest surviving gospels portray Jesus as extensively quoting and alluding to specific passages from the Hebrew Bible in ways that strongly suggest that the authors of those gospels believed that Jesus had read and studied these passages on his own.
The earliest surviving gospel is the Gospel of Mark, which was most likely written sometime around 70 CE or thereabouts (i.e., around forty years or so after Jesus’s death). In the Gospel of Mark 2:23–28, Jesus is portrayed as asking the Pharisees if they have “read” the story of how David ate the bread of the Presence and gave some of it to his companions. The passage reads as follows, as translated in the New Revised Standard Version (NRSV):
“One sabbath he was going through the grainfields; and as they made their way his disciples began to pluck heads of grain. The Pharisees said to him, ‘Look, why are they doing what is not lawful on the sabbath?’ And he said to them, ‘Have you never read what David did when he and his companions were hungry and in need of food? He entered the house of God, when Abiathar was high priest, and ate the bread of the Presence, which it is not lawful for any but the priests to eat, and he gave some to his companions.’ Then he said to them, ‘The sabbath was made for humankind, and not humankind for the sabbath; so the Son of Man is lord even of the sabbath.’”
The Greek word in verse twenty-five that the NRSV translates as “read” is ἀνέγνωτε (anégnōte), which definitely means “read.” The way this question is phrased very much makes it sound as though the author of the gospel believed that Jesus had read the story from the Tanakh on his own or, at the very least, that he had had someone else read it to him. There are multiple other passages in the Gospel of Mark that also seem to suggest that the author of the gospel believed that Jesus was literate.
ABOVE: Illustration from 1866 by the French artist Gustave Doré depicting Jesus and his disciples plucking grain on the Sabbath, as described in the Gospel of Mark 2
The description of Jesus reading aloud in the synagogue in the Gospel of Luke
The Gospel of Luke, which was most likely written sometime in around the 90s CE or thereabouts, is even more explicit in its portrayal of Jesus as a literate man. The Gospel of Luke 4:16–21 unambiguously describes Jesus as reading aloud from the scroll of Isaiah in the synagogue in his hometown of Nazareth. The passage reads as follows, as translated in the NRSV:
“When he came to Nazareth, where he had been brought up, he went to the synagogue on the sabbath day, as was his custom. He stood up to read, and the scroll of the prophet Isaiah was given to him. He unrolled the scroll and found the place where it was written:
‘The Spirit of the Lord is upon me,
because he has anointed me
to bring good news to the poor.
He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives
and recovery of sight to the blind,
to let the oppressed go free,
to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.’And he rolled up the scroll, gave it back to the attendant, and sat down. The eyes of all in the synagogue were fixed on him. Then he began to say to them, ‘Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.’”
This passage strongly suggests that the anonymous author of the Gospel of Luke believed that Jesus was one of the few literate people in his village and that it was common for him to read aloud from the Tanakh in the synagogue on the Sabbath.
ABOVE: Illustration of Jesus reading from the scroll of Isaiah by the French painter James Tissot (lived 1836 – 1902)
The description of Jesus “writing” in the Pericope Adulterae
Another passage that some people have tried to interpret as evidence that Jesus was literate is found in the Gospel of John 7:53–8:11. The text reads as follows, as translated in the NRSV:
“[[Then each of them went home, while Jesus went to the Mount of Olives. Early in the morning he came again to the temple. All the people came to him and he sat down and began to teach them. The scribes and the Pharisees brought a woman who had been caught in adultery; and making her stand before all of them, they said to him, ‘Teacher, this woman was caught in the very act of committing adultery. Now in the law Moses commanded us to stone such women. Now what do you say?’ They said this to test him, so that they might have some charge to bring against him. Jesus bent down and wrote with his finger on the ground.”
“When they kept on questioning him, he straightened up and said to them, ‘Let anyone among you who is without sin be the first to throw a stone at her.’ And once again he bent down and wrote on the ground. When they heard it, they went away, one by one, beginning with the elders; and Jesus was left alone with the woman standing before him. Jesus straightened up and said to her, ‘Woman, where are they? Has no one condemned you?’ She said, ‘No one, sir.’ And Jesus said, ‘Neither do I condemn you. Go your way, and from now on do not sin again.’]]”
There are two reasons why this passage is much more difficult to use as evidence for Jesus being literate than the passages from the Gospels of Mark and Luke that I have already quoted above. The first reason is because, as I discuss in this article from February 2020, the entire passage found in the Gospel of John 7:53–8:11—known as the Pericope Adulterae—is widely recognized among scholars as a later interpolation that was not a part of the original gospel.
The passage is missing entirely from all the earliest surviving manuscripts of this portion of the Gospel of John and, even in some of the later manuscripts, it is marked as probably a later addition to the text. The NRSV itself places the entire passage in brackets to show that it was probably not a part of the original text.
The second problem is that, unlike in the passage from the Gospel of Luke, where it is clear that Jesus is actually reading words aloud, in the Pericope Adulterae, it is unclear whether Jesus is actually writing words. The word that is used in the Greek text is κατέγραφεν (katégraphen). This word could mean “he wrote” as in “he wrote words,” but it could also mean “he drew.” In other words, the text doesn’t clarify whether Jesus is actually writing words in the dust with his finger or merely doodling.
ABOVE: Illustration from 1866 by the French artist Gustave Doré depicting Jesus defending the adulterous woman from the angry mob wanting to stone her
Was the historical Jesus literate?
Leaving that whole matter aside, it’s clear enough that the authors of the canonical gospels—or certainly at least the author of the Gospel of Luke—believed that Jesus was literate. Unfortunately, the gospels are not reliable sources; they were all written many decades after Jesus’s death by anonymous, ideologically motivated authors who certainly never knew Jesus personally while he was alive on earth. The gospels do rely on earlier written and oral sources, so they are not entirely useless from a historical perspective, but anything they say should of course be taken with several grains of salt.
Many modern scholars have rightly pointed out that the overwhelming majority of the people who lived in Galilee in the first century CE must have been illiterate. John Dominic Crossan, for instance, writes in his 1994 book Jesus: A Revolutionary Biography, on page 25:
“…since between 95 and 97 per cent of the Jewish state was illiterate at the time of Jesus, it must be presumed that Jesus also was illiterate.”
The statistic Crossan gives here isn’t based on any real evidence and I suspect it is probably a bit exaggerated. I think the actual functional literacy rate was probably somewhere between maybe fifteen percent and five percent; I don’t think the literacy rate is likely to have been less than five percent.
Nonetheless, there can be little doubt that the vast majority of Jewish people in Judaea and Galilee in the first century CE were illiterate. A Jewish saying attested in the Masekhet Soferim 11.2 accounts for a situation in which only one person in an entire village might be able and willing to read aloud from the Torah. We don’t know how common a situation like the one described in the saying might have been, but the mere fact that this situation was seen as a plausible one indicates that literacy rates were relatively low.
The real flaw in Crossan’s argument in my opinion is that he assumes that Jesus must have been like the majority of people who lived in the same time and place as him and he does not allow for the entirely reasonable possibility that Jesus might have been better educated than most people of that time and place. After all, if Jesus were really no different from the majority of people in Galilee in the first century CE, then we would never have heard of him.
We do know that there were some people in Galilee in the first century CE who were literate. Indeed, even the Masekhet Soferim seems to assume that at least one person in every village would be literate enough to read the Torah. I don’t see any reason why Jesus couldn’t have been one of those people. He was, after all, a religious leader and, even if we totally ignore everything the gospels say about him, it’s hard to imagine that he would have had no desire to study the Hebrew scriptures on his own whatsoever.
I am personally inclined to think that Jesus was probably at least functionally literate. This is a controversial opinion and I know a lot of New Testament scholars will disagree with me, but it’s the conclusion that I think best suits the available evidence. Ultimately, of course, I don’t think it is possible for us to know for certain whether the historical Jesus was literate or not. It’s yet another a mystery about him that will never be conclusively solved.
ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of the Great Isaiah Scroll from Qumran Cave 1
Why Jesus didn’t write his teachings down
In all honesty, I’m not sure that it really matters in the long run whether or not Jesus was literate, because, even if he was literate, there are very good reasons why he might not have wanted to commit his teachings to writing. The first reason is because Jesus was a religiously observant Jewish man who intended his message for fellow religiously observant Jewish people. Naturally, he almost certainly wanted his message to reach as many religiously observant Jewish people as possible.
Since the overwhelming majority of Jewish people in Jesus’s time were illiterate, it would make no sense at all for him to try to reach them by writing his teachings down. Thus, instead of putting his teachings into writing, Jesus travelled around from one village to the next, preaching his ideas by word-of-mouth. This method seems to have been quite effective.
The only reason why Jesus might have plausibly had motivation to write his teachings down would have been if he wanted his teachings to be reliably preserved for later generations. Throughout the Synoptic Gospels, however, Jesus is portrayed as constantly reiterating that the end of the world is imminent and that Kingdom of God will arrive on earth before the end of his followers’ lifetimes. Indeed, the very first words he is portrayed as saying in the Gospel of Mark 1:15 are as follows:
“The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near; repent, and believe in the good news.”
Later, in the Gospel of Mark 9:1, he is portrayed as saying:
“Truly I tell you, there are some standing here who will not taste death until they see that the kingdom of God has come with power.”
In the Gospel of Mark 13, Jesus is portrayed as giving a long sermon to his disciples, warning them how they should prepare for the End Times. He obviously intends this message for his own followers living in the early first century CE—not for random strangers who might hypothetically be born thousands of years in the future. Near the end of the chapter, in Mark 13:30–31, he tells the disciples:
“Truly I tell you, this generation will not pass away until all these things have taken place. Heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will not pass away.”
The central message that the end of the world is imminent reverberates throughout the writings of the New Testament from the very beginning all the way to the very end. The very last thing Jesus is portrayed as saying in the Book of Revelation 22:20 is: “Surely I am coming soon.”
Since Jesus seems to have believed that the end of the world as he knew it was imminent, he probably also believed that writing down his teachings for future generations would be a complete waste of time, because, from his perspective, there wouldn’t be any future generations.
ABOVE: The Last Judgement, painted c. 1435 by the German painter Stefan Lochner
There seems to be only one way to answer the original question. Ask in return: “Do you believe Jesus is God?” If they answer “yes” then Jesus was as literate as any other all-knowing god can be. If they answer “no” then the answer is “What difference does it make?”
People keep struggling trying to find an “historical Jesus.” I was intrigued by this attempt at first but have since found it foolish. Even if an historical case for his existence could be made (2000 years of trying and failing makes this highly unlikely if you are doing a Bayesian calculation) that doesn’t prove anything or really get us anywhere.
Since Jesus, a Latinized name that is the same as maybe Joshua or Jose (?), was quite common at the time, the odds that there was a real person named Jesus is highly probable. That one of those Jesuses was an itinerant teacher was therefore somewhat probable, but so what? Nothing ascribed to this Jesus and “his teachings” was new or even novel. In fact if you strip the gospels of all tropes from the Hebrew Bible (Greek version), you’d be lucky to find a few hundred words left and none of those would be enlightening.
Looking for an historical Jesus in the NT is therefore a fool’s errand. It seems as if too much attention is being paid to a moot point, e.g. how many angels can dance on the head of a pin.
I always used to think that Jesus was a bit over-courageous when he left Galilee with his followers heading for Jerusalem. His “royal entrance” in the city and the troubles he caused in the temple alerted the high priests as well as the Romans, who managed to catch, condemn, and execute him within a few days. Jesus may have underestimated the apparent risk of preaching about an expected God’s Kingdom. He might as well have planned to write down some of his teachings (which occasionally differed from the Pharisean teachings) but died prematurely.
I would like the further posts to this topic
Thank you!
your
GW Oberman
There are some black and white statements here, such as that the Gospels simply aren’t reliable. That’s not true. Depending on the topic they discuss, they actually are reliable, or on other topics, they are quite unreliable, and for many other topics, we actually aren’t at all sure or agreed on whether or not they can be construed as reliable. There are countless factors worth weighing, so many that these black and white statements are meaningless. Half of scholars think that Mark was the fledgling of one of Jesus’s followers. If the Q hypothesis is correct, then the date thing becomes solidly closer to the time of Jesus. There are several details the Gospels record that are also found in Paul’s letters. And so on and so on. An analysis by Bauckham has shown that, in all likelihood, pretty much all the names in the Gospels are real, although, as Ehrman points out, that doesn’t necessarily translate to all the stories about those individuals being strictly historical. Gathercole has shown in 2018 that the names attributed to the Gospels of the authors most likely go back to the original manuscripts, although he clarifies that this isn’t the same as those names being authentic instead of pseudipigraphical. Just two decades ago we started getting into agreement about something as basic as the genre of the Gospels (ancient bios and probably historiography for Luke-Acts), but then just this year David Litwa raised a serious possibility of them being a mythic historiography. And the complications multiply. See what I mean? “The Gospels are reliable/unreliable/can be taken with many grains of salt/few grains of salt” are all meaningless statements that no one has ever proven or demonstrated. All we can do is look at passages in these texts on a passage by passage basis, try to extract some overarching trends when the evidence is suitable, and keep doing research.
Let me add some more examples on how easily things can complicate. In 1995, Howard Clark Kee published a paper in New Testament Studies arguing that synagogues weren’t really a thing until after the war in 70 AD, and he concluded that the Gospels were basically mistaken and just plain anachronistic when describing synagogues in earlier periods, or describing things such as Jesus entering and preaching in synagogues and so forth. But in the aftermath of rapid archaeological progress in the region of Galilee and Judea over the last few decades, this picture has completely changed. Already, archaeologists since at least 2018 are agreed on the existence of no less than nine pre-70 synagogues. The most famous one is the one discovered at Magdala in 2009. The first rural synagogue from this time period was discovered at Tel Rekhesh in 2016. In 2018, the leading archaeologist in the reading, Mordechai Aviam, in a paper (https://www.mohrsiebeck.com/en/article/first-century-galilee-new-discoveries-101628ec-2018-0014) concluded that he thought the NT picture of a synagogue in virtually every Jewish settlement was about right. That is a significant shift over the course of two decades. And it goes on and on. A whole new wave of thought is taking place in Johannine studies at the moment, primarily lead by the John, Jesus, and History Project at the Society of Biblical Literature (their website here https://johannine.org/JJH.html). It’s hard to overstate how much can happen, and how much has happened, in such little time. Making it sound like this broad notion of Gospel “reliability” is a settled question of no further dispute does a disservice to the field.
When I say that the gospels are “unreliable,” I am not saying that we cannot extract valuable information from them. What I am saying is that the gospels shouldn’t automatically be trusted. As I note in the article above, the gospels were all written by anonymous, ideologically motivated authors many decades after Jesus’s death, relying to a large extent on oral tradition. They are full of stories involving miracles and divine intervention, including stories about demons being cast into swine, illnesses being miraculously cured, men walking on water, corpses coming back to life, and so forth. They must be treated with extreme caution.
I don’t think anything should be automatically trusted, even the most critical editions that come out of Cambridge University Press today. This introduces a new complication: what we mean by “reliable” for a text from antiquity. I’ve seen different ways to do this. Michael Licona, an apologist, has developed some criteria for defining that or so, and I think his criteria are a good start although the way you go with them definitely depends a lot on how you look at the evidence (see his paper “Are the Gospels “Historically Reliable”? A Focused Comparison of Suetonius’s Life of Augustus and the Gospel of Mark”). Consider this question: can we define a text from antiquity as being reliable when everything it narrates is strictly true as narrated, OR if it is “pretty much” what happened? Many scholars, for example, might say that Jesus didn’t say, word for word how the Gospels quote him (which may vary slightly between Gospels on parallel passages), but they might say that the quotes attributed to Jesus are “pretty much” what Jesus said. So does that make those sections reliable or not? It’s hard to say.
I think Tim O’Neill took a bit of a look once at all that miracle stuff happening in the Gospels. If you actually go through, say, Mark, chapter by chapter, and remove every mention of a miracle, you’ll still find … the vast majority of Mark remaining. Often, stories that involve miracles, even excluding the miracle itself, can be largely historical. For example, in Mark, John baptizes Jesus in the Jordan River. The story then narrates that the dove of the Holy Spirit descended on Jesus or something. This is one of those passages where you really can say something like “ignoring the miracle, we can conclude the whole thing pretty much took place.” This introduces, then, another complication. The same stories can very well be mixes of both history and the miraculous. And then the question of religious presuppositions comes into play, and it’s here where things go haywire.
Ultimately, there’s no straight forward way to define “reliable” here. Nor are even miraculous stories straight forwardly unreliable from a naturalistic view – most of the story, in some cases, can still be historical. (And do we then call that “reliable” or “unreliable”? Again, not clear.) Therefore, it’s a vast oversimplification to simply say “the Gospels” are “unreliable”. The way critical studies go, the only thing you can really say is this: some sections of the Gospels are reliable, some are unreliable, and for many others, we either don’t know if they’re reliable or a lot of us think we know whether they’re reliable or not but none of us agree.
Though Markus was written about 70 a.c.
does not mean at all that we have a copy of Markus from this date.
This date is nothing more than a date.
The oldest piece of one of the Evangeliums is from about 150 a.c.!
This piece is as big as a credit card and it is a copy from a copy!
Only about 13% from the Evangeliums speeches of Jesus is considered to be of him. The rest has been added in the following centuries like for example the famous speech on the mountain:….If you are hit on the right cheek, offer the left cheek too be hit to.
Watch Professor Bart Ehrmann on YouTube.
Hi,
Thanks for this article. It was an interesting read. I have a question: you say litaracy was probably higher than Crossan states. On what basis do you guess higher? Just curious.
If less than five percent of the population was literate, that would mean that almost no one at all could read or write. Most people at the time lived in small towns and villages, and literacy probably tended to be concentrated in large cities. If less than five percent of the population could read and write, this would probably mean that there must have been entire towns where there wasn’t even a single person who had a clue how to read anything. This would have enormous implications for Jewish society, because, for one thing, it would mean that a large percentage of population would have basically no clue what the Torah even said. This doesn’t seem to fit our surviving evidence, since everything we have suggests that the Torah was an extremely important part of how ordinary Jewish people lived their lives.
Furthermore, if less than five percent of the population was literate, this would also raise the question of why there are so many surviving inscriptions on so many different things, since the majority of these inscriptions would seem more-or-less pointless if almost nobody could actually read them. For instance, archaeologists have found objects with their owners’ names inscribed on them, but what would even be the point of putting your name on something if there was next to no chance that anyone who found it would be able to decipher what was written on it?
For all these reasons, I tend to think that the literacy rate was higher than Crossan estimates, although still probably fairly low.
Thank you!
The reasoning of some sceptics is curious. They start with doubts about the reliability of the Gospels. The next step is to imagine that any “real” Jesus must have been a very shadowy figure. In that case we are halfway to saying that Jesus never existed. But wait a minute: if Jesus is either a shadowy figure or no figure at all, what was going on with the claim that Jesus had risen from the dead? When people proclaimed the resurrection, did they know who it was that had risen?
“You say that Jesus rose from the dead, but who was Jesus?”
“I don’t know he was, only that he rose from the dead.”
That doesn’t make sense. We may doubt the claim that someone had risen from the dead but that doesn’t mean we can treat those making the claim as complete imbeciles. Some sceptics realise that there is a problem here. Those proclaiming the resurrection must have known who the resurrected man was. Therefore the shadowy, half-existing Jesus has to go. Now we have a new theory. The “original” Jesus was actually a celestial being who was given a human body in outer space (made from a cosmic sperm bank). This Jesus was then replaced by the Gospel Jesus.
And if you believe that, you will believe anything.
There is evidence that literacy was much higher the first century BC and AD than is often realized. For one thing, the Dead Sea scrolls are an incredibly extensive collection of quality scholarly material, and there are reports of all boys in that era being in school (and girls, if they wanted to). Jesus is described as being able to hold a literate discussion with Jewish scholars at the age of 12, which I suspect is a bar mitzveh level at least. In general, the Greek and Roman societies have left major collections of quality poetry, history, philolosophy, etc, that are still tough going for scholars.
I tend to agree with you. I think it’s probably true that most people in the first centuries BCE and CE were illiterate, but I think that people like Crossan rely on really exaggerated statistics in order to support their particular conception of Jesus. I really can’t help thinking that Jesus probably was literate, at least to some extent.
Nice to see you going against the grain on this one. I think the idea that he was illiterate is due to dogmatism on the part of secular scholars who simply believe whatever the “consensus” is (e.g. Bart Ehrman’s insistence that Jesus’ couldn’t have been literate). Keep up the good work.
There’s another issue that you haven’t mentioned here: Even if Jesus could read, that doesn’t mean he could write, at least not to the degree that would be needed to produce a written record of his teachings. We tend to assume that the two go together, but, in fact, even once you’ve learned to decode written marks into sounds and words, reproducing those same marks reliably is an extra skill that takes practice. (Hence, in the early school years, the extent to which children can write will typically lag behind the extent to which they can read.)
I agree with your point that Jesus, who believed the end times to be imminent, probably wouldn’t have seen the point in sitting down writing an account of his teachings that most of the people he was trying to reach wouldn’t have been able to read anyway, but I think another factor is likely to have been that he simply didn’t have the skill and practice in writing needed to write out that many words legibly in any kind of remotely realistic timeframe.