(22 votes, average: 4.86 out of 5)
Loading...Here is the third (and last) post on the use of secretaries in the ancient world, in which I discuss the issue of whether illiterate people (like Simon Peter, or John the son of Zebedee) could have had someone else write their books for them – so that 1 Peter *could* in some sense actually be by Peter even if he couldn’t write, or the Revelation of John be by John.
In it I continue to consider ways ancient authors used secretaries. Was it actually to have them compose writings for them? (To make best sense of this it would help to read the previous post, where I talk about two of the main ways ancient writers used secretaries. But hey, you don’t *have* to read it. It ain’t required!)
Again, the discussion is taken from my book Forgery and Counterforgery (Oxford University Press).
******************************
It is Richards‘ third and fourth categories that are particularly germane to the questions of early Christian forgery. What is the evidence that secretaries were widely used, or used at all, as co-authors of letters or as ersatz composers? If there is any evidence that secretaries sometimes joined an author in creating a letter, Richards has failed to find or produce it. The one example he considers involves the relationship of Cicero and Tiro, cited earlier by Gordon Bahr as evidence for co-authorship. In Bahr’s words “Tiro took part in the composition of the letter.” But Richards points out that Bahr cites no evidence to support this claim, opting instead simply to assert the conclusion. Moreover, there is nothing stylistically in the Ciceronian correspondence to suggest a co-authorship. Richards concludes that at most Tiro sometimes engaged in “minor corrective editing.” What is most odd in Richards’ discussion, however, is the conclusion that he draws, once he discounts the evidence of Cicero, the one and only piece of evidence he considers: “Evidently then, … secretaries were used as co-authors.” It is not at all clear what makes this view “evident,” given the circumstance that he has not cited a solitary piece of evidence for it.
There is better evidence that
Blog members get five posts a week like this. Interested? Membership fees are low, value is high, and every nickel that comes in goes directly out to charity. Click here for membership options
Bart – sorry to be off-topic, but I think you will like this. You and I had a blog comment discussion about consciousness a while back. I recently found this book: Life’s Edge – The Search for What it Means to be Alive, by Carl Zimmer. I believe you would enjoy reading it, as it relates to one of your non-historical curiosities. Here’s a sample: Scientists have taken stem cells and turned them into neurons in the lab. In a petri dish full of such neurons, those neurons will self-organize into multiple blobs called organelles. The organelles will establish neuronal links with each other, and communicate. They will then learn to respond to outside stimuli. For example, if a dish of organelles is exposed to say, a pattern of vibrations like just tapping on the table, they will exactly duplicate that pattern by firing in unison. Is that cool or what? The book is full of interesting investigations, some of which are, in fact, historical accounts of scientific discovery.
Thanks — and sorry not to reply: your comment went off to the stratosphere someonw for five days.
Hi Dr. Ehrman, I just recently joined the blog and wanted to say that your work has been extremely helpful to me during my deconversion process from evangelical Christian to agnostic. I’m actually a UNC alum and remember being warned not to take your misleading classes and even praying at a campus ministry event that students not be lead astray by you during an on-campus debate (as absurd and ignorant as that sounds to me today!) Years later I very much regret not taking the opportunity to attend your classes.
I had a question on authorship/forgery pertaining to Jude that arose for me while reading “Forged”: if the author of Jude wanted to lend credence to his critique of false teachers by forging a letter in the name of James’ brother, why would he include the obvious inconsistency of talking about the days of the apostles as if they were a thing of the past? He’s pretending to be a contemporary after all.
Ah, well, I hope your prayers were answered! (In my view, they probably were: no one was led astray! 🙂 ) As to Jude: great questions. It’s amazing how many times forgers inadvertently create anachronisms. But they indeed to. Whoops.
Bart,
1. Rabbi Tovia Singer posits that by the late introduction of the concept of a virgin birth for the Jewish Messiah the Jesus movement has sabotaged itself – because tribal identity flows from the father and without a human father the claim to be the Messiah from the house of David is null and void.
2. He also takes issue with the later introduction that the Messiah (Jesus) is God (capital G) incarnate and that this too disqualifies the Christian movements claim since the Messiah is not supposed to be God (capital G) incarnate. The Jewish Messiah is/will be a great special man but never God incarnate.
Would you agree with Tovia on these 2 points? What are your thoughts on these issues he raises?
TY for your time!
I’d say those are theological views that make sense to non-Christians and non-sense to Christians. I do agree that Xn claims about Jesus as messiah run very much contrary to Jewish expectactions/views. But it’s a little hard to say that it sabatoged itself, since it did, after all, take over the Western world! It’s hard to see how it could have been any more successful in the Empire than it was….
Bart,
Just a brief followup up I think what Rabbi was getting at is that Christianity was no longer an internally consistent belief system once it introduced the claim that someone is the Jewish Messiah while also being born and living as God (capital G) incarnate – this is, in his view, simply Impossible (capital I) to reconcile within Judaism.
Thats what he meant by saying it had sabotaged itself – from an intellectual position it was no longer a consistent system. He even used a computer motherboard analogy. But of course that certainly didnt prevent it from becoming wildly popular and taking over the Western world!
TY,
SC
Yes, I get that. But I”m disagreeing with it. I’d say it’s internally consistent but at odds with traditional Jewish views. There are and were *lots* of forms of Judaism that are “impossible” to reconcile with “Judaism,” depending on how you define Judaism. It wasn’t a monolith, ONE point of view. There were lots of points of view that were thoroughly Jewish that traditional Jews thought were out of bounds. (It’s kind of like saying that Mormons or Catholics or Appalachian shake handlers or Jehovah’s Witnesses, etc. are internally inconsistent because they aren’t *really* Christian)
Did first century Jews expect multiple messiahs arriving in different ways? Daniel 7:13-14 has the son of man coming to Earth on clouds (so nobody would know where he came from) and that agrees with John 7:26-27 and 1 Enoch. If Jesus didn’t think we was the son of man then that explains his statement “foxes have their holes and the birds have their nests, but the son of man has no place to lay his head” because the son of man would have no earthly dwelling. But Jesus had lots of places to “lay his head”: his mother’s, brothers, sisters, and disciples homes. He wouldn’t think Matt 8:20 applied to himself. But this is a different messianic notion than that of a priestly king being born from the line of David (so everybody would know where he came from). I think some of the dead sea scrolls have two messiah’s arriving. Didn’t first century Judaism also have more than one predicted messiah? I’m confused and appreciate any clarification from Bart.
Different Jews who were expecting a messiah (most probably weren’t at all, any more than most today are) had various expectatoins. Some, probably most, thought there would be a future warrior-king like David; others thought about a cosmic savior; in the Dead Sea Scrolls we find two messiahs who would both come, one more like a davidic figure and the other (superior to the first) a priest who would interpret the Law.
Thanks for the clarification; this was something that has bothered me for the past several months, I had to ask it, and you’ve cleared it up. I can now understand how Jesus could possibly think of himself as the messiah of the Davidic line but not the son of man messiah in Daniel 7. In that case, after Jesus was off the scene, his immediate followers made his statements about Daniel’s son of man refer to Jesus (when they originally didn’t).
James Tabor claims the priestly messiah was John the Baptist in “The Jesus Dynasty,” a book you called ‘boldly provocative.’ Do you disagree with his conclusion?
No.
I have recently been reading an interview in which Carsten Peter Thiede claimed, although he cannot prove authorship, that if it was the tax collector, Matthew, who wrote the so-named gospel he would have been able to take down Jesus’ words in shorthand because this would have been a skill demanded of him for his tax collector job. Please can you comment.
He’s just makin’ that up. I wonder if he knows how the tax collection system worked in antiquity.
What about the scenario that Peter, for example, dictated a letter in Aramaic, and later an educated gentile translated it into Greek, and that’s the version we have now? Not my view, but I can see people using this to explain the letter coming from illiterate Peter.
I deal with that at length in my books on Forgery. It certainly seems like something that could happen in our world today. There is zero record of it *ever* happening in antiquity. Apart froom that, what would it mean to dictate the letter in Aramaic when it is precisely it’s use of specifically Greek rhetorical devices that makes it so interesting?
Does “Say whatever you think fit” also disqualify example? Seems like it should.
It would be a different phenomenon, and it also is unattested for antiquity (except for very short form letters on very rare occaions — nothing like extended letter-essays)
In a number of places I’ve read that Hillel—who I believe was a slightly later first century Jewish figure than Jesus, endorsed what we usually call the negative version of the golden rule, and said in effect that it summarized the whole Law.
Since both Hillel and Jesus said such similar things at approximately the same time, would that indicate that that idea was in currency about that time? Is there any research about how or when it originated?
The negative form can be found in many cultures, much older than Christianity. Confucius has a form of it!
Ok, but is there a Jewish prehistory that is likely to have affected what Jesus and Hillel said? Also, both of them saying that it’s a summary of the whole law is kind of startling given all the laws in the Torah. Mustn’t that have had a Jewish prehistory even if a great many cultures have formulated the golden rule without direct influence from other cultures?
Yes, I’d say everyone standing in a religious, philosophical, political, or any other system is using what was said earlier in their own views. Nothing is *entirely* new in any of these systems. On the other hand, everything starts *somewhere*.
What about, specifically, the statement of both that the (negative) Golden Rule/Great Commandment “summarizes the Jewish Law”? Given the number of Jewish laws and the emphasis of many (not necessarily all) Jews with strict compliance with each and every one, doesn’t that seem like a very surprising statement for either of them to make? I’m wondering if there is evidence that it was a view that was fairly widespread around that time? And if the development of that view can be found in the OT? As an example, didn’t one or two of the prophets (as well as Jesus) talk about God desiring mercy rather than sacrifice?
I’d say it summarizes lots of the Law. But it certainly doesn’t summarize things like: have no other gods before me; or honor the sabbath day and keep it holy; or the kosher food laws, etc.
I believe you’ve said that it wasn’t necessarily highly unusual if Jesus had not been married. One major reason that I recall is because the Essenes were not married either. But isn’t this an exception that tends to proves the rule? Unlike Jesus the Essenes separated themselves from normal life and lived in isolated communities, rather similar in my mind to monastics whom we expect to be unmarried.
Also, were there Essenes who didn’t live in monastic communities? At least in the past I believe there has been some (non-scholarly) speculation that Jesus himself was an Essene. I think it’s also been used in fictional accounts of Jesus’s life. Is there any particular reason to think Jesus was an Essene?
The historical reality is that lots of Jewish men couldn’t have been married. Except in times of war, there are more men than women in the world (since women die in childbirth). Apart from that we know of other ascetic groups/movements that supported celibacy — including Xty later!
Dr. Ehrman, I was wondering: How much do historians know about how Paul acquired his education and his ability to compose letters in Greek? It says somewhere in the Bible that he was a tent-maker, which doesn’t suggest a high level of academic training, does it? Would it have been common for artisans at the time to be trained in Greek composition? Also, how good was Paul’s Greek? In the original Greek, do his letters read like literature, or do they rather use simple language? Thanks for your time!
Yes, teh book of Acts says he was a tentmaker (or a leather worker). So it’s a bit of a mystery how he was both highly educated in Greek and an artisan. That wasn’t common. His Greek is good — not at the sophisticated level of the most elite upper class, at all, but still good. The books read like simple literature — but they are letters rather than, say, philosophical treatises.
Thank you for your answer! I have a follow-up question: It seems that in Paul, we have at least one example of a Jewish not-upper-class individual who attained a Greek language education in a manner that cannot be explained today. So do apologists put this forward as an argument that other apostles might also have been able to write in Greek? If Paul, a Jewish artisan, “mysteriously” came by his education, might not Peter, a Jewish fisherman, have had the same opportunity? Is this argument used by apologists, and if so, would it have any merit?
I don’t think so. Paul was a Greek-speaking Jew almost certainly from a large urban area. There’s nothing particularly implausible about him being literate (many *slaves* were in that context); it’s just that we don’t know how, in his case, it happened. In the case of Aramaic speaking Jews from remote villages in rural areas, I don’t know of any thing like that.
Bart
Can you do some detailed posts like these ones on what we know about Paul’s literacy, scribes, etc and how he’d be fundamental different to historical Peter and James who did not and could not write (or have written for them) the pastoral epistles
I”ve done a number on scribes and literacy issues, especially the literacy issue related with James and Peter. I could certainly do some on Paul.
Cicero was alive in the Common Era ? You wrote about his exile in 51 CE. Maybe I misunderstood what you wrote.
Uh, no. Long dead. Must have been a scribal corruption of the text.
Hi Bart, Your posts this year on the authorship of 1 Peter sound very convincing. And I decided to examine it by reading a recent alternative view. I read the Introduction of Craig Keener’s 2021 “1 Peter: A Commentary” (https://www.google.com/books/edition/1_Peter/g5YwEAAAQBAJ). At this point, I remain undecided. Have you read Keener’s 2021 commentary?
I’m afraid he doesn’t really say any thing new. He does say things in a lot more depth than others (welll, at greater length). But for example he simply never bothers to ask whether secretaries were ever used in the way that he claims they did (he’s simply repeating what NT scholars have always said, even though they too have never looked at the evidence). They were *not* composers of long essay-letters, ever, so far as we know. He just assumes they were. Just as he assumes that Peter *did* know Greek. As NT scholars assume without considering the large scholarship on such quesitons. If you want to read a fuller account of both, check out my discussions in Forgery and Counterforgery.