This is just how I normally conduct myself in lively conversation, which is a blessing I treasure. Don’t take it seriously. I never do.
The number of possibilities can be daunting, which is why it’s tempting to get centered around just one. The temptation should be resisted whenever possible. But at times you just want to KNOW.
FWIW (and understanding this is a bit of conjecture):
I don’t think what he wrote was important, but the act of writing may have been.
The situation: ‘the teachers of the law and the Pharisees’ brought forth a woman accused of adultery and placed her in front of a crowd. Moreover, they seem to be interrupting a group that Jesus was already teaching (previous verse, John 8:2). It seems they are setting up a mob justice situation, one in which they want Jesus to be complicit. Or else, knowing that he would never be complicit (because of his teachings of peace and following the authentic spirit of the law rather than its outer rules) they will set him up to either lose his sway over the crowd or place his teachings in juxtaposition to the Jewish law.
I think Jesus a) interrupts that set-up, b) bides for time, and c) makes a little bit of a mockery of a judge looking over written scrolls, as if saying ‘the law is written on the very ground we walk on’.
Now, is all that historically accurate to what Jesus actually did? It’s hard to say that, both in general and because a) it fits with the overall tone of John against the Jewish authorities, specifically the preceding cahpter which has the ‘how does this man know so much when he is not learned’ and b) it seems to fit well into the problems of an early Christian group coming to terms with itself.
All that goes to say: I think it’s easy to make too much of wondering what the content of what he wrote was, but I don’t think it’s all that important. I think it’s more likely that it’s another great literary creation of the gospel writers.
godspell wrote
John the Baptist was probably an Essene.
In his new monograph on John the Baptist, NT scholar Joel Marcus make just this case. However as Marcus acknowledges and as Prof Ehrman has commented there are problems with this view. For one thing the Essenes were insular and monkish. They had little interest in converting people to their point of view as John and Jesus are portrayed as doing. This forces Marcus to develop a scenario where John separates himself from the Essenes to begin his ministry. Of course this is pure speculation and a bit circular since to formulate a scenario where John splits from the Essenes assumes that he was a member of the Essenes. I can see in a field where there are wide gaps in our sources the temptation to connect the dots must be overwhelming. But a simpler explanation is that all Jewish apocalyptic thought had certain basic similarities and one would expect there to be overlaps between these different flavors of Jewish apocalyptic thought. Similarity is not identity.
Jesus was not a carpenter.
He was probably raised as a day laborer, a hard scrabble hand to mouth existence with little time for book learnin’ even if that had been possible. It’s useful to consider that everything we know about him is being filtered through the sensibilities of those who were educated and literate, who were living in a much different environment than the one Jesus himself lived in. But who was Jesus really? His inner life is completely occluded to us. What education would he have needed to do what he did that he couldn’t have learned from John? Apparently these kind of self-appointed apocalyptic prophets were falling out of the trees in first century Palestine. Jesus really didn’t teach anything unique. He is famous because a certain segment of his later disciples were literate and wrote about him and their ancestors created a major world religion.
The story of the woman taken in adultery can’t be confirmed to have happened, but it’s hard to explain why such a story would have survived, and then be added to the John gospel, if it wasn’t based on a real event.
You mean other than the fact that it is just a really good story? Like the Prodigal Son or the Good Samaritan its wisdom doesn’t depend at all on whether or not it really happened. No one ever has any trouble getting the point.
The Prodigal Son and the Good Samaritan are parables–meaning that they’re clearly stories crafted with a clear beginning, middle, and end, meant to convey a simple moral message. That is not at all what the story of the woman taken in adultery does. It’s quite enigmatic, and has no real resolution–what happened to her? Did she in fact go and sin no more? Did she become a follower of Jesus? What was Jesus writing in the dirt? Why didn’t he say something besides “Neither do I condemn you. Go and sin no more”?
It doesn’t match up with anything else in the gospels very well. It’s an outlier. I think that’s because it’s the real Jesus, poking his head out. You’re free to think otherwise. But if it wasn’t about Jesus, but about some ancient philosopher, would you react the same way to it? We can’t confirm pretty much any story about any ancient figure. But we know that they all did memorable things. Or they wouldn’t be remembered.
John the Baptist wasn’t so run-of-the-mill if Herod had him beheaded, was he now?
I’m familiar with the meaning of the word that gets mistranslated as carpenter, but people don’t alway end up where they started.
I read a book about John the Baptist Bart enthusiastically recommended recently–and that book says John was probably connected to the Essenes–and split from them. And then Jesus split from him. They both show enough familiarity with scripture to make it unlikely they were illiterate. HOW literate is another question. That is unlikely to be answered.
AndyB said
FWIW (and understanding this is a bit of conjecture):I don’t think what he wrote was important, but the act of writing may have been.
The situation: ‘the teachers of the law and the Pharisees’ brought forth a woman accused of adultery and placed her in front of a crowd. Moreover, they seem to be interrupting a group that Jesus was already teaching (previous verse, John 8:2). It seems they are setting up a mob justice situation, one in which they want Jesus to be complicit. Or else, knowing that he would never be complicit (because of his teachings of peace and following the authentic spirit of the law rather than its outer rules) they will set him up to either lose his sway over the crowd or place his teachings in juxtaposition to the Jewish law.
I think Jesus a) interrupts that set-up, b) bides for time, and c) makes a little bit of a mockery of a judge looking over written scrolls, as if saying ‘the law is written on the very ground we walk on’.
Now, is all that historically accurate to what Jesus actually did? It’s hard to say that, both in general and because a) it fits with the overall tone of John against the Jewish authorities, specifically the preceding cahpter which has the ‘how does this man know so much when he is not learned’ and b) it seems to fit well into the problems of an early Christian group coming to terms with itself.
All that goes to say: I think it’s easy to make too much of wondering what the content of what he wrote was, but I don’t think it’s all that important. I think it’s more likely that it’s another great literary creation of the gospel writers.
It’s all conjecture, and what you just said is pretty close to what Roger David Aus wrote. Your interpretation of the writing is different, but I’m not sure just doodling in the dirt is going to impress anyone–again, I think whoever preserved the story probably didn’t know what Jesus wrote. It is self-evidently impossible to know now. It IS possible to get at what he was saying, which is “Our law is not just a list of acts you can be killed for. To pass fatal judgement on nothing more than two people having sex–one of whom isn’t here–we should at least be able to face the accused with a clear conscience. Can you?” Can anyone?
There’s so much context there you can’t get from the Old Testament texts–written so long before this incident reportedly occurred. Jewish Law is vastly more complex than that–so much of it is commentary, interpretation (true of all law, everywhere). Israel is a colonized nation, humiliated, angry, and confused. There is a great deal of adultery going on, and very rarely are the biblical punishments meted out. There are a lot of gentiles in the mix, particularly in a great city like Jerusalem, with different ways, that are at the same time repellent and attractive to Jews. There should be nothing in any of that description that we can’t understand today.
My original take was more like yours–he’s making fun of them. But that doesn’t track for me now. Because this woman is terrified, and because he doesn’t joke about things like that. He would take something like this very seriously. He would be angry that they were using this woman’s life to make a point. This is not the way to enter the Kingdom. This is a perversion of the law. So he writes something in the dirt to make them see that–I suppose you could say he’s tellling them they are dragging the heritage of their ancestors through the dirt. But probably there wasn’t pen and paper to hand. You use what you have.
godspell said
The Prodigal Son and the Good Samaritan are parables–meaning that they’re clearly stories crafted with a clear beginning, middle, and end, meant to convey a simple moral message. That is not at all what the story of the woman taken in adultery does. It’s quite enigmatic, and has no real resolution–what happened to her? Did she in fact go and sin no more? Did she become a follower of Jesus? What was Jesus writing in the dirt? Why didn’t he say something besides “Neither do I condemn you. Go and sin no more”?It doesn’t match up with anything else in the gospels very well. It’s an outlier. I think that’s because it’s the real Jesus, poking his head out. You’re free to think otherwise. But if it wasn’t about Jesus, but about some ancient philosopher, would you react the same way to it? We can’t confirm pretty much any story about any ancient figure. But we know that they all did memorable things. Or they wouldn’t be remembered.
John the Baptist wasn’t so run-of-the-mill if Herod had him beheaded, was he now?
I’m familiar with the meaning of the word that gets mistranslated as carpenter, but people don’t alway end up where they started.
I read a book about John the Baptist Bart enthusiastically recommended recently–and that book says John was probably connected to the Essenes–and split from them. And then Jesus split from him. They both show enough familiarity with scripture to make it unlikely they were illiterate. HOW literate is another question. That is unlikely to be answered.
In this case that The Prodigal Son and the Good Samaritan are parables put in Jesus’ mouth and the Woman Taken in Adultery is a story about Jesus seems irrelevant, and the latter is certainly crafted “with a clear beginning, middle, and end, meant to convey a simple moral message”. It’s resolution is obvious as is its moral. All tales have loose ends – How did the brothers get long after the events narrated in the story? How was the trip home for the forlorn traveler?
No, John wasn’t “run-of-the-mill”. Judging from Josephus he was much more popular than Jesus ever was. We know of disciples for a couple centuries after his death. But John was killed not because of his apocalyptic message but because he meddled in politics. I was commenting about Jesus. Jesus is just not that special. Nothing he taught he invented. He is famous because his followers started a major world religion.
I once met a man who was born blind but could recite the entire Quran just from memory. He did not attain that level of knowledge by reading. Jesus was raised in a primarily oral culture. We are amazed only because we were raised in a primarily literate culture with the assumptions and expectations born of that culture.
Nobody cares how the brothers got along afterwards, because it doesn’t affect the moral of the story–since when do siblings get along all the time? We do care what Jesus was writing in the dirt, and it’s directly relevant to the events that unfold in that brief story–in that it may explain why the mob just melted away. The reason we don’t know what he wrote is that the storyteller doesn’t know. The reason the storyteller doesn’t know is that it’s not just a story. Or so I think, and in point of fact, most scholars think so. Bart mentioned this recently, while making it clear (without details) that he dissents. It’s not a question of faith at all. It’s a question of what kind of story it is, and it’s not the kind of story that Christians would have made up out of whole cloth–or preserved, unless it was known to be based on real events. It’s problematic from their viewpoint as well. We can agree to disagree.
I agree John the Baptist was more popular and well-known among Jews than Jesus–again, what’s your point? Jesus can only be important if he was incredibly famous in his own lifetime? How famous was Socrates, outside Athens? We don’t have a single word written by him, or anything written about him by contemporaries, other than fictionalized dialogues from two pupils, and a scathing satire by Aristophanes. You don’t seem to understand the concept of posterity reevaluating legacies. Obviously we wouldn’t care about Jesus without his followers and those who came after them creating a new religion by degrees (it was never the original intent). But that’s begging the question–would they have done that without him having taught and inspired them? So many vastly influential individuals were far LESS well known than Jesus in their own lifetimes. Euclid–now who the hell heard of him?
Without the story of Jesus, without his words, his ideas, and the story of his life, which most scholars believe are partly based on what he really said and did–would these same people have successfully founded a world religion? Would they have, in fact, been anything at all? You don’t get credit for the people you inspire? Only for what you personally accomplish in the brief span of a single lifetime? The truly great INVARIABLY have most of their influence after death. That is an undeniable fact of history.
I don’t know anything about this blind man you mention other than what you said, but–
Just making sure I wasn’t unintentionally taking Bart’s name in vain–from a few months back on the main blog–
How then did it come to be added? There are numerous theories about that. Probably most scholars think that it was a well-known story about Jesus, circulating in the oral tradition about him, that ended up being added into a margin of a manuscript at some point. From there some scribe or other thought that the marginal note was meant to be part of the text, and so inserted it immediately after the account that ends in John 7:52. It is striking, and worth noting, that other scribes inserted the account in different places of the New Testament – some of them after John 21:25, for example, and others, interestingly enough, after Luke 21:38. In any event, whoever wrote the account, it was not John.
But that naturally leaves readers with a dilemma: if this story was not originally part of John, should it be considered part of the Bible? Not everyone will respond to this question in the same way, but for most textual critics, the answer is No.
So I’m good here. Bart says most scholars think this was a well-known story relating to Jesus before it was added to John’s gospel. (he hasn’t done a thorough survey among his fellow professionals, so he hedges a little).
However, I find myself less certain how I got the notion that Bart dissents from this. I may have read it somewhere on the blog. Or not.
The Ehrman article someone mentioned elsewhere, about Didymus the Blind, doesn’t really seem to deny the possibility that some version of this event occurred.
** you do not have permission to see this link **
We have other versions of it, and Didymus’ is quite different (and very brief). But what remains consistent in all versions is Jesus saying that only those without sin are fit to condemn her (with the implication that Jesus himself is not without sin, since he doesn’t condemn her either).
The writing in the dirt is absent from Didymus. But there seem to have been a large number of texts (mainly lost) that referenced this story. And Didymus was blind–hence the name–and they didn’t have Braille back then. So it would make sense his version would be briefer, and cribbed from a longer source he’s recalling.
There’s a lot of controversy about where it came from, but the only coherent explanation I’ve seen of what might really have happened is from Aus. The story raises a lot of questions. It always will. But it really seems odd to me that somebody would add the writing in the dirt, if that wasn’t something Jesus was known to do. And equally odd that the person adding this wouldn’t explain what Jesus was writing. Which makes sense if nobody present could read, other than Jesus and the more educated members of the group that wanted to stone the woman. He died a few days later, and they would not be talking to Christians later on about what happened that day, or preserving their side of the story for posterity.
Matt2239 said
Questions about what Jesus wrote soon drift to the question of whether he could write. You may recall the story about that time Jesus was separated from his parents and was discovered in the temple. It details how smart and astute Jesus was. Stylish naysayers like to point out that only 3% of people in Judea could read or write, so it’s unlikely Jesus was literate. That overlooks the most significant fact of all: Jesus and his disciples are the most unlikely people in all of human history. Jesus’ ministry lasted only three years and he executed in a horrific way, and yet today there are 2 billion people and 6 billion books that all say he rose from the dead.
Very interesting what you say about the resurrection of Jesus. But it is completely irrelevant to elucidate whether Jesus knew how to write or not.
The famous pericope adulterae is an interpolation that is due to at least two authors. In addition, the Greek word “gramma” (transliteration) means the same to write as to draw. So we cannot know what is said in the gospel attributed to John if the historical Jesus could write.
My question is simple: if Jesus could write, why didn’t he write anything that has been reflected in the NT? Nothing. Not a single word. For if he was God and had incarnated on earth not only to be crucified but to teach the doctrine we call today Christianity, who better than him to leave us in writing the most basic of his doctrine?
By the way, what you say about 6 billion books that assume the resurrection of Jesus, besides being an exaggeration, may be if 90% are Bibles and 9.99% are apologetic texts.
Quick note on the 3% number from the Meir bar-Ilan study. All one needs to do is read that study to understand that in no way is it purporting to predict whether any individual person from the past was literate.
Using it for this purpose would be like using IQ sampling to predict the IQ of a person we have no information about.
It just struck my mind: if Jesus was literate, he was literate in Aramaic.
Why this matters? Because for Jesus and his peers Hebrew was a dead language, spoken by scribes, Pharisees and Sadducees.
So, it is hardly believable that a lower class man of that time and place was literate in a dead language.
Therefore: it is almost sure that Jesus could not read the Bible, even if he was literate.
Stephen said
godspell wroteJohn the Baptist was probably an Essene.
In his new monograph on John the Baptist, NT scholar Joel Marcus make just this case. However as Marcus acknowledges and as Prof Ehrman has commented there are problems with this view. For one thing the Essenes were insular and monkish. They had little interest in converting people to their point of view as John and Jesus are portrayed as doing. This forces Marcus to develop a scenario where John separates himself from the Essenes to begin his ministry. Of course this is pure speculation and a bit circular since to formulate a scenario where John splits from the Essenes assumes that he was a member of the Essenes. I can see in a field where there are wide gaps in our sources the temptation to connect the dots must be overwhelming. But a simpler explanation is that all Jewish apocalyptic thought had certain basic similarities and one would expect there to be overlaps between these different flavors of Jewish apocalyptic thought. Similarity is not identity.
Jesus was not a carpenter.
He was probably raised as a day laborer, a hard scrabble hand to mouth existence with little time for book learnin’ even if that had been possible. It’s useful to consider that everything we know about him is being filtered through the sensibilities of those who were educated and literate, who were living in a much different environment than the one Jesus himself lived in. But who was Jesus really? His inner life is completely occluded to us. What education would he have needed to do what he did that he couldn’t have learned from John? Apparently these kind of self-appointed apocalyptic prophets were falling out of the trees in first century Palestine. Jesus really didn’t teach anything unique. He is famous because a certain segment of his later disciples were literate and wrote about him and their ancestors created a major world religion.
The story of the woman taken in adultery can’t be confirmed to have happened, but it’s hard to explain why such a story would have survived, and then be added to the John gospel, if it wasn’t based on a real event.
You mean other than the fact that it is just a really good story? Like the Prodigal Son or the Good Samaritan its wisdom doesn’t depend at all on whether or not it really happened. No one ever has any trouble getting the point.
Being one of the Essenes meant taking “tremendous oaths” (Josephus) to abide by their rules. It is highly unlikely a religiously conscientious person — such as the Baptist almost certainly was, or he would not have adopted his hard lifestyle, and would likely not have been able to influence so many others, including Jesus — would have violated such tremendous oaths, once they were made.
The Baptist may have been a member of some small, distantly Essene-related sect that did not take the Essene oaths. We know so little about the origins of the Essenes, however, nothing much more can be said right now. We do not know who exactly the Teacher was, or why exactly he was persecuted, or who the “Interpreter of the Law” was, or who the “Messiah of Aaron and Israel” is supposed to be, and how he could come from both Aaron and Israel, or what the “Book of Hagu” was, or anything like that. So the best we can say is the Baptist had some connection to the Essenes, some connection that probably did not involve being a full-fledged member; maybe he belonged to some other group that knew the Teacher, but left him before he was persecuted; it is all frustratingly vague, I know.
The Jews then, as today, are a people who value religious education. Reading their sacred scrolls in the Synagogue was and is considered sacred worship.
It is not at all hard to teach a child to read and write. All it takes is for the local Rabbi to offer to do so. That is likely the case considering how important religious education was to the Jews since their origins. That does not mean every Jewish child was literate it would likely depend on their father’s trade. Fishing did not require reading and writing.
It is not at all hard to teach a child to read and write.
But consider the infrastructure that must be in place to accomplish this. We live in a literate culture. They did not. It’s been estimated that literacy in first century Palestine was at about 2%. That would have been the upper crust.
Stephen said
But consider the infrastructure that must be in place to accomplish this. We live in a literate culture. They did not. It’s been estimated that literacy in first century Palestine was at about 2%. That would have been the upper crust.
The Law was read in the Synagogue every Sabbath.
Someone was reading it.
Copyists were copying it.
Surely there were parents whose hope was to have their son be among those in Synagogue who could read the sacred scrolls or copy them.
Surely there was a male relative who would help his nephews learn to read or write.
Linda, in Jesus’ day a Jewish synagogue was a place of assembly for all social functions. Undoubtedly there were religious discussions but the purview of worship was the temple. The view of the synagogue you have came much later. Not every town had one and they only became important after the destruction of the Temple during the first Jewish revolt forty years after Jesus’ death. The view most people have about synagogues didn’t come about until the Middle Ages!
Look, we have no way of knowing for sure whether Jesus could read but given what we know about the conditions under which he lived it seems unlikely. It was an oral culture. He would have heard stories from his father and other adults. Jesus could have successfully reached adulthood without ever meeting anyone who could read (or without ever seeing a Roman soldier in the flesh by the way). He probably learned a lot from his time with John.
Stephen, below is a quote from a scholar far more educated than myself.
Bruce M. Metzger, The New Testament Its Background, Growth, and Content, pg. 72
“The influence of the synagogue was both extensive and pervasive. Jesus and his disciples would have been educated as children at a synagogue school, and upon reaching thirteen years of age would have taken their place as worshipers in the regular services. What they knew of the words of the scriptures they had learned in the synagogue from their studies and from the oral readings and expositions.
“The synagogue influenced the piety not only of Jews but of some Gentiles as well. Earnest souls, dissatisfied with the creeds and cults of paganism, turned to the Jewish synagogue and its ethical monotheism. Many such persons became associate members of the synagogue, and participated in its worship, even, in some cases, building a synagogue (Luke 7:2-5). It was Gentiles of such a background who responded favorably to the earliest missionaries and evangelists (Acts 13:42-48; 14:1-2).
“The synagogue thus played a conspicuous part in the preparation for the coming of Christianity. Not only did synagogues throughout the Mediterranean world become seedbeds of the church, but also Judaism supplied the institutional forms of Christian worship and even, in some cases, the words of prayers and liturgies themselves.”
Linda, I have no doubt that Dr Metzger was smarter than me too but as in all things our knowledge of the ancient world doesn’t stand still. Metzger’s book was written in 1965. ** you do not have permission to see this link ** is something a bit more contemporary. A well regarded study. The image you have of the synagogue is largely derived from post First Revolt times after the Temple was destroyed in 70 CE and the later development of Rabbinic Judaism. In Jesus’ day the Temple was the seat of worship for Jews. A synagogue was a public assembly, a place to gather for social functions, as often a hostel or a hospital as a house of God. (In fact many of them seem to have been converted from houses.) True we do have the ruins of an ancient synagogue found in Nazareth. Dated from the 12th century!
But to get back to the main point here. We have no idea if the historical Jesus could read. By far most Jews of his day could not. And in the face of a lack of definitive evidence one way or another it is best to assume what happened is what normally happened. But I’m rather mystified why this is such an issue. Useful to remember that the Iliad and the Odyssey originated in an oral culture. The Epic of Gilgamesh existed for centuries as oral tales. The Buddha’s sermons were passed orally for three hundred years before they were written down. Stories about Jesus were passed orally for decades. We owe a lot to oral cultures. I think much of the source of the problem is that for us knowledge of Jesus is mediated through the sensibilities of the gospel writers who were trained and literate, unlike the vast majority of their own contemporaries.
BDEhrman
FreedomBen
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