I realize that people want to portray the early Christian community as illiterate – but this is based in part on accepting the NT descriptions of, for example, fishermen, as being the early followers.  While that COULD have been true, quite honestly, we cannot assume that it its.  

In the meantime, Jesus is clearly literate as he sits in the temple and expounds on the law – a written document – comes from a priestly family on his mother’s side, which would suggest again a tradition of literacy in his family – again if you just want to take the NT at face value.

But consider what we know historically: Paul is WRITING about things already during the lives of Jesus disciples who he KNOWs.  These people are traveling around, and apparently carrying instructions by letter to communities and themselves have letters of recommendation.  It is pretty clear the the apostolic generation – at least some of them in the leadership – are quite literate in some language and able to work with scribes to write down their thoughts.  That much of this is lost to us is really the more interesting question. But as the Dead Sea Scrolls show, just because it was lost didn’t mean it didn’t exist.  

Some general observations:

I am an old man now and I have a few, not many, but a few memories of things people said to me from my teenage years that are clear as a bell to me in my old age like they said them yesterday. They were impactful, short, powerful.

I think some of the Oral traditions were written down as soon as a decade after Jesus death in a very basic rudimentary form. I have no evidence of this course. Just speculation here.

With over a 1000 sayings attributed to Jesus in the Synoptics I would be surprised if there wasn’t at least a few of those impactful, short, powerful statements that go straight back to historical Jesus himself in an accurate form.

For me, after everything I’ve read on early Christianity, I believe a very few people who were young adults, men and women, who heard Jesus speak as teenagers were probably active in the budding Jesus Movement 10, 20, 25 years later. Perhaps centered around James initially…

Not many – but a few.

I think modern secular scholars are too skeptical on this point.

So…there were a few people around active in the movement who had heard Jesus speak when the Proto Gospels and whatever Q was or what came before Q – short memorable sayings – were being written down.

IE we have…wait for it…a few eyewitnesses! That were in the Movement as the Proto material was being written down in a very short basic form. These were nothing like the complex Gospels that would come later. Just a few written collections of things they remembered about Jesus. And a small number of those sayings did end up in the later material. Things like “Why call me good? No one is good but God alone.”

I am not a Christian – this is just my speculation and an albeit very minority view (among most secular scholars anyway).

joemccarron said
In his book does Ehrman spend much time defending the view that there were no other writings before the Gospels?   Because the arguments don’t get off the ground unless that is established.  And I just tend to think they likely had some writings about Jesus before the Gospels.   

 

Paul was very literate and writing quite a bit before the gospels.  He also seems to suggest the church is at least somewhat of an institution.  I find it hard to believe they would have had no written texts about Jesus life at that time.  

 

Here is the part from the blog that I wonder about most:

“Was There No Writing in the Christian Communities Prior to the Gospels?
As we’ve said, form criticism has tended to embrace the view that, in all likelihood, neither Jesus nor anyone in his inner circle was literate. They thus assumed that writing played no regulative role in the oral transmission of early material about Jesus, which made it easier for this material to be significantly and quickly altered as it was passed along. However, while no one disputes that first century Jewish culture was an orally dominated culture, there is increasing evidence that reading and writing was not as rare in the ancient world in general, and in ancient Palestine in particular, as was once generally thought.

For example, whereas some scholars have argued that only the wealthy in the ancient world could have received the education needed to become literate, we’ve now discovered clear evidence of writing among military personal, builders and even slaves! (1) So too, whereas it was commonly assumed in the past that writing materials were very rare and expensive in the ancient world, we now have evidence that certain kinds of writing materials were actually rather inexpensive and were utilized by significant segments of the middle and lower classes. (2) We’ve also discovered texts that were intended to inform the general public (for example, publicly posted notices), which of course presupposes some degree of literacy among the general populace. (3)

If the ancient world was in general more literate than previously thought, we have reason to believe ancient Jews would have been much more so. After all, as New Testament scholar John Meier notes,

“The very identity and continued existence of the people of Israel were tied to a corpus of written and regularly read works in a way that simply was not true of other peoples in the Mediterranean world of the first century. . . To be able to read and explain the Scriptures was a revered goal for religiously minded Jews. Hence literacy held a special importance for the Jewish community.” (4)

Thus, as Birger Gerhardsson argues, “the milieu in which Jesus and the original disciples ministered, and the milieu in which remembrances of Jesus’ life and teaching were passed on, was one that revered the written word and thus valued literacy.” (5)

In light of this, we have no reason to question the Gospels’ portrayal of Jesus as not only being able to read (e.g. ** you do not have permission to see this link **). Nor do we have any reason to suppose that all of Jesus’ disciples were illiterate. At the very least, Matthew’s occupation as a tax collector would have required some level of literacy. It’s perhaps significant in this regard that an early second century church father named Papias — a man who seems to have been a direct disciple of the Apostle John — mentions that Matthew was the designated note-taker among the earliest disciples.

We thus conclude that, while the recollection of Jesus’ words and deeds would have been passed on primarily by word of mouth in the early church, it seems more likely than not that, to some extent at least, they also would have been recorded in writing. These written materials likely would have provided a check on how much the oral traditions about Jesus could have been altered over the first several decades of the new found Christian communities”

 

Does Ehrman spend much time arguing that in fact it was oral tradition for lengthy periods of time or does he mostly assume it and then talk about how memories can be faulty?  

Hi Joe,

I think you make a good point here. Ehrman and others often emphasize the poorness and the illiteracy of the early church. I don’t doubt there was plenty of both, but precisely the writings of Paul tell us that there were also people of some means involved with the early communities – and there was obviously a system in place with the community in Jerusalem led by Jesus’ successor there, James, with messengers carrying messages back and forth.  These could be oral of course, but we see in Paul’s letters that there is an expectation of carrying letters of recommendation – which he doesn’t have by the way – which implies that there are individuals in these communities who can read. Paul’s letters themselves suggest this. Paul also indicates that there are individuals in his communities with the means to support his mission financially – and in his letters to the Romans, there seem to be individuals addressed who are well placed in Imperial society – including “my kinsman Herodian”, or in Acts the “Foster brother of Herod” etc. 

This doesn’t answer the question of what was distributed or by whom, but I don’t see any reason not to expect regular written correspondence moving about the Mediterranean at this time.