Over the past month I have received a number of questions on the blog about whether it was possible that some of the apostles used “secretaries” to write their books — so that when 1 or 2 Peter, say, claims to be written by Peter, it actually was written by Peter in a sense. Peter told a secretary what to write and the secretary (e.g., Silvanus? 1 Peter 5:12) actually put pen to papyrus. But the thoughts and ideas were all Peter’s.
It’s an important question, and I’ve dealt with it a good bit over the years. I actually did a short thread on it over six years ago now here on the blog. I’ve decided to return to the issue. This will take three posts. The first is on what levels of literacy back at the time of the New Testament: how many people cold read and how many write (which is not the same thing in antiquity!); and apart from who could write, who could compose a writing?
Here is what I said about the matter in my academic book Forgery and Counterforgery.
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In his now-classic study of ancient literacy, William Harris gave compelling reasons for thinking that at the best of times in antiquity only 10% or so of the population was able to read [Ancient Literacy; Harvard University Press, 1989]. By far the highest portion of readers was located in urban settings. Widespread literacy like that enjoyed throughout modern societies requires certain cultural and historical forces to enact policies of near universal, or at least extensive, education of the masses. Prior to the industrial revolution, such a thing was neither imagined nor desired. As Meir Bar Ilan notes: “literacy does not emerge in a vacuum but rather from social and historical circumstances.”
Moreover, far fewer people in antiquity could compose a writing than could read, as shown by the investigations of Raffaella Cribiore, who stresses that reading and composition were taught as two different skills and at different points of the ancient curriculum. Learning even the basics of reading was a slow and arduous process, typically taking some three years and involving repeating “endless drills” over “long hours.” “In sum, a student became accustomed to an incessant gymnastics of the mind.” These kinds of “gymnastics” obviously required extensive leisure and money, neither of which could be afforded by any but the wealthy classes. Most students did not progress beyond learning the basics of reading, to the second level of grammar. Training in composition came only after these early stages, and most students did not get to that point: “the ability to articulate one’s thoughts in writing was achieved only when much literature had been digested.” Especially difficult, and requiring additional training, was acquiring literacy in a second language. Indeed, as, Cribiore points out, “bilingualism did not correspond to biliteracy.”
All of these points bear closely on the question of whether an Aramaic-speaking fisherman from rural Galilee could produce a refined Greek composition such as 1 Peter. But before pressing that question, we should consider the issue of literacy specifically in Roman Palestine, a matter pursued most convincingly in studies by Bar-Ilan and Catherine Hezser.
Bar-Ilan begins his analysis by referring to cross-cultural studies that have demonstrated that literacy rates are closely tied to broader social and cultural factors. Urban societies are always more literate than rural. Moreover, low birth rates, low population growth, and low life expectancy all contribute to low literacy rates, and for good reason. With respect to life expectancy, for example: the use of the written word positively affects a society’s hygiene, infant care, agricultural practices, and so on, all of which play a vital role in longevity. And so, for example, the more illiterate societies always suffer the highest rates of infant mortality.
Turning to hard historical evidence for ancient Israel, Bar-Ilan notes that the Talmud allows for towns where only one person could read in the synagogue (Soferim 11:2). Since all synagogues that have been discovered can accommodate more than 50 people, we are probably looking at literacy rates, in these places, at about 1%. When this figure is tied to the fact that the land of Israel was 70% rural, and only 10% was “highly” urban, one can take into account all the sundry factors and crunch the numbers: “it is no exaggeration to say that the total literacy rate in the Land of Israel… was probably less than 3%.” Most of this 3% would have comprised wealthy Jews living in the major cities.
Hezser has devoted the only full length study to this question in her monograph Jewish Literacy in Roman Palestine. She agrees with Bar-Ilan on his statistical claims: total literacy in Palestine was probably around 3%; those who were literate were largely located in urban areas; some villages and towns had literacy rates of lower than 1%. In this connection Hezser makes the striking historical observation that “the only literary works which can with certainty be attributed to Palestinian Jews of the first century C.E. are the writings of Josephus and the no longer extant works of his opponent Justus of Tiberias” (both of whom “received a Greek education and were influenced by Graeco-Roman writing”). Moreover, Hezser argues that “writing seems to have mostly – and perhaps almost exclusively — been used by the political, economic, and religious-intellectual elites in late Roman Palestine.” Was the fisherman Simon-Peter in this august group?
Before pursuing that question, we should look at the related issue of the use of Greek in first-century Palestine. Hezser evaluates the extent to which Palestinian Jews may have been able to converse in Greek more generously than other more recent studies devoted to the question, as we will see in a moment. But even she points out that Josephus is the only Jew of Roman Palestine to indicate that he learned Greek, and she notes that Josephus himself indicates that he could not write literary Greek without assistance from Greek speakers (Contra Apionem 1.9). Moreover, Hezser admits that we do not know whether Josephus studied Greek before coming to Rome. She later acknowledges that most Jews in Palestine would have had only “a rudimentary knowledge of Greek” which involved knowing “a few phrases to lead to a simple conversation.” That is a long way from being able to write a high-level Greek composition, especially in light of the fact that simple conversational Greek took no special training, whereas learning to read (even in one’s own language) took years of hard work, and composition took years more. Louis Feldman notes that “Josephus’s admission (Contra Apionem 1.50 [= 1.9]) that he needed assistance in composing the version in Greek of the Jewish War illustrates that few attained the competence in the language necessary for reading and understanding Greek literature.”
The most persuasive studies of the use of Greek in Galilee in particular have been produced by Mark Chancey, who shows that scholars who maintain that Greek was widely spoken in the first century have based their views on very slim evidence, in which Palestinian data from over a number of centuries have been generalized into claims about the use of Greek in Galilee in the first half of the first century. There is, in fact, scant evidence that Greek was widely used outside of the major urban areas. People living in rural areas spoke almost exclusively Aramaic.
These and other studies have made it clear that there were few educated people in Palestine in the days of Peter. Those who did have the benefits of education would have been taught Hebrew to enable them to read the Torah, unless they came from a fabulously wealthy aristocratic family in a major city. These fortunate few would have made up the bulk of the 3% of Palestine who could read. Moreover, most of the 3% who could read could not compose a sentence or a paragraph. Most of those who could compose a paragraph could not compose an entire book. Most of those who could compose a book could not do so in a foreign language, Greek. Most of those who could do so, could not compose it in elegant Greek. Was Peter, a lower-class fisherman from rural Galilee, among that minuscule fraction of the Palestinian population who could compose books in elegant Greek? He was not wealthy. He would have had no time or resources for an education. Let alone an education in reading a foreign language. Let alone education in Greek composition. Acts 4:13 is probably right – Peter was illiterate.
In my next post I move on to the question of whether he (or any of the other illiterate “authors” of the New Testament) could have used a secretary.
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“Hezser makes the striking historical observation that ‘the only literary works which can with certainty be attributed to Palestinian Jews of the first century C.E. are ….'” What about Paul’s epistles?
Paul wasn’t a Palestinian Jew, he was from Tarsus.
But he claimed to have been educated in Jerusalem.
I was responding to the inference that Paul was a Palestinian Jew. Regardless of his education, he wasn’t.
Bart has said “…it is clear that his [Paul’s] Jewish upbringing took place outside of Palestine, in what is known as the Jewish Diaspora.” (From Peter, Paul, and Mary Magdelene, p. 102) In other words, Paul was not a PALESTINIAN Jew. His literacy can shed no light on the abilities of people who did grow up there.
And then we come to the ‘Dead Sea Scrolls’ (DSS) what kind of foundations does a society need to produce decades of followers to take years out of their life to be a scribe in the desert. Were the Essene a society of literate men? The DSS are mostly written in Hebrew so I can assume the Essene should have been bilingual and with a stretch also biliterate. Was the priestly class the only Hebrew who were literate?
On a somewhat side bar; the book Hebrews in the NT was not a sermon to literate Jews the references to the OT are for the most part wrong. But if you are speaking to an illiterate and unlearned congregation then you can pretty much say anything.
Of course later scribes will come along and ‘polish’ the words ‘of the old ones’.
Of course I can’t leave this subject without my favorite verse from Tim’s book of wisdom, ‘if you are taught wrong, you will teach wrong’.
Certainly many of the Essenes were literate. And no, there were plenty of literate folk who were not priests.
Why were many Essenes literate? There were more educated people in Judea?
We don’t know how many were, but some of them were certainly copying books. My guess is that *most* of them were not literate, but enough were to make the making of books important.
The alternative to the dictation/secretary theory of new testament authorship seems to require that the stories and theology of the New testament originated directly from the 1-3% literate, who would have been upper class. Why would an educated, upper class group invent stories with miraculous events, pro-lower class themes and illiterate, working class characters?
It seems more plausible to me that the NT stories originated from the illiterate, working class, which would have necessarily been dictated from the illiterate to the literate because we have the stories within the same generation. On the other hand, I think some of the theology and later interpretations could have been original product of the religious, literate class.
I don’t think the stories had to originate with the literate; but necessarily they were the ones who wrote them down. The stories did not need to be dictated though. They were simply told and retold until someone put them on papyrus.
Robyn faith Walsh seems to address this
In my own experience trying to learn a foreign language, it is not hard to memorize stock phrases, and once you memorize some words you can figure out simple sentences as you read. However, composing and speaking or writing a coherent sentence is MUCH more difficult. But I know earnest believers will point to Acts 2:4 and say, “The Holy Spirit did it!” Question: given the high level of illiteracy, especially in rural areas, I assume genealogies were passed down orally, and therefore subject to error. So, would someone like Jesus really know if he was a descendant of David? I’m guessing a lot of people could claim to be descended from a famous figure, but who would know?
I think it was even more extreme than that. So far as we know genealogies weren’t passed down at all. Most people would have had no clue who their great-grandfather was, let alone their genealogical tree going back dozens of generations. I suppose in one way virtually everyone in Israel was a descendant of David, just as probably everyone in America is now, if you go through both genders all the way back (rather than strictly patrilinear). BUt no, Jesus would not have known his lineage.
Sounds like the genealogies in Matthew and Luke were made up. Same with the very long genealogy in Chronicles (Hebrew Bible/Old Testament).
I don’t even know who my great grandparents were!
For some reason, I was really surprised when I first read that the apostles were almost certainly illiterate. I had had no problem believing that not everything in the gospels was historically accurate, miracles among others.
Somehow this fact alone seems to cast tremendous doubt on the historical accuracy of the gospels. It seems to put a pretty strong burden of proof on those who want to claim that they are accurate. It seems to cut off any but the most tenuous connections between the gospels and eyewitnesses of Jesus’s life.
When did you first come across this conclusion about the apostles’ illiteracy? Did it have a similar effect on your thinking?
I don’t think I started thinking seriously about it until I was doing research on ancient manuscripts after my PhD; and I got even more serious about it when I read William Harris’s (now) classic, Ancient Literacy.
I don’t follow why “learning to read (even in one’s own language) took years of hard work”. I’m thinking of introductory Greek classes today; Greek is a pretty phonetically regular language; you can teach someone the alphabet and how to sound words out (albeit haltingly) in something like a week of ordinary instruction. The hard part of learning Greek isn’t the phonics but the grammar and vocabulary.
So why would it have taken the ancients years of hard work to learn to sound out sentences written in a language they already spoke fluently? True, making the transition from haltingly sounding a sentences out to reading with real fluency requires some practice (requiring both time and access to materials to practice reading), and that would be a significant hurdle. But still, to take a modern analogue, Spanish-speaking children can learn to read most texts with high accuracy after only a year, because Spanish is an orthographically transparent language.
It also looks to me like Bar-Ilan’s calculation gives a lower bound on literacy. Can we really infer from the fact that the Talmud envisions the possibility of a synagogue with only one literate person that that was normal through large areas of Palestine?
When I talk about reading Greek I’m not talking about being able to pronounce the words. I mean reading it so as to understand what the words mean. I can pronounce the words of dozens of languages! I’m not sure if you have tried learning Greek, but I’m tellin’ you, it will take years of hard work! And yes, I highly recomment Bar-Ilan’s work, and CAtherine Hezser’s. The best way to sense the strength of the argument would be to check it out and see what others have said about it. I don’t think we can use common sense to decide what situations were like in various times and places in the past.
Certainly, learning to read Greek today, as an Anglophone, is a lot of work, but that is because we aren’t just learning to read the language, we are learning the language itself at the same time–it’s the second part that take almost all the work.
But you said, in the ancient world, learning to read would take years of hard work, even in learning to read one’s own language.
If one already speaks the language fluently, then the only thing left–I would think–would be learning to pronounce the written words; after all, ex hypothesi, the student already speaks the language.
So I would have expected a native speaker to have that hard stuff down pat, and I’d have expected reading to come pretty quickly, unless either the vernacular version of the language was so vastly different from the literary form that they weren’t mutually intelligible, or the written language used a very complicated writing system (like a syllabary, as in cuneiform, or a complicated system of abbreviations, as in mediaeval Latin).
If you were a university teacher who encountered this kind of thing every day (i.e., hey, if you were in my shoes!), I think you’d see that there are millions of people who can speak fluently but simply don’t know how to put their words on paper. They have not been trained to write. It’s a different skill from being able to speak. Weird, but true. (I have PhD students who can deliver a brilliant speech but simply cannot write a coherent paper)
I agree about writing–but the statement I was questioning was specifically about reading one’s own language.
Formal composition in any language takes years of practice to perfect. Nevermind doctoral students, many professors haven’t perfected the art.
So I’m fully sympathetic to your larger point that a Galilean fisherman probably couldn’t write polished Greek prose.
I’m just gently questioning (not denying! just questioning) the general assertion that “learning to read (even in one’s own language) took years of hard work.”
I know it may sound weird. But yes, it takes years of hard work to become literate in your own language. Visit your local Literacy Center and you’ll see how much effort it takes.
For Porphyry:
The burden of the proof is not yours. These statements are scientifically simply incorrect:
“Learning even the basics of reading was a slow and arduous process, typically taking some three years”
“Learning to read (even in one’s own language) took years of hard work”
Maybe you’ll get to this later in the thread but I’m wondering to what extent illiteracy might have been an indicator of the disciples’ ability to form or understand relatively complex ideas. Was being able to express complex thoughts in writing correlated with the ability to express or understand them orally?
If illiterate eyewitnesses are ultimately at the origin of parts of the gospels, eg, as sources of oral tradition, should we be looking for more than a minimum of complex thinking, at least in the historically accurate parts of the gospels? The process of interpreting the gospels might still be complex but shouldn’t we expect the ideas expressed to be relatively simple?
I suppose the grounding of the NT in the OT could impart some of the OT’s complexity to the NT. Ideas going back to original eyewitnesses could still have been informed by OT complexity even if the eyewitnesses themselves were illiterate.
Literacy is not a marker of intelligence; many many illiterate peole are incredibly intelligent and able to handle complex ideas, especially in cultures where literacy is not widespread. Still, education as a rule generally does improve a person’s ability to handle intellectually complex ideas. I’d say the Gospels are relatively simple in their basic ideas, but incredibly deep once you start digging into them.
Your last statement, about gospel ideas being relatively simple but very deep after you get into them, is very interesting. Can you give one example for me to chew on?
The Gospel of Mark. YOu can read it and get the basic idea pretty quickly. But when you dig into it the artistry and cleverness is quite breath taking — e.g., as you realize how the author has shown that the disciples simply could not get Jesus’ message about having to suffer and die, as they continued to think that they were on the path to glory.
Sorry to be pedantic here, 2nd paragraph: “New Testament: how many people cold read and how”……unless there is something called “cold reading”? -(maybe in more northern climates?)
I suppose I should read Harris, Cribiore, Bar Ilan, Hezser etc. before commenting on this, but …
I know that historical literacy has been underestimated in some cases. It was long believed that most Swedes were illiterate before 1842, when we got public schools in Sweden. But we now know that at least 70% of all Swedes were literate 100 years before that, and that was also 100 years before the Industrial Revolution began in Sweden. This was chruch policy, and parish cathechetical meetings were held to check people’s literacy and Bible knowledge. There were hardly any schools back then, so parents taught their children to read.
Also, since the Scriptures are central in Jewish religion and culture, couldn’t it be that Jews, also in 1st century Palestine, were literate to a much higher degree than other contemporary peoples, that Jewish parents taught their children to read? Isn’t one explanation of the contemporary high proportion of Jews in science, culture and finances the historically high literacy of Jews?
I don’t claim that Peter wrote 1 and 2 Peter, but how do we know that Peter was poor? Zebedee, the father of James and John, was rich enough to have employees (Mark 1:20).
Yes, it’s possible that literacy was higher; cross-cultural comparisons probably won’t get us there, but can be suggestive. Still, we have to look at the evidence, which includes what we know about both the educational systems and, especially, the socio-economic realities of time and place. It’s hard to get our modern minds around the idea that huge regions simply had no schools, teachers, or books. That’s why it appears Peter would have been completely illiterate: we know a good bit about what life was like in poor rural areas like that. Kids simply were not sent to school. As soon as they could be put to work, they were. Even if John’s father had people working for him, that would not have made him middle class. It was almost certainly simply that he happened to have gotten a boat and all of them, including the family, were simply living a hand-to-mouth existence. The “workers” would not have been on wages, the way we think of today.
I apologize for the lateness. I have read Harris’ book and agree with his and Bart’s conclusions. Our modern cultures and mental frameworks are biased by the fact that education is built into our societies. That simply was not the case prior to the 1700s and possibly through the 1800s. Leisure – skole in greek (root word for school) – is the basis of culture. Leisure is the freedom from needing to eek out a living, which requires much time, physical, mental and emotional effort. So much that peasant fishermen, laborers, women maintaining a home, etc. did not have the social or time resources to learn to read, write, compose. Only those with sufficient leisure could.
What about oral traditions? Could ideas spoken by illiterate but otherwise intelligent men have made it into New Testament books even if the men.were incapable of writing them down? For example could Peter’s ideas preserved in oral traditions have made it into 1st and 2nd Peter through people who were far better at Greek rhetorical writing than Peter?
Certainly intelligent people were passing on stories by word of mouth, yes. But we have to consider what the processes would have been between someone telling a story in a certain language and that story circulating for decades in different parts of the world before someone with his own views and ways of putting it decided to write it down in a different language.
Great work Bart. Looking forward to the next two posts on this topic.
Beyond who wrote the texts is, who read them. Before most people could read, they depended oral readings of select passages and its approved sermon for teachings, along with icons and art, that tell stories. So who read them? One guess is, Priests of other religions who could see possibilities in this Jesus Movement.
If the literacy rates were about 10% then in a community of, say, twenty Christians, presumably a couple of them could read to the others.
I assume this means that at the time of Jesus, having a bar mitzva ceremony at which one reads from the Torah was rare? Or did that tradition come later? Was the local Rabbi usually the only literate person in the community?
It’s a later tradition. It didn’t come about for many centureis (possibly startin about the 6th century — some 500 years later)
Did Peter know another language besides Aramaic/ Hebrew? In what language would he have dictated his thoughts? Did he speak Latin or Greek? The texts attributed to him were written in Greek. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that he dictated them in Greek.
Dictating to a writer/scribe was ancient. Jeremiah dictating to Baruch Ben Neriah comes to mind.
As for the literacy of Jews under Roman occupation, I always believed ( as I was taught) that since the destruction of the Temple in AD70, education became compulsory for children and adults alike. But now I’m not sure if it’s true. Or whether it matters regarding the issue at hand.
Lastly, do we know whether Jesus could read? In two Gospels he reads from the scroll in the synagogue. The description rings startlingly plausible,as the writer says that Jesus began reading from the spot in the scroll indicated to him. This is quite difficult to do, and it is done exactly like that ;it takes an excellent reader to do it right, particularly if unprepared,and it’s a sacred duty to read impeccably. I know this well, because I read. It also means the Gospel writer knew much detail about Hebrew ritual. Matthew?
Peter would have known Aramaic and probably nothing else. And yes, Jeremiah was in a different socio-educational kettle of fish. The appearance of “synagogue schools” was later; people tend to think that all boys learned to read because of later Talmudic traditions. As to Jesus, it’s hard to say. The only passage in which he is said actually to read is Luke 4. It’s possibly he learned his Scriptures by hearing them, as did most Jews in his day. It’s hard to imagine he could read *fluently*. (There is no archaeological remains of a synagogue in the small hamlet of Nazareth in his day; one wonders if wherever the community met on Sabbath there could have been a scroll of Isaiah handy…)
Bart, I have no reason to doubt your judgment about the likely illiteracy of Galilean fishermen, but I still think literacy — including the ability to write — may not have been as rare among the Judaean population as a whole as you maintain.
I base that belief on the archaeological evidence we have for reading and writing literacy among ordinary members of the Jewish population in the First Temple Era hundreds of years earlier. If those skills could have been transmitted to common soldiers way back then, it’s hard to see why that wouldn’t still have been true later. In both periods, the importance of scripture to the faith and identity of the Jewish people would have provided ample motivation.
See the paper, “Algorithmic handwriting analysis of Judah’s military correspondence sheds light on composition of biblical texts” by
Shira Faigenbaum-Golovin, Arie Shaus, Barak Sober, David Levin, Israel Finkelstein, et al at https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1522200113
With literacy among the lower classes, the questions always concern the *utility* of having them take the time and effort to learn. That’s why governments didn’t start funding literacy education until the Industrial Revolution. It paid to take time away from labor to learn. But it is indeed important evidence from antiquity. There’s also graffiti to consider, that may suggest wider literacy.
Do you think that Jesus knew how to read, or it is invention of Luke? Luke 4:16
I waffle on the question. I used to be completely convinced he could read (but not write). Now I’m just not sure.
This is slightly off-topic, but you have referred to Jesus as a rabbi. Did that title imply any particular training, or did it simply mean “itinerant teacher”?
In his day it just meant Jewish teacher. Later it came to mean something more official, like “Professor”
To be clear, I’m agreeing to _Greek_ illiteracy among the Apostles, but arguing for at least some Hebrew (and/or Aramaic) literacy among the general, non-scribe and non-priest Judaean population.
After all, in Luke 4:16-19 we’re told that Jesus is able to publicly read aloud from Isaiah in Nazareth’s synagogue. The congregation isn’t happy with what he says about the passage, but they aren’t surprised that he was able to read it. Indeed he was handed the scroll to read as if a congregant reading from it is quite the usual thing.
Yup, I get it. The works of Bar-Ilan and Hezser are also dealing with Hebrew/Aramaic literacy. Among the lower classes (that is, the vast majority of the population) there would have been almost NO literacy in Greek. Part of the question is precisely whether Luke 4 (written by someone who did not know the local situation in Galilee or anywhere else in Israel) is plausible or not.
Dr. Ehrman,
I tried searching for my question on your site and have not found any information, so I thought I would ask it here.
In what language did Jesus and his original disciples/followers predominantly speak and write (for those who were literate)? And, how can we know?
I was always taught that while Jesus and his disciples knew Aramaic, they also would have been fluent in speaking Greek (not just the Hellenistic Jews, but all the Jews; similar to how in many countries where English is not the native language, most natives speak it).
Is that an accurate representation? Or, do you think Jesus and most of his disciples would have been fairly ignorant of the Greek language at their time in Jewish Palestine?
Yes, I’ve talked about it a number of times. Probably you’d find it if you searched for Aramaic. That was certaily his native language. Scholars disagree from there. MY view is that there is almost no reason to think Jesus knew Greek, let alone could speak it fluently. Upper class elite Jews in urban areas certainly could, but not lower class peasants in rural areas. Without mass communication (of any kind, not just internet!) the world was not well connected, and in a small hamlet like Nazareth, probably no one would have been educated in a school or learned Greek fluently.
Dr. Ehrman,
Why would people attribute authorship to certain apostles if it was common knowledge they couldn’t read and write? If we can deduce that Peter couldn’t have written 1&2 Peter, then couldn’t the earliest people attributing authorship (as well as the general populace of Christians) deduce this as well?
Because people attributing authorship to them (living years later in different parts of the world) didn’t know they could read and write. Even today — everyday — people say things that simply can’t be true and don’t know it. In antiquity that was far far more common because unlike now, there was no way to investigate, and almost never any reason to do so. Today when ther eis a way and plenty of reason, the vast majority still don’t bother, about most things!
Dr. Ehrman,
I came across a statement in an article that said “Hebrew children were required to memorize the first five books of Torah before they were twelve years old. Young students were also required to discuss these texts and write them.”
Is this true? Is there any legitimacy to what they said?
Nope, modern myth. Totally bogus. If you want to see an actual expert discuss all the available evidence, see Catherine Hezser, Literacy in Roman Palestine.
The New English Translation has a curious footnote for Acts 4:13. Among other claims, it says the word used “does not mean illiterate” and “Among Jews in NT times there was almost universal literacy”.
That footnote seems… at odds with the evidence you present, and somewhat unusually for NET does not even mention alternatives. I guess my question is… is there any legitimate scholarship going on underneath that footnote, or might I assume that its author was less than extremely literate themselves?
And, assuming it’s wandered off the deep end here. do you know of a resource that is similar in depth and breadth as the NET footnotes but I am likely to find, let’s say, mainstream scholarship underneath?
Whoa. I’m afraid the person who wrote the footnote didn’t know what he was talking about. I’d suggest you use the HarperCollins Study Bible.