"Illiterate Goat-herders"

Geesh! Will you guys come up with a new line?   I have, I'll bet unlike any of you comment thread atheists, known "goat-herders" you aren't smart enough to do their job. 

Now that that issue has been taken care of,  the idea that those who composed the texts of the Bible were illiterate only makes their texts more impressive, not less impressive.  That is especially true of the often made speculation that someone like Paul was illiterate and that he dictated his epistles to a scribe who wrote them down - though I could say that the place in Romans that might indicate it could, as easily, have been a person who was making a copy of it, at least in my reading of a number of the English and other translations from the Greek. 

Romans is an extremely complex document full to the brim of literary, Scriptural references, closely and intricately detailed arguments that, I'd think, would anticipate a literate readership and with astonishing insights into a number of issues.  There are atheists and non-Christians who have been impressed with it, there is one fairly recent commentary on that one letter that took some very careful scholars twelve years to conclude and that commentary is only one of a myriad of commentaries on it. 

If Paul was illiterate, unable to write, perhaps to read, as well, THAT MAKES HIS INTELLECTUAL ACCOMPLISHMENT ALMOST UNIMAGINABLY MORE IMPRESSIVE IN COMPOSING ROMANS.   I'm sure I couldn't do it and I can't think of many academics of today who could.   Romans is a far more impressive intellectual document than the works of the legendarily blind Homer or the known to be blind Milton who I strongly suspect would put himself behind Paul in terms such as those I've addressed here.  There is not a single one of the heroes of pop-atheism who could begin to hold a candle to him in terms of intellectual achievement and depth,  if human history continues, in several hundred years commentaries on Paul will still be being written, still taking serious, careful scholars years to write and compile when Dawkins, Dennett, Harris, Hitchens, the Keystone-CSICOPs and their allies and the Britatheists are a sideline of minor academic curiosity about an intellectually degenerate epoch in the history of insular "Western thought."  I would guess that the antisemtic motives of that movement will figure highly into it by that time.    

And I'm sure Paul would never stop reminding his admirers that he is merely setting out and elucidating the teachings, the understanding of The Law and much more than that of Jesus.  The more I go into the actual teachings of Jesus, the more profound it is clear that they are.  Intellectually, yes, in terms of insight into human character and human history and the nature of reality, yes, but ever more than that.