Again With The "Ignorant Jewish Peasants"

I FORGET THE TITLE OF THE BOOK, written by a Catholic seminarian in NYC in the early 1960s who met Edward Albee's secretary who, he said, told him about taking down part of one of his plays as Albee dictated it to him.  It was a forgettable book by a young man with what goes as a fine education (Columbia, I seem to recall) that I read on a car trip because it happened to be the book I picked up knowing it was going to be a long car ride.  I thought about it for probably the first time since putting it away almost sixty years ago because I thought of using Arch Obler as an example to make a point.  Obler is a well known author to aficionados of "golden age" radio drama.  Unfortunately, best known for a bit of horror tripe he produced about an ever expanding artificially maintained chicken heart that envelops the world.  He was, actually a better writer than his claim to fame would lead you to believe. Obler was known for composing his radio dramas in his head while he as in bed, talking them into a Dictaphone to later be transcribed and, I'd imagine, edited by a secretary and himself.  For the record, I think Norman Corwin's radio dramas of the period stand up better but Obler was, in my opinion, a better playwright than Albee was.  Meaning is meaningful, veiling meaning behind literary artifices often renders them meaningless.  Absurdist lit is ephemeral and its producers should not be surprised if the world has little need to repeat it.  Subsequent productions are more in the way of pious observance, not art.

That's a little introduction to an answer to the often made indictment of Christianity that Jesus and Paul were "illiterate peasants" to which I have to say, if they were illiterates of no formal education that only makes their intellectual achievements all the greater because anyone who could come up with what they did without recourse to the organizational powers of written words is the intellectual superiors of those who though literate could not do what they did.  I've made that point before.  As to the heart of the thought and work both Jesus and Paul, their religious content, it might be arguable that illiterate peasants, being among the least among us and, so, among the least likely to do great evil as great evil is done to them, perhaps that was a considerable asset to their purpose, as being rich and reputable would have likely inhibited that. And, what do you know, Jesus said pretty much that. Repute in intellect and, especially, formal education is not highly correlated with moral greatness. It barely correlates well with underachievement of normal, unheroic moral action.

I, though, think it is very likely that both Jesus and Paul could read and very possibly write words.  The modern arguments for illiteracy don't seem to me to be persuasive and are based on some pretty tendentious assumptions with the typical modern dismissal of Christianity.  I would say made toward that desired end.

What we have in the case of Jesus is a report of him reading from the Scroll, Isaiah, and a report of him writing in dirt on the ground in that story I've discussed, the Woman taken in adultery.  I certainly think that the Gospels present Jesus as having a deep, a profound knowledge of the Jewish Scriptures, often confounding those learned in written texts, which would imply either an incredible memory of what he heard read and a deeper than usual understanding of them or him being able to read it for himself.  The argument that those accounts are suspect because he, as a Jewish peasant of the period would have had to be illiterate seems rather circular and question begging.  We do not have any idea how many literate people we might or those living then might put into the same economic-social class in his locale as Jesus is assumed by us to have been in.  We really don't have any way of knowing that because that would require a level of surveying by methods unknown to that period and hardly reliable today or of sufficient evidence to make such an accurate guess having survived which it certainly hasn't.  If I am skeptical of contemporary surveying and polling, the pantomime of that endemic to the "scientific" evaluation of the ancient past to come up with numbers purporting to be statistical evaluation is something I think indicts and convicts today's intellectual set of gross dishonesty and vast over-selling of their often highly ideological claims.   

Paul is especially interesting because what we have of him, in Acts, in the Pauline letters, perhaps in other writings referring to or reacting to him,  presents enough so we are confronted with an extremely complex personality.  One who contains great contradictions and whose words are often scandalous in regard to slavery, in regard to Women, in regard to LGBTQ rights, his often scandalous statements about his own People - you can never forget that Paul considered himself and publicly declared himself to remain Jewish and a Pharisee - etc.  A lot of the scandal, it seems to me, is due to him being quite taken with the dramatic, attention demanding presentation of contrasts which can read quite differently to us today than it probably seemed to those he wrote to at the time.  The contrasts he draws in Romans between "the Jews" and "the Law" with the practices of the ambient pagan gentiles (of greatly contrasting variety) are, some have argued, him pointing out that all of us fall short of the Gospel of Jesus, of the risen Christ his experience of whom motivated the rest of his life.  

Luke Timothy Johnson in one of his lectures concluded that one of the sources of scandal among us today is because Paul had a weakness for fearing the effects of things like Women speaking in church, the relationships of slaves to masters, due to the ambient Roman patriarchal familial norms in the alien world he worked in.  It would be good to know an accurate chronology for the various letters and the Paul presented in Acts to try to see how, as he was exposed to more and more varied gentile communities how his fidelity to his claim that in Jesus all of the important social-political-personal distinctions disappeared, Jew-gentile, slave-free, male-female, one of what must have then seemed AND STILL VERY MUCH IS profoundly radical.  Imagine what the program of today's Republican-fascist "white evangelicals" would be if they took that passage as if it were both true and something they were commanded to live up to.  Imagine if the Churches all took it seriously from the time it was made Scripture.  

As with the teachings of Jesus, if those were actually applied capitalism would disappear, slavery would disappear - anyone who thinks you could have slavery while doing to others what you would have them do to you isn't thinking very hard, they're not thinking at all.  There would be the most radical of economic and, so, social leveling, in which those he lead would serve, those who had gave it away to those who wouldn't return it, all would love their enemies and pray for those who persecute them and  forgive those they love the most- of course of those who persecute them followed the Gospel of Jesus, they wouldn't persecute them.

Paul's radical egalitarian on one hand and anti-egalitarian statements,  contrasting duos of sayings, are sometimes quite understandable if you consider the consequences in the milieu in which he worked ALWAYS KEEPING IN MIND HIS LETTERS ARE OFTEN ADDRESSED TO CONTROVERSIES AND FALLING AWAY IN THE COMMUNITIES HE WROTE THEM TO.  Elizabeth A. Johnson pointed out that we can know two things about Paul saying Women should be silent in Church, that women in the Church were speaking when Paul wrote his letter and that we have no record of how the Women in the Church responded to what he said.  And at the same time, in his greetings in Romans, etc. he named People, he more than just implies that women either co-lead or lead Churches (which met in private homes) and acted AS HIS REPRESENTATIVE, SPEAKING HIS MESSAGE AND ANSWERING QUESTIONS ON HIS BEHALF TO THE CHURCHES HE WROTE TO!   

Slave owners who treated their slaves as beloved members of their family (community) would no longer treat them as slaves, slavery under such a practice would no longer be slaves.   

Paul's letters were not Scripture the first time they were read, they were letters of advice and guidance, they became Scripture by the decision of later Christians in the various Churches and, as hierarchies formed and, especially, as Christianity because enmeshed in secular politics.  The decisions of what were Scripture and what were not may have and, I think, often were made for very good reasons but they were no more perfect decisions than any others made by human beings, including Paul's (or his group of colleagues) in what to say in those letters.  Given what all texts of that period are, I'm not so sure that means of coming up with an authoritative canon of those which were to be taken as Scripture was not only wise but a realistic necessity.*

Paul might be the most complex of human figures in the Scriptures, apart from Jesus.  That's partly because what became Scripture contains so much purportedly about him and purported to be from him.  There aren't many other figures in the ancient or classical period about which so much may be known, certainly not from the class that Paul was from - and I suspect he may well have been higher up in the economic-social scale than Jesus was, though I'm sure there would be various points of view about that, today.  

Back to the accusation that Jesus and Paul were illiterates, all blind people of that time and probably most blind people into the modern day who do not have recourse to braille or some other writing method are illiterate, not able to access written words.  

There are definite problems with that, I know because my father was blind and I daily saw those problems and he was both a fluent braille reader and writer.  Braille read with the fingers is read more slowly than printed words read with the eyes, back then it was far harder and slower to type with a Perkins Brailler and even more slowly with an awl and stylus (Dad was proficient with both) I know today using a computer it's a lot faster.  And if you go to the period of audio recording, in which many blind people don't learn to use Braille or ever gain proficiency in it, depending on audio recordings of read text has its own deficiencies as compared to accessing words by reading them printed in ink on a page or pixels on a screen, the difference between words read with your eyes or words merely heard are even greater.  It is simply not as fast to speak or hear words as it is to see them, it is harder to go back and reference what you have already read in braille or in a recording of words. It is far harder to look something up, though I'd guess some who use computer technology mixing text recognition with text to audio might become quite good at reviewing or referencing what they've already heard (I would imagine they get used to the annoying qualities of computers reading words aloud.) But most of the Blind People in the world do not have access to much or any of that technology.

I know from observation that many Blind People develop impressive means to live with and surpass those kinds of problems and limits.  Some do it quite brilliantly with great ingenuity, using methods of memorizing and understanding as do People who are illiterate even though they can see quite well.  I'd guess as many as a percent of their populations are as capable of producing ideas of great brilliance and importance as sighted-literate People. Some of the most vapid, superficial, stupid and trivial thinking around are the product of literate professional writers with quite expensive college-credentials.  Considering the amount of absolute nonsense-garbage-trash and idiocy that is produced by the literate, my guess would be that that produced by those who have a harder time producing it would tend to be higher quality - though I have no real way to test that idea and I'm quite sure it has never been tested.  

I've said before if Paul was illiterate, his letter to the Romans, the theology in it, the arguments in it, the contents of it are a work of genius, far more impressive than much of high-flown philosophy of the literate or Homer or the other epics I've looked at presumably composed by non-literates.  But we know Romans was written down, either by Paul or by those associated with him or a sort of secretary, because it was a letter.  If Paul dictated it or had someone else or a committee (some imagine) write it down it's unlikely he'd not have had it read back to him to see if changes were needed or additions made. It was obviously composed with care as to its contents.  I think both are quite likely, that Paul was literate, himself, and that he, at times, dictated things to secretaries as Arch Obler or Edward Albee did. It's possible he, like most professional modern writers, wrote what was a rough or more refined draft that he handed over to someone else to edit into its final shape.  If that's evidence of illiteracy, most professional writers of fiction, today, are illiterates.  Obler and Albee were certainly literate though they were quite busy or lazy and neither of them were anywhere near as busy as Paul seems to have been.  Jesus was certainly even more busy, he didn't get round to writing letters or even a memoir.  I would imagine paper was pretty scarce in the countryside most of his life was spent in.  

* I'm reminded of the research I did into the almost certainly spurious "Jefferson letters to Thomas Paine" often cited by college-credentialed atheists and other haters of Christianity, reported by a very well educated Moncure Conway which not only have never been demonstrated to exist except on his claims but the contents of which certainly and directly contradict what Jefferson said in known and authentic letters in his own hand.  Not to mention the false claims often made about what those say by People who never actually look for the originals but clip their references from ideological atheist invective that misrepresents those.  Considering how much atheist invective depends on false, distorted, falsified and downright dishonest secondary sources going on to tertiary and even more remote junk, the slamming of the Christian scripture is sheer hypocrisy.   And, it being part of the ambient secular milieu, it's never, ever questioned or tested in the way Scripture constantly is, internally by those who accept it and externally by those who hate it.