Re: Responses


Subject: Re: Responses
From: L. Manning Vines (lmanningvines@hotmail.com)
Date: Mon Jul 15 2002 - 21:30:37 EDT


Jim also said:
<< If Christ was seen as an anomaly, that would speak against
literacy. The question is...was he an anomaly because he could read? Not
necessarily.
[. . .]
So the anomaly Christ posed may be better understood in terms of the insight
you
get from deep study, rather than just the ability to read. >>

I considered this, and I mentioned that the citation does not seem to be
certain evidence of wide-spread illiteracy, but that it suggests, rather,
that most Jews were not highly literate, or did not study scripture.

The priestly Jews in the book were not expressing surprise that Jesus was
very wise or an insightful literary critic, but that, very literally, he has
known the written things. This suggests to me that a carpenter's son would
either not ordinarily read scripture at all, or would have a very simplistic
and superficial knowledge of it. So I suppose that the majority of the Jews
of the time were not highly literate.

-robbie
-
* Unsubscribing? Mail majordomo@roughdraft.org with the message
* UNSUBSCRIBE BANANAFISH



This archive was generated by hypermail 2b25 : Tue Sep 17 2002 - 16:27:01 EDT