Literacy, New Testament

Abstract

Although various New Testament texts reflect the importance of literacy and illiteracy in early Christianity (for example, Mark 13:14; John 7:15; Acts 4:13; 8:30; 1 Corinthians 16:21), these issues have taken on greater significance in New Testament studies since the 1980s. This period witnessed an explosion of interdisciplinary research on ancient literacy and illiteracy in cognate disciplines such as classics, cultural anthropology, literary criticism, and media criticism. Cumulatively, these interdisciplinary studies have established a new and sustained scholarly majority opinion that most ancient persons were illiterate. As a result, New Testament scholars now see literacy and illiteracy as important factors for interpreting New Testament and early Christian texts in their socio-historical contexts, especially for understanding the diffusion of social power in the text-centered cultures of Second Temple Judaism and early Christianity. Such a perspective has breathed fresh life into old debates, such as the education of Jesus and his followers or the identity of Jewish scribes, and has introduced, or participated in, new perspectives, such as “performance criticism” and the “material turn” in studies of early Christian book culture. Most of these studies accept that the majority of the population in Second Temple Judaism and early Christianity was illiterate and proceed to understand the social consequences of the use of books and literate skills in a predominantly oral environment. Along these lines, further studies have increasingly come to indicate the overall inadequacy of the terms “literate” and “illiterate” for understanding the complex manifestations of literate skills in practice. Complicating factors include the facts that reading and writing skills were acquired and used separately, reading and writing skills existed in varying levels and varying languages even for an individual, and that literacy (the ability to access written tradition for oneself) should not be confused with textuality (the awareness and appreciation of written tradition). These factors and others have impacted New Testament scholars’ understanding of the authorship, reception, and circulation of texts in Second Temple Judaism and early Christianity.