Misquoting Jesus (6 page)

The problem of definition is even more pronounced when we turn to the ancient world, where the ancients themselves had difficulty defining what it meant to be literate. One of the most famous illustrative examples comes from Egypt in the second Christian century. Throughout most of antiquity, since most people could not write, there were local “readers” and “writers” who hired out their services to people who needed to conduct business that required written texts: tax receipts, legal contracts, licenses, personal letters, and the like. In Egypt, there were local officials who were assigned the task of overseeing certain governmental tasks that required writing. These assignments as local (or village) scribes were not usually sought after: as with many “official” administrative posts, the people who were required to take them were responsible for paying for the job out-of-pocket. These jobs, in other words, went to the wealthier members of the society and carried a kind of status with them, but they required the expenditure of personal funds.

The example that illustrates the problem of defining literacy involves an Egyptian scribe called Petaus, from the village of Karanis in upper Egypt. As often happened, Petaus was assigned to duties in a different village, Ptolemais Hormou, where he was given oversight of financial and agricultural affairs. In the year 184
C
.
E
., Petaus had to respond to some complaints about another village scribe from Ptolemais Hormou, a man named Ischyrion, who had been assigned somewhere else to undertake responsibilities as a scribe. The villagers under Ischyrion's jurisdiction were upset that Ischyrion could not ful
fill his obligations, because, they charged, he was “illiterate.” In dealing with the dispute Petaus argued that Ischyrion wasn't illiterate at all, because he had actually signed his name to a range of official documents. In other words, for Petaus “literacy” meant simply the ability to sign one's name.

Petaus himself had trouble doing much more than that. As it turns out, we have a scrap of papyrus on which Petaus practiced his writing, on which he wrote, twelve times over, the words (in Greek) that he had to sign on official documents: “I Petaus, the village scribe, have submitted this.” What is odd is that he copied the words correctly the first four times, but the fifth time he left off the first letter of the final word, and for the remaining seven times he continued to leave off the letter, indicating that he was not writing words that he knew how to write but was merely
copying
the preceding line. He evidently couldn't read even the simple words he was putting on the page. And
he
was the official local scribe!
¹⁵

If we count Petaus among the “literate” people in antiquity, how many people could actually read texts and make sense of what they said? It is impossible to come up with an exact figure, but it appears that the percentage would not be very high. There are reasons for thinking that within the Christian communities, the numbers would have been even lower than in the population at large. This is because it appears that Christians, especially early on in the movement, came for the most part from the lower, uneducated classes. There were always exceptions, of course, like the apostle Paul and the other authors whose works made it into the New Testament and who were obviously skilled writers; but for the most part, Christians came from the ranks of the illiterate.

This is certainly true of the very earliest Christians, who would have been the apostles of Jesus. In the Gospel accounts, we find that most of Jesus's disciples are simple peasants from Galilee—uneducated fishermen, for example. Two of them, Peter and John, are explicitly said to be “illiterate” in the book of Acts (4:13). The apostle
Paul indicates to his Corinthian congregation that “not many of you were wise by human standards” (1 Cor. 1:27)—which might mean that some few were well educated, but not most. As we move into the second Christian century, things do not seem to change much. As I have indicated, some intellectuals converted to the faith, but most Christians were from the lower classes and uneducated.

Evidence for this view comes from several sources. One of the most interesting is a pagan opponent of Christianity named Celsus who lived in the late second century. Celsus wrote a book called
The True Word,
in which he attacked Christianity on a number of grounds, arguing that it was a foolish, dangerous religion that should be wiped off the face of the earth. Unfortunately, we do not have
The True Word
itself; all we have are quotations from it in the writings of the famous Christian church father Origen, who lived about seventy years after Celsus and was asked to produce a reply to his charges. Origen's book
Against Celsus
survives and is our chief source of information about what the learned critic Celsus said in his book directed against the Christians.
¹⁶
One of the great features of Origen's book is that he quotes Celsus's earlier work at length, line by line, before offering his refutation of it. This allows us to reconstruct with fair accuracy Celsus's claims. One of these claims is that the Christians are ignorant lower-class people. What is striking is that in his reply, Origen does not deny it. Consider the following charges made by Celsus.

Origen replies that the true Christian believers are in fact wise (and some, in fact, are well educated), but they are wise with respect to God, not with respect to things in this world. He does not deny, in other words, that the Christian community is largely made up of the lower, uneducated classes.

P
UBLIC
R
EADING IN
C
HRISTIAN
A
NTIQUITY

We appear, then, to have a paradoxical situation in early Christianity. This was a bookish religion, with writings of all kinds proving to be of uppermost importance to almost every aspect of the faith. Yet most people could not read these writings. How do we account for this paradox?

In fact, the matter is not all that strange if we recall what was hinted at earlier, that communities of all kinds throughout antiquity generally used the services of the literate for the sake of the illiterate. For in the ancient world “reading” a book did not mean, usually,
reading it to oneself; it meant reading it aloud, to others. One could be said to have
read
a book when in fact one had
heard
it read by others. There seems to be no way around the conclusion that books—as important as they were to the early Christian movement—were almost always read aloud in social settings, such as in settings of worship.

We should recall here that Paul instructs his Thessalonian hearers that his “letter is to be read to all of the brothers and sisters” (1 Thess. 5:27). This would have happened out loud, in community. And the author of Colossians wrote: “And when you have read this epistle, be sure that it is read in the church of the Laodiceans, and that you read the letter written to Laodicea” (Col. 4:16). Recall, too, Justin Martyr's report that “On the day called Sunday, all who live in cities or in the country gather together to one place, and the memoirs of the apostles or the writings of the prophets are read, as long as time permits” (1
Apol.
67). The same point is made in other early Christian writings. For example, in the book of Revelation we are told, “Blessed is the one who reads the words of the prophecy and blessed are those who hear the words” (1:3)—obviously referring to the public reading of the text. In a lesser-known book called
2 Clement,
from the mid second century, the author indicates, in reference to his words of exhortation, “I am reading you a request to pay attention to what has been written, so that you may save yourselves and the one who is your reader” (2 Clem. 19.1).

In short, the books that were of paramount importance in early Christianity were for the most part read out loud by those who were able to read, so that the illiterate could hear, understand, and even study them. Despite the fact that early Christianity was by and large made up of illiterate believers, it was a highly literary religion.

Other key issues need to be discussed, however. If books were so important to early Christianity, if they were being read to Christian communities around the Mediterranean, how did the communities actually get those books? How were they put in circulation? This was in the days before desktop publishing, electronic means of reproduc
tion, and even moveable type. If communities of believers obtained copies of various Christian books in circulation, how did they acquire those copies? Who was doing the copying? And most important for the ultimate subject of our investigation, how can we (or how could they) know that the copies they obtained were accurate, that they hadn't been modified in the process of reproduction?

A
s we saw in chapter 1, Christianity from its very beginning was a literary religion, with books of all kinds playing a central role in the life and faith of the burgeoning Christian communities around the Mediterranean. How, then, was this Christian literature placed in circulation and distributed? The answer, of course, is that for a book to be distributed broadly, it had to be copied.

C
OPYING IN THE
G
RECO-ROMAN
W
ORLD

The only way to copy a book in the ancient world was to do it by hand, letter by letter, one word at a time. It was a slow, painstaking process—but there was no alternative. Accustomed as we are today to seeing multiple copies of books appear on the shelves of major book chains around the country just days after they are published, we simply accept that one copy of, say,
The Da Vinci Code
will be exactly like any
other copy. None of the words will ever vary—it will be exactly the same book no matter which copy we read. Not so in the ancient world. Just as books could not easily be distributed en masse (no trucks or planes or railroads), they could not be produced en masse (no printing presses). And since they had to be copied by hand, one at a time, slowly, painstakingly, most books were not mass produced. Those few that were produced in multiple copies were not all alike, for the scribes who copied texts inevitably made alterations in those texts—changing the words they copied either by accident (via a slip of the pen or other carelessness) or by design (when the scribe intentionally altered the words he copied). Anyone reading a book in antiquity could never be completely sure that he or she was reading what the author had written. The words could have been altered. In fact, they probably had been, if only just a little.

Today, a publisher releases a set number of books to the public by having them sent to bookstores. In the ancient world, since books were not mass produced and there were no publishing companies or bookstores, things were different.
¹
Usually an author would write a book, and possibly have a group of friends read it or listen to it being read aloud. This would provide a chance for editing some of the book's contents. Then when the author was finished with the book, he or she would have copies made for a few friends and acquaintances. This, then, was the act of publication, when the book was no longer solely in the author's control but in the hands of others. If these others wanted extra copies—possibly to give to other family members or friends—they would have to arrange to have copies made, say, by a local scribe who made copies for a living, or by a literate slave who copied texts as part of his household duties.

We know that this process could be maddeningly slow and inaccurate, that the copies produced this way could end up being quite different from the originals. Testimony comes to us from ancient writers themselves. Here I will mention just a couple of interesting examples from the first century
C
.
E
. In a famous essay on the problem of anger, the Roman philosopher Seneca points out that there is a dif
ference between anger directed at what has caused us harm and anger at what can do nothing to hurt us. To illustrate the latter category he mentions “certain inanimate things, such as the manuscript which we often hurl from us because it is written in too small a script or tear up because it is full of mistakes.”
²
It must have been a frustrating experience, reading a text that was chock-full of “printer's errors” (i.e., copyist's errors), enough to drive one to distraction.

A humorous example comes to us from the epigrams of the witty Roman poet Martial, who, in one poem, lets his reader know

Copying texts allowed for the possibilities of manual error; and the problem was widely recognized throughout antiquity.

C
OPYING IN
E
ARLY
C
HRISTIAN
C
IRCLES

We have a number of references in early Christian texts to the practices of copying.
⁴
One of the most interesting comes from a popular text of the early second century called
The Shepherd
of Hermas. This book was widely read during the second to fourth Christian centuries; some Christians believed that it should be considered part of the canon of scripture. It is included as one of the books of the New Testament, for example, in one of our oldest surviving manuscripts, the famous fourth-century Codex Sinaiticus. In the book, a Christian prophet named Hermas is given a number of revelations, some of them concerning what is to come, others concerned with the personal and communal lives of Christians of the day. At an early point in the book (it is a lengthy book, longer than any of the books that made it into the
New Testament), Hermas has a vision of an elderly woman, a kind of angelic figure symbolizing the Christian church, who is reading aloud from a little book. She asks Hermas if he can announce the things he has heard to his fellow Christians. He replies that he can't remember everything she has read and asks her to “Give me the book to make a copy.” She gives it to him, and he then relates that

Even though it was a small book, it must have been a difficult process copying it one letter at a time. When Hermas says that he “could not distinguish between the syllables,” he may be indicating that he was not skilled in reading—that is, that he was not trained as a professional scribe, as one who could read texts fluently. One of the problems with ancient Greek texts (which would include all the earliest Christian writings, including those of the New Testament) is that when they were copied, no marks of punctuation were used, no distinction made between lowercase and uppercase letters, and, even more bizarre to modern readers, no spaces used to separate words. This kind of continuous writing is called
scriptuo continua,
and it obviously could make it difficult at times to read, let alone understand, a text. The words
godisnowhere
could mean quite different things to a theist (God is now here) and an atheist (God is nowhere);
⁵
and what would it mean to say
lastnightatdinnerisawabundanceonthetable?
Was this a normal or a supernormal event?

When Hermas says he could not distinguish between the syllables, he evidently means he could not read the text fluently but could recognize the letters, and so copied them one at a time. Obviously, if you don't know what you're reading, the possibilities of making mistakes in transcription multiply.

Hermas again refers to copying somewhat later in his vision. The elderly woman comes to him again and asks whether he has yet handed over the book he copied to the church leaders. He replies that he has not, and she tells him:

And so the text he had slowly copied had some additions that he was to make; and he was to make two copies. One of these copies would go to a man named Clement, who may have been a person known from other texts to have been the third bishop of the city of Rome. Possibly this is before he became the head of the church, as it appears here that he is a foreign correspondent for the Roman Christian community. Was he a kind of official scribe who copied their texts? The other copy is to go to a woman named Grapte, who possibly was also a scribe, perhaps one who made copies of texts for some of the church members in Rome. Hermas himself is to read his copy of the book to the Christians of the community (most of whom would have been illiterate, and so unable to read the text themselves)—although how he can be expected to do so if he still can't distinguish the syllables from one another is never explained.

Here, then, we get a real-life glimpse into what copying practices were like in the early church. Presumably the situation was similar in various churches scattered throughout the Mediterranean region, even though no other church was (probably) as large as the one in Rome. A select few members were scribes for the church. Some of these scribes were more skilled than others: Clement appears to have had as one of his duties the dissemination of Christian literature;
Hermas simply does the task because on this one occasion it was assigned to him. The copies of texts that are reproduced by these literate members of the congregation (some of them more literate than others) are then read to the community as a whole.

What more can we say about these scribes in the Christian communities? We don't know exactly who Clement and Grapte were, although we do have additional information about Hermas. He speaks of himself as a former slave (
Shepherd
1.1). He was obviously literate, and so comparatively well educated. He was not one of the leaders of the church in Rome (he is not included among the “presbyters”), although later tradition claims that his brother was a man named Pius, who became bishop of the church in the mid second century.
⁶
If so, then possibly the family had attained a prestigious status level in the Christian community—even though Hermas had once been a slave. Since only educated people, obviously, could be literate, and since getting educated normally meant having the leisure and money needed to do so (unless one was trained in literacy as a slave), it appears that the early Christian scribes were the wealthier, more highly educated members of the Christian communities in which they lived.

As we have seen,
outside
the Christian communities, in the Roman world at large, texts were typically copied either by professional scribes or by literate slaves who were assigned to do such work within a household. That means, among other things, that the people reproducing texts throughout the empire were not, as a rule, the people who wanted the texts. The copyists were by and large reproducing the texts for others. One of the important recent findings of scholars who study the early
Christian
scribes, on the other hand, is that just the opposite was the case with them. It appears that the Christians copying the texts were the ones who wanted the texts—that is, they were copying the texts either for their own personal and/or communal use or they were making them for the sake of others in their community.
⁷
In short, the people copying the early Christian texts were not, for the most part, if at all, professionals who copied texts for a living (cf. Her
mas, above); they were simply the literate people in the Christian congregation who could make copies (since they were literate) and wanted to do so.

Some of these people—or most of them?—may have been the leaders of the communities. We have reason to think that the earliest Christian leaders were among the wealthier members of the church, in that the churches typically met in the homes of their members (there were no church buildings, that we know of, during the first two centuries of the church) and only the homes of the wealthier members would have been sufficiently large to accommodate very many people, since most people in ancient urban settings lived in tiny apartments. It is not unreasonable to conclude that the person who provided the home also provided the leadership of the church, as is assumed in a number of the Christian letters that have come down to us, in which an author will greet so-and-so and “the church that meets in his home.” These wealthier homeowners would probably have been more educated, and so it is no surprise that they are sometimes exhorted to “read” Christian literature to their congregations, as we have seen, for example, in 1 Tim. 4:13: “Until I come, pay special heed to [public] reading, to exhortation, and to teaching.” Is it possible, then, that church leaders were responsible, at least a good bit of the time, for the copying of the Christian literature being read to the congregation?

P
ROBLEMS WITH
C
OPYING
E
ARLY
C
HRISTIAN
T
EXTS

Because the early Christian texts were not being copied by professional scribes,
⁸
at least in the first two or three centuries of the church, but simply by educated members of the Christian congregations who could do the job and were willing to do so, we can expect that in the earliest copies, especially, mistakes were commonly made in transcription. Indeed, we have solid evidence that this was the case, as it
was a matter of occasional complaint by Christians reading those texts and trying to uncover the original words of their authors. The third-century church father Origen, for example, once registered the following complaint about the copies of the Gospels at his disposal: