Episode Transcript
[00:00:01] Did the APostle Peter write first Peter written by Bart Ehrman, read by Ken Teutsch when it comes to the question of whether Peter, the disciple of Jesus, was likely to have written First Peter, as I indicated in my previous post, a major issue to consider is the fact that in antiquity most people could not read, let alone write, let alone compose a sentence, let alone a five page essay, let alone in a foreign language.
[00:00:34] But weren't Jews the exception? Didn't Jewish men all know how to read and write? It turns out the answer is no.
[00:00:44] Again, this is taken from my fuller study forged.
[00:00:49] The fullest, most thoroughly researched and widely influential study of literacy in Palestine during the period of the Roman Empire is by Katherine Hesser, Literacy in Roman Palestine.
[00:01:04] After examining all of the evidence, Hesser concludes that in Roman Palestine the best guesstimate is that something like 3% of the population could read, and that the majority of these would have been in the cities and larger towns. Most people outside of the urban areas would scarcely ever have seen a written text.
[00:01:26] Some smaller towns and villages may have had a literacy level of around 1%.
[00:01:32] Moreover, these literate people were almost always the elite of the upper classes. Those who learned to read learned how to read Hebrew, not Greek.
[00:01:42] And what is more, once again, far more people could read than could write. The people who knew how to write were primarily men who were priests. In fact, for the entire first century ce, the time of Jesus and Simon Peter, we know for certain of only two authors of Palestine who produced literary works, I.e. educated compositions other than tax documents or land deeds or marriage certificates, etc. The Jewish historian Josephus and a man named Justus of Tiberius. We still have Josephus writings, but justices don't survive. Both of these men were at the upper echelons of society. Both were inordinately well educated. We know of no other literary authors for the entire century.
[00:02:31] Was Peter in Josephus and Justus class?
[00:02:35] He wasn't even in the same ballpark. What about Greek education in the land of Peter's birth and upbringing? It is sometimes assumed that since Galilee, the northern part of what we think of as Israel, was occasionally called Galile of the Gentiles, it was overrun by Gentiles in Jesus and Peter's day. And according to a common kind of logic, if there were lots of Gentiles in Galilee, they would have spoken Greek. So to get along, everyone must have spoken Greek. As it turns out, that's not true either.
[00:03:09] The most recent thorough studies of Gentiles in Galilee have been undertaken by an American author Named Mark Chancey, Chancey has studied every archaeological find from Galilee from around the time of the first century and has read every single piece of writing from the period of any relevance and draws a decisive conclusion.
[00:03:30] The Gentiles in Galilee were almost exclusively located in the two major cities, Sepphoris and Tiberias. All of the rest of Galilee was predominantly Jewish. And since most of Galilee was rural, not urban, the vast majority of Jews had no encounters with Gentiles.
[00:03:48] Moreover, Greek is not widely, let alone normally spoken. The vast majority of Jews spoke Aramaic and had no facility in Greek.
[00:03:59] How do all these findings affect our question of whether Peter wrote 1st and 2nd Peter or any other books? Was Peter among the very upper echelons of the educated elite of Palestine who could compose letter essays in Greek?
[00:04:14] Apart from the legendary accounts I have mentioned, all we know about Peter's life comes to us from the New Testament. What we principally learn about him is that before he was a follower of Jesus, he was a fisherman from Capernaum in Galilee.
[00:04:29] In order to evaluate Peter's linguistic abilities, the place to begin then is with Capernaum. A full summary of what we know about Capernaum from Peter's day is provided by an American archaeologist of Palestine, Jonathan Reid. On the basis of archaeological digs and historical sources, it is clear that Capernaum was a historically insignificant village in rural Galilee. It is never mentioned in any ancient source prior to the Gospels. It is scarcely mentioned by any sources after that. It was discovered by archaeologists in the 19th century and has been excavated since then.
[00:05:07] In the time of Jesus, it may have had anywhere between 600 to and 1,500 inhabitants. So say a thousand.
[00:05:14] The archaeological digs have revealed no evidence of any public buildings whatsoever, such as shops or storage facilities.
[00:05:24] The famous synagogue that tourists see on the site today was built centuries later. End of footnote.
[00:05:31] The market for buying food and other necessities must have been held in tents or booths in open, unpaved public areas. The town is on none of the major international trade routes. The Roman roads in the area date from a hundred years after Peter's life. There is no trace of any pagan or gentile population in the town. There are no inscriptions of any kind on any of the buildings. Reid concludes that the inhabitants were almost certainly predominantly illiterate. Archaeologists have found no building structures or materials associated with social elites from the first century. For example, plaster surfaces, decorative frescoes, marble mosaics, red ceramic roof tiles, etc. The houses were roughly constructed out of stone basalt, with mud or clay being used to fill in the gaps they probably had thatched roofs. In short, Peterstown was a backwoods Jewish village made up of hand to mouth laborers who did not have an education.
[00:06:32] Everyone spoke Aramaic. Nothing suggests that anyone could speak Greek.
[00:06:37] Nothing suggests that anyone in town could write.
[00:06:41] As a lower class fisherman, Peter would have started work as a young boy and never attended school. There was in fact probably no school there. If there was a school he probably didn't attend. If he did attend it, it would have been in order to receive a rudimentary training in how to read Hebrew. But that almost certainly never happened. Peter was an illiterate peasant.
[00:07:05] This should come as no surprise really. As it turns out, there is New Testament evidence about Peter's education level. According to Acts 4:13, both Peter and his companion John, also a fisherman, were agramatoi, a Greek word that literally means unlettered, that is illiterate.
[00:07:24] And so is it possible that Peter wrote one Peter? We have seen good reasons for him not writing second Peter, as we will see in later posts, and some reason for thinking he didn't write first Peter, but it is highly probable that in fact he could not write at all. I should point out that the book of 1 Peter is written by a highly literate, highly educated Greek speaking Christian who is intimately familiar with the Jewish scriptures in their Greek translation, the Septuagint.
[00:07:54] This is not Peter.
[00:07:56] It is theoretically possible of course, that Peter decided to go to school after Jesus resurrection. In this imaginative, not to say imaginary scenario. He learned his Alphabet, learned how to sound out syllables and then words, learned to read and learned to write. Then he took Greek classes and mastered Greek as a foreign language and started memorizing large chunks of the Septuagint before taking Greek composition classes and learning how to compose complicated and rhetorically effective sentences. And then toward the end of his Life, he wrote 1 Peter.
[00:08:31] Is this scenario plausible?
[00:08:33] Apart from the fact that we don't know of adult education classes in antiquity, there's not any evidence that they existed. I think most reasonable people would conclude that Peter probably had other things on his mind and on his hands. After he came to believe that Jesus was raised from the dead, he probably never thought for a single second about learning how to become a rhetorically skilled Greek author.
[00:08:58] Some scholars have suggested that Peter did not directly write 1 Peter, but that he indirectly wrote it, for example by dictating the letter to a scribe. Some have noted that the letter is written through Silvanus 5:12 and thought that maybe Silvanus wrote down Peter's thoughts for him. I have dealt with this question of whether scribes or secretaries actually ever composed such letter essays on the blog before a series of posts back in August 2012, maybe I should repost them.
[00:09:30] The answer will be almost certainly not, but for now I can say at least a couple of words about the case of First Peter. First off, scholars now widely recognize that when the author indicates that he wrote the book through Silvanus, he is indicating, according to the common usage of the phrase, not the name of his secretary but but the person who was carrying the letter to the recipients.
[00:09:55] Authors who used secretaries don't refer to them in this way, but why not suppose that Peter used someone else other than Silvanus as a secretary? It would help to imagine how this theory is supposed to work exactly. Peter could not have dictated this letter in Greek to a secretary any more than he could have written it in Greek. That would have required him to be perfectly fluent in Greek and to have mastered rhetorical techniques in Greek and to have had an intimate familiarity familiarity with the Jewish scriptures in Greek. None of that is plausible. Nor can one easily think that he dictated the letter in Aramaic and the secretary translated it into Greek. The letter does not read like a Greek translation of an Aramaic original, but as an original Greek composition with Greek rhetorical flourishes. Moreover, the letter presupposes the knowledge of the Greek Old Testament. So the person who composed the letter, whether orally or in writing, must have known the scriptures in Greek.
[00:10:54] Is it possible then, that the historical Peter directed someone to write a letter, basically told him what to say and let him produce it? Apart from the fact that there are already good grounds for thinking that the letter was written after Peter had died, since it alludes to Rome's destruction of Jerusalem in the year 70, there is a far more serious problem.
[00:11:15] Where do we find any evidence that something like this ever happened in the Greek and or Roman worlds where someone produced a letter essay for someone else and put his rather than his own name on it?
[00:11:29] So far as I know, there is not a single instance of any such procedure attested from antiquity or any discussion in any ancient source.
[00:11:38] There are plenty of instances of another phenomenon, however.
[00:11:42] This is the phenomenon of Christian authors writing pseudonymous works, falsely claiming to be a famous person.
[00:11:49] That happened all the time, with a multitude of examples found in Greek, Roman, Jewish and Christian circles.
[00:11:56] Ancient scholars called books like that a falsely inscribed or a lie or an illegitimate child.
[00:12:05] Modern people would simply call it a forgery, even though most people, including those of us who have written books about it with the word in the title shudder a bit to see the word used, but even so, that's what it would be a book written by someone claiming to be a famous person, at least to the intended audience, assuming they'd be deceived.
[00:12:28] If one Peter is in fact pseudonymous, then it almost certainly was written after 70 CE.
[00:12:35] Usually it is dated sometime toward the end of the first century.
