Episode Transcript
[00:00:01] How many early christians could read, written by Bart Ehrman, read by Ken Teutsch.
[00:00:09] How many christians by near the end of the New Testament period, say, 100 CE, could read and write? In his intriguing article, christian number and its implications, roman historian Keith Hopkins tries to come up with some ballpark figures. As you may recall, he is assuming that there were christian churches in about 100 communities in the world at the time. We have references to about 50 in our surviving texts, and he is supposing that maybe there were twice as many as we have any evidence for. And he agrees that if Christianity started out with about 1000 believers in the year 40, then with a growth rate of 3.4% per year, by the year 100, there would be just over 7000 christians in the world. That would mean the 100 churches would have an average of 70 believers. Some, of course, would be larger. Think Rome. Others would be much smaller. We're talking averages here. And if Rome did have, say, 120 believers, they would be meeting in different house churches throughout the city.
[00:01:16] Hopkins points out that in antiquity, the population would be roughly 30% male, 30% adult female, and 40% children under the age of 17. And so an average church at the time would have 20 men, 20 women and 30 children. Now, how many of them could read? The reality is that most women did not have a basic education, but that's true of men as well. The overall literacy rate among adult men at the time was low. This is based on other studies, such as William Harris ancient literacy, probably something like ten to 20% among women. What, one to 2%? So let's assume that it was 20%. That would mean that an average church with 70 members, of whom 20 were adult males, would have, on average, four who could read. And of course, their reading abilities would cover a wide range. Some could probably read very painstakingly and slowly. Maybe one or two could read pretty well, say overall, there would be around the year 100, 400 christians in the entire world who could read. Again, these numbers sound overly precise, because they are. No one is saying that we know exactly how many people who call themselves Christian could read in the year 100. But these are not simply blind guesses. They are calculations based on what little surviving evidence we have, references to churches in every surviving source, evidence of rates of literacy in antiquity and so on. I wonder sometimes what the implications of such numbers would be. In particular, I have long been struck by the fact, which I take to be a fact, that Christianity, unlike virtually every other religion we know of, with the exception of Judaism, was a religion that focused on the importance of written texts in a world where few people could read. For Judaism, of course, texts were important. The law of Moses found in the Torah, was central to jewish life and practice. But for christians, I would argue, texts were at least as important, maybe even more so. The scriptures, Jewish Bible were read deeply and seriously to see how they had predicted the coming of Christ. Scripture was an absolute authority for the christians, even as they reinterpreted major portions of the law in order to show why it no longer had to be followed literally for those who believed in Christ.
[00:03:48] But in addition, they had their own writings, accounts of the words and deeds of Jesus which were quoted as authoritative texts, writings of his apostle Paul, books circulating in the names of other apostles already by the end of the first century, say again, 100 CE, there were Christians who maintained that these other writings were just as authoritative, or even more so than the jewish scriptures. These books were read aloud in churches every week. They were studied, they were copied and circulated. Christianity was not strictly a literary movement, of course, but writings had a unique place in it. I stress this point for two reasons. For one thing, this made Christianity, along with Judaism, very different indeed from all the other religions in the Roman Empire. Even though we today think of religions in relationship to their books, for example, the Hebrew Bible, the New Testament, the Koran in ancient Rome, books had very little indeed to do with religion. Roman religions had nothing comparable to a Bible. But for another thing, what do we make of a religion that focuses heavily on books when most of its adherents couldn't even read?
[00:05:03] Many years ago now, I had a graduate student who wrote her master's thesis on this issue, Kim Haynes Eitzen, who went on to be a professor of early Christianity and chair of her department at Cornell. She argued quite sensibly, in my opinion, that the ability to read in a book oriented community was a marker of high status and power. Who would be the leaders of the early churches? The people who could read? They were the ones who had access to the sacred texts. They were the ones who provided access to those texts to others in the community. And most important, they were the ones who would have been trusted to provide the authoritative interpretation of the texts. They were, after all, the only ones who had direct access to them.
[00:05:50] It might occur to someone to ask, if texts were so important in the early christian movement, then why didn't the literate leaders of the churches teach other people how to read?
[00:06:00] There probably were logistical problems in doing so. These literate people were not necessarily able to teach what they knew. People had very little leisure time for activities that in fact take massive amounts of time getting an education.
[00:06:15] And since there were no institutions in the environment that set the pattern for adult education, it may well not have even occurred to someone that it would be a good idea to teach others to read. But in her thesis, Kim argued something else. Literacy provided the bishops of each church, that is, the head honchos, with a source of power, and they were not willing to relinquish it to others. The power of interpreting the religion was in the hands of very few, and that allowed the christian leaders to assert their own authority, their own interpretations of the faith within their communities. It's an interesting idea. Some people might consider it a bit too conspiratorial, but I think there may be something to it in a religion where having the correct understanding of the faith was completely central was in fact of fundamental importance, not just for life in this world, but for guaranteeing a happy afterlife for the christians. God wanted you to have the right religion, and the smart, literate people were the ones who could tell you what that was. Maybe they weren't overly eager to share their power.
