The New Testament Wasn't Written Last Week

The New Testament wasn't written last week. Unfortunately, this obvious fact leads to some real difficulties for those of us who read it. In this blog post, I'm going to address three of those difficulties.

Difficulty #1: The Bad Samaritan
     When we hear the word "Samaritan", we almost automatically put "Good" before it in our mind, because probably the most famous parable of all is the parable of the Good Samaritan. The word "Samaritan" has an almost wholly positive connotation. Samaritan's Purse is a charitable relief organization and Samaritan Ministries provides a Christian health cost sharing organization. Some states have even enacted "Good Samaritan" laws to protect people who try to help someone in distress.
     However, when we think "Good Samaritan" we are thinking almost the opposite of what the early New Testament readers would think. I've been in churches where some half-explanation of this has been offered - it's usually along the lines of "Jews really didn't like Samaritans, but Jesus showed them that they should." This has sometimes been accompanied by the message that Jews traveling from Galilee to Judea veered far out of their way to avoid going through Samaria, leaving the congregation with the impression that there was a ridiculous level of prejudice present. All this is an unfortunate result of our reading the New Testament with today's ears, rather than first century A.D. ears.
     Most first century New Testament readers who were familiar with the Samaritans would have thought "Bad Samaritans," and with good reason. The Samaritans were named after the Northern Kingdom of Israel with its capital city of Samaria. Samaria produced a remarkable 200-year perfect record of every single king there being bad, according to the book of 2nd Kings. When God's judgment finally came, the Samaritans were displaced by the Assyrians and partially replaced by foreigners, with the result being a syncretic religion where God was worshipped along with foreign deities. When Nehemiah returned to build the walls of Jerusalem, the Samaritans opposed his work.
     By the time of the New Testament, the Samaritans had adopted a religion similar to but different from Judaism. They accepted only the Torah, the five books of Moses, rejecting the rest of the Old Testament. Furthermore, the Samaritans had altered the text, producing a modified version of the Torah which included in multiple places instructions to worship on Mount Gerizim. You can find the Samaritan Pentateuch on the internet today and compare. They were politically hostile to the Jews, as evidenced by their refusal to let Jesus and his disciples pass through their territory in Luke 9:52-53. No one would think it strange that the horrible charge leveled against Jesus was that he was "a Samaritan and had a demon" (John 8:48).
     So when we read about Samaritans in the New Testament - whether the helpful one in the parable, or the one who was healed and turned back to say thanks, or the lady at the well with a messed up life, we need to think "Bad Samaritan." We need to remember that these folks started from a position of hostility to the people of God. Their religion was heretical and in general they did not show hospitality to Jews. If we carry that impression of Samaritans with us when we read the scripture, then the true import of its message will be much more powerful. Samaritans may be rotten - but they are still our neighbor. Samaritans are woefully lost, but Jesus still wants to save them.

Difficulty #2: The Good Pharisees
     OK, the pharisees were not all good, but when people of the first century thought of pharisees, they were thinking from their own knowledge and experience, which would give a different picture than the primary one we get in the New Testament. Today, pharisees are thought of almost entirely as really legalistic religious people and really hypocritical religious people, due to their sharp arguments with Jesus and His blistering condemnation of them, particularly in passages like Matthew 23. Yet even in the Bible the picture is more nuanced than that.
     The word "pharisee" is derived from the Hebrew word for "separate." The pharisees originated during the period when Greek Hellenistic culture dominated the middle east. The Hellenistic culture was pagan and polytheistic, entirely hostile to the values and beliefs taught in the Bible and held by believing Jews. Furthermore, the Hellenistic culture carried all the aura of belonging to the winners, while those faithful to God were the conquered losers. It was in this environment that the pharisees arose, going against the grain and vowing to be faithful to the Law of Moses and the traditions of their people.
     The pharisees held beliefs more doctrinally correct than those of other Jewish factions. The pharisees believed in the inspiration of the entire Old Testament. They believed in the bodily resurrection of the dead, with the righteous dead going to a place they called "Abraham's bosom," while the wicked would be cast into a "lake of unquenchable fire."  All men would, after death, stand before the "Judgment Seat of God the Word... whom we call Christ." (This description is from Josephus, Discourse to the Greeks Concerning Hades. The wording matches the New Testament so closely that the authenticity of the treatise has been questioned. In any case, the point remains that the pharisees' doctrine on a number of major issues was correct.) The other prominent religious party was the Sadduccees, who believed none of the above, accepting only the Law of Moses as inspired.
     Readers today sometimes get wrong impressions from phrases like "chief priests and pharisees." The chief priests were Sadduccees, and were frequently cross-wise with the pharisees except that there was considerable agreement between the two in their opposition to Jesus. Since the Sadducees controlled the priesthood, they were the more politically powerful faction.
     Some pharisees would eventually convert and follow Jesus (Acts 15:5). The apostle Paul apparently considered himself to still be a pharisee even after his conversion (Acts 23:6). At other times, some pharisees tried to be helpful or were more sympathetic (Luke 13:31, John 3:1 and Acts 5:34).
     All this background draws a more sympathetic picture of the pharisees, yet one is still left with the fact that overall, the gospels are sharply critical of them. What should this teach us? I think that the main thing is this: if we consider ourselves to be conservative Christians, we should read the gospel criticism of the pharisees as a warning to us. We are the ones most like the pharisees. We are the ones who are more committed, like the pharisees. Like the pharisees, we are the ones who are trying to live a life separate from our worldly culture. Like the pharisees, we have our doctrine much more correct than the liberal branches of the Christian faith. So if Jesus warns the pharisees against legalism, we need to take that warning very much to our own heart, as we can easily embrace convictions that are not scripturally mandated. Then, after we do embrace stricter convictions and disciplines, we can feel more righteous than our neighbors because, say, we refrain from something they don't. Like the pharisees, we have a terrific temptation to be hypocrites. Being a hypocrite first requires that one has an actual standard of conduct (like we do). Everyone can then see that we have a standard, and when a Christian falls, or just falls short of the standard, the hypocrisy is a terrible witness.

Difficulty #3: Slaves or Servants?
     Romans 1:1 begins, "Paul, a servant of Jesus Christ..." Or some translations read "slave" instead of servant. One can also find "bond-slave" and "bond-servant." The Greek word is "doulos," and the basic and most correct translation is simply, "slave." But there's a big problem translating the word doulos as slave - the problem is in our own American history. For an American, it is not possible to think of slavery without immediately thinking of the American experience of slavery, which was entirely race-based. If we read "slave" in the Bible it is impossible to get the picture of American black slavery out of our head, since American racial slavery was a dominant factor in our nation's history and left us a heritage that still bedevils us today. But that picture is all wrong. Slavery in the New Testament era was not race-based. So the best translation in terms of accuracy is still "slave," but if a translation chooses another word, I wouldn't blame them.

Literacy During the New Testament Time Period

“And he [Gideon] captured a young man of Succoth and questioned him. And he wrote down for him the officials and elders of Succoth, seventy-seven men.” (Judges 8:14)

I’ve always been intrigued by this seemingly unimportant line in the book of Judges, because it indicates that a random young man who was captured in battle was able to write, and that Gideon was able to read.

There is some belief that only an elite class of people were literate during Jesus’ time. In his book Ancient Literacy, William Harris argues that social and technological conditions were such that mass literacy during the time of the Roman Empire was unthinkable, and literacy rates could not have exceeded 10-15%. This seems to be the general consensus. In this article I am going to argue that literacy in Israel during the Biblical time period was much higher than is generally believed.

Trying to make the case for any rate of ancient literacy is trickier than one might think. If any measurements of such a thing were taken, they are lost to us today. If you use texts of ancient historians like Josephus, you may notice accounts of people reading and writing, but the problem is that Josephus and most other ancient historians wrote about the elites: kings, priests, etc. Everybody agrees that those elite classes could read and write, so these kind of records don’t prove anything either way. A much better source to use to argue for literacy is the Bible itself, because the Bible talks about all kinds of ordinary people and not just the elite classes.

Now when we use the Bible to make a case for a high degree of literacy during Biblical times, it’s not the same as using the Bible to make, say, a case for Christianity. The New Testament authors of course were trying to make a case for Christianity. But they were not trying to manipulate literacy percentages - they were not trying to fool 21^st century readers into thinking more of them could read and write than really could. Therefore, the Bible ought to be considered a reliable source for this area of study even by those who are not believers.

Let’s consider some of the things the Bible says about literacy. Pontius Pilate wrote an inscription for a sign placed above Jesus’ head on the cross (Matthew 27:37). Why would someone write words on a sign? Probably because he figured that people would read it! We know the priests did, because they complained about what the sign said. John says many of the Jews read this inscription (John 19:20).

What about Jesus and his disciples? Jesus the carpenter could read (Luke 4:16). Among his disciples, Matthew could read and write, which would not be surprising for a tax collector. Matthew wrote the first gospel. The fishermen, Peter and John, also wrote New Testament books. Peter and John both had brothers, Andrew and James, and one figures that if one brother could read probably both learned to read. So that makes Jesus and five of the twelve disciples, giving us six out of thirteen readers in a group not taken from the upper echelons of society. This is not to say that the other seven disciples couldn’t read too; we just don’t have any information on them one way or the other.

Luke begins his gospel by saying that many before him had written down accounts of what Jesus did (Luke 1:1).

Jesus repeatedly asked the Pharisees, “Have you not read…” (Matthew 12:3, 12:5, 19:4, 21:16, 21:42). The implication was that of course the Pharisees had read these things. He also asked this of the Sadducees (Matthew 22:31). In Matthew 24:15 and Mark 13:14, the gospels contain the parenthetical statement “let the reader understand.”

So it sure sounds like we have a lot of literate people: Pharisees, Sadducees, priests, governors, tax collectors, doctors, fishermen and carpenters, plus a random captive, a bunch of folks who happened to walk past the cross, and whoever happens to read the gospels. We could add Paul, who wrote letters to Timothy and Titus, who could read, and the other New Testament authors James, Jude and the anonymous author of Hebrews.

Perhaps we should look at some evidence from outside the Bible too.

Inscriptions from a fort in Arad, Israel around 600 B.C. show writing by at least six different individuals in the army there, from the commander down to the deputy quartermaster (http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/210694). This is long before the New Testament period, but it should be assumed that Jewish literacy increased over time, as Judaism came to depend less on the Davidic monarchy and national state and more on the Law and the Prophets being read in synagogues. The teaching of reading in the synagogues eventually became codified in Judaism through the tradition of the Barmitzvah, in which, among other things, a 13 year old boy would read the Torah.

I suspect that the belief in a low level of literacy for New Testament Jews may be based on an analogy to agrarian people in third world countries in more recent times. There the literacy rates were low indeed. But the analogy is arbitrary. Written texts were important to the Jewish people, and the Greco-Roman period overall had a fairly rich development of intellectual life – things not true in most more recent third world agrarian societies. Also, I suspect there is a little of what C.S. Lewis called “chronological snobbery,” which is the wrong-headed idea that we modern people are intelligent while those who lived before us were dumb.

By coincidence, at the time of this writing I am attempting to learn a new foreign language (to be named later) in which the alphabet consists of 33 symbols that are completely foreign to me. I started trying to learn the alphabet in earnest today. This will take me some number of hours, but less than ten, I think. After I learn the alphabet, I will still be no good in this foreign language because I’ve never spoken it and I don’t know any of the words or grammar. However, in Jesus time, to read Hebrew, the Jews needed to learn an alphabet with 22 symbols. After that, the Hebrew language was phonetic and unlike me with my new foreign language, they already spoke it. So that’s all it would take to be literate – several hours of concentrated study. It wouldn’t be that hard. I suspect most of them could read.