"nightjar" wrote in message
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On 07/02/2020 16:43, harry wrote:
On Wednesday, 5 February 2020 13:14:48 UTC, The Natural Philosopher wrote:
On 05/02/2020 10:01, Tim Lamb wrote:
Point of curiosity.
Would the son of a carpenter and his fishermen disciples be able to read
and write at that time?
Also, what access would there have been to scrolls presumably jealously
guarded by religious authorities?

Jesus spent a lot of time in te temples and had been around the block a
few times before the Teacxhings. I'd say he could read Hebrew all right.
Or like todays Muslims, had *memorised* the bible

Jesus spoke Aramaic, a precursor of Arabic.
All the ordinary people did in that area at that time.

The Jewish holy scrolls are mainly written in Hebrew, with only a smattering of
Aramaic.

Those are the ones of which only fragments have survived. The problem with
assessing all written material from antiquity is that in order to be written and
survive at all it a) needed an investment in time and materials by somebody
with sufficient resources to create such a record, b) it needed to be written on
a durable medium given the right conditions and c) unless it was written on clay
tablets or stone it needed to be preserved by someone rather than destroyed
either deliberately or accidentally during times when preserving other cultures
wasn't necessarily a priority.

As a broad generalisation all written material in antiquity was relatively expensive
to produce and so it was closely guarded by whoever commissioned it but
given the inevitable ravages of time on parchment, papyrus and wood the
amount still extant is probably a tiny percentage of what existed in
antiquity.


michael adams

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