Were the people of first century Palestine primitive?

People in the Roman Empire of the first century AD were not nearly as ignorant as is often imagined. It may be helpful here to give a brief history of the development of writing. Masses of cuneiform tablets have been discovered in the Middle East area going back to 3,000 BC. The so-called Proto-Canaanite alphabetic script, from which our modern alphabet eventually developed, is known from early inscribed objects; a potsherd from Gezer (c. 1800 - 1650 BC), a plaque from Shechem of approximately the same period, a dagger from Lachish (c. 1700 - 1550 BC), and others. The so-called Proto-Sinaitic texts written by slaves working in the turquoise mines of the Sinai Peninsula, c. 1500 BC, are of much the same type.

In 1929 a library of tablets was discovered in the North Canaanite city of Ugarit (Ras Shamra). They were written in a thirty-letter alphabet - a cuneiform imitation of Proto-Canaanite - quite close to Canaanite and so to Hebrew, and dated to about 1400 BC. By the mid-eleventh century BC the twenty-two letters of the later Proto-Canaanite had become the standardised Phoenician script. Presumably this was taken over by the incoming Israelites in which to write their Hebrew language. The Greek alphabet, from which our English alphabet is derived, developed from the Phoenician script. The earliest known Hebrew inscription is the Gezer Calendar (c. 925 BC). From then on writing became more common.

About 295 BC Ptolemy I, who succeeded Alexander as King of Egypt, appointed Demetrius, a former pupil of Aristotle, to build a library in Alexandria. Earliest reports assert that Demetrius had at his disposal a large budget to collect "all the books of the world" Successive Ptolemaic kings were indomitable in their efforts to acquire them. The universal library that was envisaged had also "to contain writings of all nations." The Royal Library proved too small for the wealth of books acquired, so Ptolemy III (246-221 BC) decided to attach the newly built Serapeum as a branch library.

"The New Testament accounts can't be dismissed simply on the basis of the primitive nature of society in first century Palestine!"

The total estimate of manuscripts in both libraries is thought to have reached about half a million scrolls. This library was a major factor in facilitating the development of knowledge generally in the three centuries before Christ, particularly in the fields of mathematics, medicine and astronomy. Other extensive libraries developed in the Roman Empire, the largest being at Ephesus and Rome. When the library at Alexandria burned down in the first century BC, the Roman general, Mark Anthony, gave his beloved Cleopatra 200,000 manuscripts from his cherished library at Pergamum in Asia Minor. Education was highly valued in the world of Jesus' day, not least amongst the Jews. The Dead Sea Scrolls are an excellent example of writing in Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek from the first centuries BC and AD.

Dr. Paul Barnett, in his excellent book Is the New Testament History?,[1] gives us a helpful perspective in this:

[One] problem for us is to think of history in neat progressive terms. Old means primitive; recent means developed. While this may be true of history overall, it is by no means true that the tenth century is an exact midpoint in terms of ‘progress’ between Jesus in the first century and our generation in the twenty first. In many ways the first century, when Graeco-Roman society was at its height, was more civilized than the Middle of ‘Dark’ Ages. In fact, we know more about the Roman emperor Augustus than about the eleventh century English king Harold, even though the latter is a thousand years closer to us than the former. It is fortunate for the study of Christian origins that Jesus was born in such a literate, well-documented period.

[1] Hodder & Stoughton, 2003, ©.

E. E. Ellis ("New Direction in Form Criticism," in idem, Prophecy and Hermeneutics in Early Christianity, 1978) has for some time maintained that the writing of Jesus traditions and the circulation of such written records among Jesus' disciples could well have begun already during Jesus' ministry, while Alan Millard, Reading and Writing in the Time of Jesus, has recently argued this case on the basis of the widespread presence of writing in Jewish Palestine at the time of Jesus.

Luke, who wrote two-fifths of the New Testament, was an educated Greek. Professor E. M. Blaiklock, who was a lecturer in the classics of Greece and Rome at Auckland University, and who had studied in that field for 40 years, says:

Luke is a consummate historian, to be ranked in his own right with the great writers of the Greeks.

Paul wrote the next biggest chunk of the New Testament. He was highly educated in three cultures, Roman, Greek and Jewish. F. F. Bruce, a highly respected British Classical and New Testament scholar, thoroughly familiar with classical Greek, wrote of Paul:

I have learnt to regard Paul as the greatest man who ever wrote in Greek. If anyone should call him the greatest writer of all time, I would not dispute that claim.

The New Testament accounts can't be dismissed simply on the basis of the primitive nature of society in first century Palestine!