Was Jesus an illiterate peasant? (part 1)
by Ben Witherington in Patheos.com—
There is an awful lot of loose talk and pontificating on the basis of loose talk when it comes to the issue of Jesus’ social level, and his ability to read or write, or whether he could have been multi-lingual. Sometimes the discussion is even based on irrelevant data— for example the fact that Galilee was not inhabited by scads of Gentiles (see Mark Chancey’s fine monograph on how Gentile was Galilee). The ethnic makeup of Galilee is frankly irrelevant to the issue of whether Greek was used in the first century in Galilee or not for the very good reason that all of the Holy Land had long since been Hellenized for centuries.
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