By Dr. Don Bierle, FaithSearch President
Helen Bond, a professor of Christian Origins at the University of Edinburgh told The Daily Beast, “If Jesus was a carpenter/mason, as we generally suppose, then it’s not impossible that he had some rudimentary grasp of letters and/or numbers for the purposes of his trade, but I think it very unlikely that Jesus could read or write.”
Author Reza Aslan similarly told The Wall Street Journal, “…I would say the vast majority of biblical scholars would agree that the illiteracy rates in Jesus’s world were somewhere around 98 percent. 98 percent of Jesus’s fellow Jews could neither read nor write.”
Is this true…or naivety…or arrogance…or nonsense?
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