Re: If Jesus Intended for Christianity to be Exclusively a “Religion of the Book,” Wh
This whole nonsense that the Roman and Greek cultures, to say nothing of the extremely literate Jewish culture, were illiterates is such garbage!
The Romans and the Greeks had a long history of reading and writing. At the time of the NT, there were millions of papers used by ordinary people for things like shopping lists, letters to family and other written words, that are being uncovered and catalogued today. This was the common people who spoke the common (Koine) Greek. Not the amaneusis or scholars.
The Hebrew boys not only learned to read and write in the synagogue schools, they memorized large parts of the OT. Both the Greek and the Hebrew OTs. So they knew at least two languages. In Palestine, at the time of Christ, most also knew Aramaic. That is a lot more languages than the average North American knows. (Not saying Europe, they have the multi-language thing mastered there!)
We won't even get into the low level of reading and writing, the mistakes which place so many people in the category of being barely literate today!
As for the OP's question about why GOD did not invent the printing press for 1400 years, in fact, it was MEN who invented the printing press. Up till that time, do you think God had no method of preserving his Word? In fact, the monks in Byzantine Empire in particular spent their whole lives copying the whole NT, and there are more than 5000 manuscipts from the early times in the church till the invention of the printing press. Those are just the preserved ones, we have no idea how many thousands were burned, destroyed or lost forever. Those early printing presses probably were just about as slow as the monks copying the texts by hand.
The whole point is, God did have a plan. He sent the gospel into the Roman world, with safe roads and seas, as the Roman army protected everyone. People all read and wrote in Greek. The NT was written in Greek so it could be read to both Jews and Gentiles. And studied by everyone! The time Jesus was born, lived and died was the fullness of time. The gospel went out into the world at an amazing rate! In just over 300 years, Christianity had spread to the known world.
Now, the Middle Ages is another story with regards to literacy, but the Roman times were very literate, not a bunch of uneducated people sitting around waiting for Zeus to drop fame and fortune in their laps, like some cultures are today! Not Zeus, of course!
If you want sources, just say so! I can post them!
....while hiding your agenda. I wasn't born again yesterday....
