Thanks for the tip.
I went a-googling and found http://www1.biu.ac.il/indexE.php Bar-Ilan University.
Bar-Ilan University is the second largest university in Israel, with a student population of approximately 24,500 at the main campus in Ramat Gan, and at the four regional colleges operating under its auspices – in the Jordan Valley, in Safed, in the western Galilee and in Ashkelon.
http://faculty.biu.ac.il/~barilm/illitera.html says that:
Illiteracy in the Land of Israel in the first centuries c.e.
The comparative anthropological study of illiteracy began relatively only recently, and therefore it is no wonder that most of its research is devoted to contemporary societies. Only few studies are related to literacy in Antiquity from which we obviously do not possess such data as we have from Europe in recent centuries.
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Conclusion:
Conclusion
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Comparative data show that under Roman rule the Jewish literacy rate improved in the Land of Israel. However, rabbinic sources support evidence that the literacy rate was less than 3%. This literacy rate, a small fraction of the society, though low by modern standards, was not low at all if one takes into account the needs of a traditional society in the past.
So what makes Scripture as accurate as it is?
http://www.tektonics.org/ntdocdef/orality01.html#chauv says that:
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Oral recall was far more important in ancient socities, particularly Judaism, than we have commonly allowed for; and the techniques used for memorization by ancient societies as a whole have a remarkable similarity to techniques promulgated by today’s “memory improvement” seminars we now pay exorbitant fees to attend. Byrskog notes that “...as we know today from modern studies of visual memory, most people recall — correctly or not — the past through images impressed on their memory. The ancient people were aware of this basic, human characteristic.” He also reports exceptional (and very likely exaggerated, in some cases!) examples from ancient texts of memory feats [162-3]:
Plato says that the Sophist Hippias of Elis “was able to repeat fifty names after hearing them only once.”
Pliny the Elder reports that Cyrus was able to name every man in his army, and that Lucius Scipio remembered the names of every person in the Roman Empire, and that one named Charmadas “recited by heart any book in the libraries.”
Seneca boasted of being able to his youth to repeat 2000 names read to him “and recite in reverse order over two hundred verses his fellow students told him...” He does regard this as miraculous, however!
Though indeed these from Pliny are likely (!) exaggerated, “it is evident that the more detailed and the more voluminous the scope of information stored in the memory could be shown to be, the more impressive it was.” The ideal was to recall exactly, “as detailed as possible,” though obviously the ideal would have limits. Among the Jews, rabbis were encouraged to memorize entire books of the OT, indeed the whole OT, and all of Jewish education consisted of rote memory. Students were expected to remember the major events of narratives - although incidentals could be varied, if the main point was not affected [Wilk.JUF, 32]. (This is reflected well in the differences in reportage that we find in the Gospels, for there we find an 80% agreement in the words of Jesus [Linn.ISP, 106]; see also [More.ScCy, 144], and see comments about ma besay-il here.). Many of the disagreements are cultural variations of the sort we might expect, such as Luke, out of consideration for his Gentile readers, not using the Jewish term “Son of Man” where Matthew or Mark do.) This was a society well-attuned to preserving oral tradition; and as Charlesworth notes, “Oral tradition is not always unreliable; in fact, sometimes it is more reliable than the written word.” [Chars.JesJud, 19] Skeptics who compare oral transmission to the modern children’s game of “telephone” are engaging a hopeless anachronism.
The Seminar also ignores the general Jewish regard for the work of respected teachers. Witherington, writing of the Jewish tendency and capability to preserve such material, says [With.JQ, 48, 80]:
In view of the fact that the earliest conveyors of the Jesus tradition were all, without exception, Jews, we would naturally expect them to treat the teachings of their master with as much respect as did the disciples of other Jewish teachers such as Hillel and Shammai. This is all the more likely if, as happened with Jesus of Nazareth, the teacher suffered an untimely and unexpected end and was highly criticized by some Jews. The need to remember, preserve and defend him against false charges would be acute...
Disciples in early Jewish settings were learners, and, yes, also reciters and memorizers. This was the way Jewish educational processes worked. In fact it was the staple of all ancient education, including Greco-Roman education....those who handed on the tradition would not have seen themselves primarily as creators but as preservers and editors.
In this regard, many have cited the work of Scandanavian scholar Birger Gerhardsson, who argued some years ago that “based on clear parallels of oral transmission processes between early Christianity and Rabbinic Judaism, one could conclude that the oral Jesus tradition was passed along with a high degree of care and continuity.” [Boyd.CSSG, 121] Gerhardsson’s work was, and still is, attacked on the basis of his concentration on Rabbinic practice after 70 AD, which may or may not have had any bearing upon the time of Jesus c. 30 AD [Klopp.FQ, 44]. However, such Rabbinic practices certainly had their precedents, and these may be found in the general Jewish system of education in the first century [Boyd.CSSG, 121-2]:
Here, it is important to recognize the place that ancient Jewish educational practice gave to the memorization of both oral and written tradition...
...Reisner has done a thorough study both of educational practices within the first-century Judaism, as well as the evidence within the Gospels’ tradition related to Jesus and his teaching methods. He has concluded - quite apart from a dependency on Rabbinic parallels - that memory of sacred teachings and traditions was a vital part of both Jewish life in general and Jesus’ teaching program in particular.
And Glenn Miller has added in this regard:
Part of this growing confidence in the accuracy of oral transmission, is the growing awareness of the easy-to-memorize structure of many of Jesus sayings. So Stein (SPI: 200):
It is now clearer than ever before that Jesus was a teacher. In fact the Gospels describe him as a teacher forty-five times and the term ‘rabbi’ is used of him fourteen times. One of his prominent activities was teaching. Like the rabbis, he proclaimed the divine law, gathered disciples, debated with the religious authorities, was asked to settle legal disputes, and supported his teaching with Scripture. He also used mnemonic devices, such as parables, exaggerations, puns, metaphors and similes, proverbs, riddles, and parabolic actions, to aid his disciples and audience in retaining his teachings. Above all he used poetry, “parallelismus membrorum”, for this purpose.
Jeremias has listed 138 examples of antithetical parallelism in Jesus’ teaching that are found in the synoptic Gospels alone (NT Theology, 15f), and to these over fifty other examples of synonymous, synthetic, chiasmic, and step parallelism can be added (Stein, “The Method and Message of Jesus’ Teachings”, Westminster, 1978: 27-32).
In light of all this, it is evident that Jesus ‘carefully thought out and deliberately formulated [his] statements’ (Gerhardsson).
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But even these variants, Vansina adds, are minor, and seldom occur, so that even within one or two generations “beyond the eldest living members of a community,” there is little change. Then even when changes do occur, there is “no doubt as to the actual message and the wording of the tradition.” How much better, then, would the Gospels reflect the words of Jesus in this regard, with the short span between their composition and publication, even by late-date standards?
Boyd (ibid.) also notes that general studies of oral transmission have shown it to be more reliable than critics would presuppose:
Studies by anthropologists such as Albert B. Lord and Jan Vansina have demonstrated that the transmission of traditions in oral societies follow a generally fixed, if flexible pattern - similar to the type witnessed to in the Gospels themselves. Related to this, comtemporary psycholinguistic studies have served to confirm that the techniques that charactrerized Jesus’ oral teaching methods would have made for ‘very accurate communication between Jesus and his followers’ and would have ‘ensured excellent semantic recall.’
Currently, Boyd notes, some NT critics are beginning to acknowledge this kind of data, albeit reluctantly - but the Jesus Seminar has yet to make note of it in any significant fashion. Kloppenborg [Klopp.FQ, 44] dismisses this argument by claiming that there is “no evidence that Jesus himself taught by memorization” - which is patently false, as we have seen above; Jesus used teaching forms that encourarged memorization. But even if He did not, the nature of the society within which Jesus taught would still preserve through memorization. Moreover, we should keep in mind this suggestion by Wright [Wrig.PG, 123]:
If we come to the ministry of Jeus as first-century historians, and forget our twentieth-century assumptions about mass media, the overwhelming probability is that most of what Jesus said, he said not twice but 200 times, with (of course) a myriad of local variations.
Thus, even if we dismiss the mnenomic nature of Jesus’ teaching; even if we ignore (as the Seminar has, in their own Western-mindset fashion) the tremendous capacity of the Oriental memory, we still have to consider that whatever Jesus taught, He would, like any teacher, have taught it many, many times - enough times so that His disciples would have the entire set of lessons committed to memory! Given the data above, we have every reason to believe, in this regard, that the material within the Gospels is historically reliable.
“All good and well, Holding, but MY objection has to do with Acts 4:13. It tells us that John and Peter were illiterate. How did they write the books attributed to them?
Acts 4:13 does NOT indicate that Peter and John were nonliterate — only that they did not study under the Pharasaic Rabbis; and at any rate, that only accounts for 2 out of hundreds of Jesus’ original group of disciples who could act as scribes (like Matthew!) — plus, perhaps it doesn’t occur to you that John and Peter learned to read in the years that followed? Illiteracy is a social problem, but it is not an incurable disease! However, John’s being known to the high priest, as noted in his Gospel, would indicate a certain level of breeding and perhaps literacy; and at any rate, how could the priests have known from a SPEECH that John and Peter could not read or write?
It is well known that the Jews prized literacy more than most cultures, but it is less well know that their oral skills were at least as great as their written ones.
And we must remember that the Gentiles, with the exception of the small population of upper class and merchants, were less literate than the Jews.