Reading and Writing in the Apostolic Age

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For both Jews and Gentiles, books were central to the function of religion, government and everyday life in first century Palestine. Jews honored books as the means by which God had ordained to write the Ten Commandments and to preserve the oral traditions of the patriarchs and prophets. Greeks and Romans maintained a thriving literary culture centered on the Hellenistic and Ciceronian traditions of their peoples. Christians continued and synthesized these traditions, putting the Gospel in writing only a few decades after the Crucifixion and writing letters to one another even earlier. This essay will explore the materials, languages, genres, logistics and expressions of books in these three traditions: Jewish, Greco-Roman and Christian.

In the first century world of the Roman Empire, books were almost exclusively in the form of scrolls made out of papyrus or animal-skin parchment. Due to scroll limitations, works were published as scroll-length books, like most books of the Bible; as a multivolume collection (like Psalms); or as condensed versions called epitomes (like 1-2 Chronicles and 2 Maccabees).[1] Bound books, or codices, did not become standard until they were popularized by Christians, who used them almost exclusively “from the very beginning”,[2] eventually becoming “a mark of Christian identity.”[3] Papyrus was considered a cheaper and easier-to-use alternative to parchment and so was the most common material for writing. In the drier climates around the Mediterranean, papyrus was quite durable, and its storage in the tombs of Egyptians has ensured its longevity for millennia.[4] Many letters of papyrus have even been found preserved in the sands of the Egyptian desert.[5] Black ink was dry, not liquid, until wetted for use and made from a combination of lamp-black and gum, while red ink was made with sikra, a red powder also used for make-up. Writing styli were made from split reeds called calami, some of which were bronze and resembled fountain pens.[6]

All letters of any importance included a signatory postscript written in the hand of the sender rather than the scribe (e.g. Col 4:18) and a personal seal in clay, wax or lead.[7] However, many ancient authors of longer books, especially Jews (including the authors of most books of the Bible) who were not writing for reputation or protecting their intellectual property in a world without copyright laws like many Roman writers, did not sign their works. Between hiring a scribe and the cost of papyrus, ancient documents were very expensive: “a single, finished copy of Romans would have cost the equivalent of $868!” Thus many authors had rich patrons, one of whom may have been St. Luke's correspondent Theophilus, as his Gospel would have cost roughly $2,377 per copy.[8]

Jews rarely wrote upon stone, perhaps out of reverence for the tablets of the Law, whereas Greeks and Romans did so frequently. Jews did occasionally write on metal, including the copper scrolls of the Essenes found at Qumran. Unlike ancient Mesopotamians, Jews did not write on clay tablets, the square Hebrew alphabet being unsuited to it (unlike cuneiform), but like all Mediterranean cultures they did use ostraka, potsherds for brief messages in ink,[9] as well as wax-coated wooden tablets that could be “blotted out” or erased, hence the use of this term in Scripture (e.g. Is 48:19; Rom 4:7).[10] But, like Greeks and Romans, most of their writing was on perishable papyrus. However, in the East it had been common for some time to use parchment for longer works, the word (derived from Latin pergamena) referencing Pergamon where it was generally made; the Septuagint's source documents were originally on parchment, as recorded in the Letter of Aristeas, and St. Paul asked Timothy to bring his parchment scrolls when he came. (2 Tim 4:13)[11] One common practice among ancient Jews was to wear tefillin, or phylacteries, small leather boxes containing parchment scrolls inscribed with verses from Scripture, on their foreheads, taking certain verses, e.g. Exodus 13:9, 16, Deuteronomy 6:8, 11:18, literally.[12] Christ also mentioned this practice in Matthew 23:5.

Although Roman roads made mail somewhat easier, it was still difficult to transport documents over long distances. They were often carried by individual messengers, whether slaves or professionals, or else by travelers asked to carry letters with them, who would often accompany caravans for safety. Rome also maintained a courier postal ministry for official messages, and the Sanhedrin employed special messengers to stay in contact with other Sanhedrins in the Diaspora. It could take weeks for a letter to arrive from the Holy Land to Rome or vice versa. Both Romans and Jews also wrote public notices on walls, including on the Temple, officially or as graffiti, but information spread first and most rapidly by word of mouth.[13] People rarely wrote alone. They would usually dictate to a scribe while in the company of friends, some of whom would make recommendations and affect the writing, like Stephanas, who reminded St. Paul that he had baptized him. (1 Cor 1:16, 16:17) They also did not write on desks or tables but on their knee or a tunic draped across their lap.[14]

As rabbinic Judaism developed following the destruction of the Temple, synagogues became more elaborate. By at least the time of the synagogue at Dura-Europos in the third century A.D., synagogues included an Ark of the Torah, where the books of the Law were kept, facing toward Jerusalem. Worn out or heretical scrolls were stored in a separate “book-cemetery”, or genizah, near the synagogue.[15] Similar treasuries may have housed scrolls in the Temple, according to the contemporary Jewish historian Flavius Josephus.[16] The Essenes, whose primary monastery was at Qumran near the Dead Sea (in order to “[i]n the wilderness prepare the way of the Lord” Is 40:3), kept scrolls with copies of biblical books and many of their own works, some of which survive today. The scrolls themselves were likely part of the library of the Qumran monastery, hidden in caves from the assault of the Romans when the Essenes were wiped out during the Great Jewish Revolt. Qumran also included a scriptorium for copying books, corroborated by dried ink found at the site.[17]

By the first century, Aramaic had been the vernacular language of the Jews for several centuries, following their conquest by the Assyrians. Many, including Jesus and some of His disciples, also would have known Greek as the international language.[18] The Jewish historian Eupolemus, from the 2^nd century B.C., wrote that Moses brought the first alphabet to Israel from the Phoenicians, the alphabet having become popular around the same time as the Exodus. Just before the birth of Christ, the rabbis replaced the Phoenician-based alphabet with the Aramaean square version still used for Hebrew today; it then became standard for both Hebrew and Aramaic but the Samaritans and some of the Dead Sea scrolls still retained the old form. Knowledge was mostly transmitted as oral tradition, but nevertheless Jews greatly valued books, due to the Law being inscribed in writing by God Himself: most Jews could not ordinarily own and keep copies of Scripture in their house due to the sacredness of the books.[19]

The New Testament gives the impression that most Jews at the time were at least basically literate.[20] Modern scholarship has generally concluded, however, that most people in the first century, whether Jew or Gentile, were illiterate or semiliterate. This is why scribes in both cultures were so important, as even those who could read often employed scribes for their writing skill; the scribe would draft the desired message in his own words, or take dictation if the sender was able to communicate eloquently, and the scribe would then compose it on parchment or papyrus based on his notes and edit the finished text in his own style. Both Jews and Christians had literate men to read Scripture in their synagogues and churches.[21] Hebrew was only known fluently by trained scribes and clerics. In synagogues, a Meturgeman explained the Hebrew readings in Aramaic for the uneducated.[22]

Alongside Scripture (in Hebrew versions and the Greek Septuagint), whose canon was disputed amongst different Jewish sects,[23] Jews also read other traditional and contemporary works, including apocrypha and pseudepigrapha, such as the Books of Enoch, the Ascension of Isaiah, the Life of Adam and Eve, the Letter of Aristeas describing the translation of the Septuagint and many others. In the centuries following the destruction of the Temple in 70 A.D., Jews began writing down what in the time of Christ were preserved primarily as memorized oral tradition, including Aramaic commentaries on Scripture (Targums) and exegesis (midrash). Jews learned Scripture by memorization through recitation, as in modern Talmudic schools, from childhood, thus filling their language with biblical allusions and giving it a poetic structure.[24]

As in the Hellenistic culture which they absorbed, Romans greatly valued books. They had many libraries, both of their own and taken over from the Greeks, including the great library of Alexandria. They also kept libraries in temples, served by scribes, including one in the Temple of Apollo in Rome and one in the Temple of Serapis in Alexandria.[25] Their libraries tended to use wall niches to store scrolls, with a central reading room for study and discussion. An international publishing industry flourished with bookstores in major cities. Accordingly, based on evidence from Pompeii, Roman literacy at this time “had reached a high level… not limited to an upper elite crust” of society.[26] Koine Greek was the international language, the standard tongue in the eastern Mediterranean and the language of the elites in non-Greek areas, such as Palestine. Latin was only used for official decrees (always accompanied by Greek translations)[27] or as the common tongue of native Italians, or else as a literary language in the Ciceronian tradition. Romans wrote in many different literary genres, including histories, biographies, travelogs, scholarly works, cookbooks,[28] letters, plays, novels and epic poems.

The early Christians wrote in genres borrowed from both the Jews and Romans. Dr. Brant Pitre identifies the gospels as having been written in the ancient genre of historical biographies (Greek bioi) based on eyewitness testimony, called “memoirs” by St. Justin Martyr, fitting the Hellenistic genre by focusing on the life and death of a single person, being between 10,000-20,000 words, commonly beginning with a genealogy and not necessarily being arranged in chronological order or exhaustive of the facts, as Roman writers explained.[29] The letters of St. Paul and the other letters contained in the New Testament adopted common epistolary forms but also included many of their own unique features: St. Paul’s shortest letter, Philemon (355 words), is longer than Cicero's average letter (295 words); his longest letter, Romans (7,111 words), is eighty-two times the average length of ancient letters.[30]

Early Christians (excluding the Gnostic writings) wrote in a wide range of genres, including hagiographies of saints, like the Acts of Paul and Thecla, catechetical works like the Didache, manuals like the Apostolic Constitutions, visionary works like the Shepherd of Hermas, hymnals like the Odes of Solomon and even narratives reflecting older traditions like the Protoevangelium of James.[31] Christ and the early Christians utilized many literary devices of the Jews, such as chiasmus, rabbinic hyperbole, parables, etc., and were also influenced by some of the non-biblical books read by Jews, with the Epistle of Jude even incorporating the dispute between St. Michael the Archangel and Satan over the body of Moses as recorded in the Assumption of Moses (Jude 1:9) and passages from the Book of Enoch (Jude 1:14-15) into the inspired canon of Scripture.[32]

Like today, books were central to the lives of peoples in first century Palestine. Yet they faced many challenges and used different materials, styles and genres of writing than are familiar to most modern people. For this reason, learning more about the role and application of books in the ancient world can be helpful to understanding its great contributions to history.

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[1] Jimmy Akin, The Bible is a Catholic Book (El Cajon, CA: Catholic Answers, 2019), 94-95.

[2] Lionel Casson, Libraries in the Ancient World (New Haven, CT: Yale, 2001), 129.

[3] Akin, The Bible is a Catholic Book, 95-96.

[4] Henri Daniel-Rops, Daily Life in Palestine at the Time of Christ, trans. Patrick O’Brian (London: Phoenix, 2002), 276-277.

[5] Casson, Libraries in the Ancient World, 54-55.

[6] Casson, Libraries in the Ancient World, 277.

[7] Akin, The Bible is a Catholic Book, 84-85; Daniel-Rops, Daily Life in Palestine at the Time of Christ, trans. Patrick O’Brian, 279-280.

[8] Akin, The Bible is a Catholic Book, 88-89, 92.

[9] Casson, Libraries in the Ancient World, 24.

[10] Casson, Libraries in the Ancient World, 274-275; New Catholic Bible (Catholic Book Publishing Corp, 2019), at BibleGateway, www.biblegateway.com.

[11] Casson, Libraries in the Ancient World, 52; Daniel-Rops, Daily Life in Palestine at the Time of Christ, trans. Patrick O’Brian, 275-276.

[12] Julius H. Greenstone, Joseph Jacobs, Ludwig Blau, et al., “Phylacteries (‘tefillin’),” in Jewish Encyclopedia, at https://jewishencyclopedia.com.

[13] Akin, The Bible is a Catholic Book, 85-86; Daniel-Rops, Daily Life in Palestine at the Time of Christ, trans. Patrick O’Brian, 280-281.

[14] Akin, The Bible is a Catholic Book, 83-84.

[15] Daniel-Rops, Daily Life in Palestine at the Time of Christ, trans. Patrick O’Brian, 279; Solomon Schechter and Elkan N. Adler, “Genizah (lit. ‘hiding’ or ‘hiding-place’),” in Jewish Encyclopedia, at https://jewishencyclopedia.com.

[16] Flavius Josephus, “The Antiquities of the Jews,” in The Complete Works of Flavius Josephus, trans. William Whiston (2014), §7, 17. Kindle.

[17] John Bergsma, Jesus and the Dead Sea Scrolls (New York: Image, 2019), 3, 15. Kindle; Daniel-Rops, Daily Life in Palestine at the Time of Christ, trans. Patrick O’Brian, 278.

[18] Akin, The Bible is a Catholic Book, 67.

[19] Daniel-Rops, Daily Life in Palestine at the Time of Christ, trans. Patrick O’Brian, 270, 273, 278-279.

[20] Daniel-Rops, Daily Life in Palestine at the Time of Christ, trans. Patrick O’Brian, 272-273.

[21] Akin, The Bible is a Catholic Book, 79-80.

[22] Daniel-Rops, Daily Life in Palestine at the Time of Christ, trans. Patrick O’Brian, 268.

[23] Akin, The Bible is a Catholic Book, 66.

[24] Daniel-Rops, Daily Life in Palestine at the Time of Christ, trans. Patrick O’Brian, 267, 271-272, 276, 284-285.

[25] Casson, Libraries in the Ancient World, 81, 138.

[26] Casson, Libraries in the Ancient World, 78-79, 82, 109-110.

[27] Daniel-Rops, Daily Life in Palestine at the Time of Christ, trans. Patrick O’Brian, 268-269.

[28] Casson, Libraries in the Ancient World, 41.

[29] Brant Pitre, The Case for Jesus (New York: Image, 2016), 70-80.

[30] Akin, The Bible is a Catholic Book, 87.

[31] Akin, The Bible is a Catholic Book, 119-120; George Reid, “Apocrypha,” in Catholic Encyclopedia, ed. Kevin Knight, vol. 1 (New York: Robert Appleton Company, 1907), at New Advent, www.newadvent.org.

[32] Notes for New Catholic Bible, at BibleGateway, www.biblegateway.com.