How Educated was Paul?

The introduction to my most recent paper:

At least since the third century Christians have been fighting the accusation of anti-intellectualism. Celsus described Christian doctrine as so “vulgar” that it was only able to sway the ignorant (Against Celsus, 1.27). He accuses the Christians of preying on the least educated people in the ancient world, “children” and “certain women as ignorant as themselves” (3.55). Origen admits that the apostles were not educated, but meets this accusation with an argument from Paul’s letter to the Corinthians,

It was by help of a divine power that these men taught Christianity, and succeeded in leading others to embrace the word of God. For it was not any power of speaking, or any orderly arrangement of their message, according to the arts of Grecian dialectics or rhetoric, which was in them the effective cause of converting their hearers.[1]

Origen, the Christian intellectual force of the third century, responds to anti-intellectual critiques with an argument from Paul. It is widely known that Origen was extremely well educated, but what of Paul?

The question of Paul’s education has been broached many times with varying conclusions. Adolf Deissmann was convinced Paul was “not one of the literary upper classes, but came from the unliterary lower classes and remained one of them.”[2] In comparison with Philo, Mary Andrews argued, “Paul cannot be rated among the intellectuals of his day.”[3] In contrast, E. A. Judge argued that while the degree of Paul’s education is “tantalisingly unclear [sic.]” he certainly had a good measure of it, because “he reacted powerfully against the perversion of human relations which he saw inculcated by the ideals of higher education.”[4] Most recently, Paul’s education has been evaluated fairly high in order to account for his use of the OT.[5] Despite these studies there is not much of a consensus regarding Paul’s educational background.

This state of affairs is somewhat expected in light of the fact that Paul never directly speaks of his education. Even on the rare occasion when he does mention his personal background or credentials (Gal 1.13-14; 2 Cor 11.22-23; Phil 3.4-7; cf. Rom 11.1), he is silent about schooling. If anything, Paul downplays education as a relevant factor to his work. He rejects worldly wisdom (1 Cor 2.1-4) and described himself as a “rank amateur when it came to rhetoric.”[6] Furthermore, he is adamant that his gospel is a direct revelation of God and not based on any human teaching or wisdom (1 Cor 2.6-13; cf. Gal 1.1, 11-12, 16). Thus, it would have been counterproductive for Paul to have flaunted his educational credentials. Analysis of Paul’s education thus requires careful reconstruction.

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[1] The Ante-Nicene Fathers Vol. IV : Translations of the writings of the Fathers down to A.D. 325, eds. Alexander Roberts, James Donaldson and Arthur C. Coxe (Oak Harbor, CA: Logos Research Systems, 1997) 424.

[2] Paul: A Study in Social and Religious History, trans. William E. Wilson (New York: Harper & Brothers, [1912] 1957) 48.

[3] Mary E. Andrews, “Paul, Philo, and the Intellectuals,” JBL 53 no. 2 (1934): 166.

[4] E. A. Judge, “The Reaction Against Classical Education in the New Testament,” ERT 9 no. 2 (1985): 170 and 174 respectively.

[5] Stanley Porter and Andrew W. Pitts, “Paul’s Bible, His Education and his Access to the Scriptures of Israel,” JGRChJ 5 (2008): 9-40.

[6] Ronald F. Hock, “Paul and Greco-Roman Education,” Paul and the Greco-Roman World: A Handbook, ed. J. Paul Sampley (Harrisburg, PA: Trinity Press International, 2003) 198 citing 2 Cor 11.6.

Rethinking Ancient Reading

Pieter J. J. Botha wrote a fascinating article exploring the vast difference between contemporary and ancient reading practices. The article, “New Testament Texts in the Context of Reading Practices of the Roman Period: The Role of Memory and Performance,” published in Scriptura vol. 90 (2005) pgs 621-40, is well worth a read. I just wanted to note some highlights here.

Botha begins by painting the picture of a contemporary reading scene:

“One pulls the chair up to the desk and arranges some of the books and other papers already lying there. Then, glasses are picked up form a preferred place, cleaned [. . .], perched on the nose and steadied behind the ears to gaze at the now lucid pages. Adjustment of the study-lamp and little shifts of the chair and arms to reduce the shadows on the book follow. On reaches for a pencil or highlighter, and the soft sounds of scratching in the margins of book or notebook become audible.” (621)

This is the posture of many a contemporary reader – seated alone at a desk, wrapped in silence, bathed in incandescent light and aided by glasses. Botha observes how this picture is completely anachronistic in the first century. There was no electricity for light, no eye-glasses, no desks, and rarely was reading a silent solitary activity.

In regard to the texts themselves, Botha observes how unfriendly they are to modern reading practices. The dominant textual format—the scroll—was unwieldy and cumbersome. The visual landscape of the ancient text looks overwhelmingly cluttered to the modern eye with no paragraph divisions, punctuation or even spacing between words! “The Greco-Roman text was constructed with almost no aids to the reader, whose task it was to divide the lines correctly into words and sentences” (627).

It is not surprising, then, that ancient readers were expected to know the text before they read. Consider the orator Quintilian’s recommendation for reading,

“There is much that can only be taught by practice, as for instance when the boy should take breath, at what point he should introduce a pause into a line, where the sense ends or begins, when the voice should be raised or lowered, what modulation should be given to each phrase [. . .] I will give but one golden rule: To do all these things, he must understand what he reads.” (Inst. Orat. 1.8.1-2; Botha, 628).

Quintilian suggests practicing a text to the point that the reader knows his “reading” beforehand. Botha (drawing from J. Svenbro) suggests a fascinating illustration. He compares ancient reading practices to moderns “reading” sheet music. It is not impossible to “read” music in silence, but the most common way of doing so is by playing it on a piano to know what it sounds like (629).

Even the act of writing was drastically different in the ancient world. There were no editors, and often lengthy compositions were dictated in one sitting from memory. Pliny even mentions his preference for working out his texts in his head before dictating them to his scribe (Epist. 9.36). Or consider Cicero’s description of how the “speaking mind will forsee what is to follow” when delivering a speech (De Oratore 44.150; Botha, 633). These writing practices describe a very different literary concept that is far more oral than visual.

These ancient reading and writing practices ought to invite us to rethink ancient texts. This is especially so of NT texts which point to oral delivery as the primary means of distribution (1 Thess 5.27; Col 4.16; Rev 1.3). With these oral texts we must not fall into contemporary habits of “seeing” texts, but must have ears to hear.