<< 1 >>
Rating: 
Summary: Why didn't Christ's followers take notes?
Review: One of the mysteries of Christianity is the lack of proof that Jesus ever existed. Most of what we rely on is found in the New Testament, none of which was penned during Christ¹s lifetime. Paul¹s letters to various Christian groups around the Middle East were written about twenty years after Christ¹s death  and Paul never met Christ while He was alive. The four Gospels all appear to date to after 70 A.D., and it is unlikely that they were written by writers who ever met Jesus. So, all of our main writings about Christ are second hand accounts. This begs the question of why Jesus¹ followers weren¹t furiously taking notes while He was alive. Had Christ arrived today, he would have easily entered people¹s diaries, emails, newspaper articles, magazine profiles, police crime reports, probably even some television broadcasts. In short, anyone who was making this much of an impact on even a small number of people would have created a paper trail. Indeed, in Brooklyn right now, a Jewish sect called the Lubavitchers are furiously debating whether their latest rebbe, who died in 1994, is really a Messiah who will return from the dead. That debate is creating a big paper trail. Was life so different in Jesus¹ time that no one took notes? Were diaries unknown? Why didn¹t the Romans, a bureaucratic state with a paper obsession, at least record some details of Jesus¹ death? One possible answer to this mystery is provided by Alan Millard's book, Reading and Writing in the Time of Jesus. Millard has studied the state of literacy and writing in the first century and beyond in Judea. Much of his evidence is fragmentary - pieces of broken pots were used as scrap 'paper' during this period, showing that non-scholars often wrote down messages to each other. Erasable wax tablets shaped like books were often used on the job for writing down accounts and ledgers. The weekly services at the Jewish synagogues required the men to be able to read from the scared scrolls. Millard concludes that literacy certainly existed among common Jews, so there's no reason to believe that Christ's memory could only be handed down orally. The problem, Millard argues, is that so little written material of any kind has survived the ravages of decay. There is precious little original documents written by Roman officials from first century Judea, Millard argues, so we shouldn't be surprised at the dearth of letters and messages describing Christ's actions. Lots of people could have been writing down their impressions of this new Jewish teacher, without any of it having survived. Indeed, Millard argues that the few documents we have from this period come from the arid deserts of Egypt, where the environment preserved scrolls written at this time. Moisture, and the constant recycling of written material, may be the prime culprits for the absence of additional written evidence of Christ's life. (...)
<< 1 >>
| 
