It is unlikely that many first-century CE Palestinian Jews, especially peasants, during Jesus of Nazareth’s (c. 6–4 BCE—c. 30 CE) time, were literate, beyond perhaps being able to write their names, numbers, receipts, and contracts for common transactions. 

Most scholars, therefore, accept the study of ancient literacy provided by William Harris (1989) that around 90% of the rural population was illiterate.

Although young boys were perhaps educated in Torah, this did not take place in established schools or institutions, as modern people might think. Moreover, there is little evidence that such education would have included reading and writing. Further, although Josephus Flavius (37–100 CE) explains that the law required children to read and learn Torah (Against Apion 2.204), he provides no indication that this practice was carried out throughout the villages of Palestine. 

First-century Palestinian Jews were probably bilingual to some extent, having a knowledge of Greek and Aramaic or Hebrew. But because of the nature of the existing epigraphic and literary evidence (ossuaries, scrolls, and Dead Sea Scrolls), it is difficult to determine which of these languages were dominant. Importantly, being illiterate does not mean “unlearned” in terms of family and national history, tradition, and the Scriptures. 

Orality and memory were very important in preserving Jewish identity, and the events remembered may have had a high degree of historicity. An event that occurred was committed to memory and was eventually synthesized into a memorable pattern of speech in order to preserve it.

The sociologist Maurice Halbwachs’ (1992) work regarding collective memory has been considered valuable by some New Testament scholars (Kirk and Thatcher 2005). A major observation of Halbwach’s pertains to the function of memory within religious frameworks, which is that recollections of the past are assimilated within the frameworks of the present. But the past is not completely lost to the present. While the past is continually (re)shaped and (re)collected so as to have meaning in the present, the present is continually informed and guided by the past, especially if the tradition is older, is adopted by a large number of adherents, and is widespread (1992, 183).

References

Halbwachs, Maurice. 1992. On Collective Memory. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

Harris, William V. 1989. Ancient Literacy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Hatina, Thomas R. 2008. “Houesholds, Jewish.” In The Routledge Encyclopedia of the Historical Jesus, edited by Craig A. Evans, 971–986. Routledge (Apple Books).

Kirk, Alan., and Thatcher, Tom. 2005. Memory, Tradition, and Text: Uses of the Past in Early Christianity. Atlanta, GA: Society of Biblical Literature.