As for literacy... that's a good point. How could illiterate fishermen have written the Gospels (I suppose they could have learned, or dictated them to someone else). It's just odd - and I won't apologize for this perception - that out of all the people connected to this "ministry", that NOBODY kept any written account of ANY of it while it was happening.
Well of course all the Gospels are anonymous, so nobody knows who wrote them. There's no reason to think any of them was written by someone who was actually there though - quite the reverse, given that they appear to be based on earlier oral traditions.
I can't even remember all the previous conversations I've had today (it's currently just after 3 pm here), let alone conversations from 40 years ago (I remember a few, but not enough to write a religious text based on them).
The thing you have to bear in mind is that people in antiquity didn't think like us, or act like us. This is particularly so when it comes to writing. Even literate people were often suspicious of the value of writing. Plato's
Phaedrus has a famous passage where he argues that the written word is a pale imitation of the spoken word and fundamentally unreliable. And even literate people valued memory over reading. It was usual for people to memorise entire texts, even if they were literate; this is what enabled expert exegetes such as Paul to interpret one passage in the light of another, because they had memorised them. Jerome memorised
the entire Bible by heart, a feat which was not as unusual as you'd think. So yes, if Jesus' ministry were happening today, you might think it odd that none of the dozens or even hundreds of disciples that he apparently had didn't write anything down about it. But that doesn't apply in antiquity, because people were simply more used to relying on memory, even if they were literate.
The only text I can think of off-hand from antiquity that we would consider a "journal", kept solely for the author's own use, is Marcus Aurelius'
Meditations, which is striking simply because of its rarity. There are campaign journals such as Alexander the Great's, but they were kept because they were needed for logistics, not because the writers thought there was intrinsic value in writing them down. Another possible example is
The Passion of Saints Perpetua and Felicity, which is apparently based on a journal by Perpetua, but here again she was presumably writing this with an eye to the edification of her community. The most personal writings that we eve get from antiquity are usually letters rather than journals.
This is perhaps partly because people read more slowly in antiquity than we do today. Punctuation and even word spacing as we know them today didn't exist. writinglookedlikethis And that meant that you couldn't scan a text and quickly take in each word as a unit as we do today. You had to speak it out loud and work out the words as you sounded them. Hence the famous passage in Augustine's
Confessions where he says that Ambrose was so clever he could read without moving his lips. Reading, even in private, was a performative act and a slow one compared to how we read today. So it's little wonder that people didn't typically keep journals or indeed write at all unless they were specifically intending to send a message to somebody else (or to write a book for general circulation), quite apart from issues of the cost and availability of writing materials. They simply did not have the writing-based culture that we do.
BTW,
@Plotinus... what do you make of someone who keeps insisting that the world is only 2000 years old, yet also insists that she's Christian? She's BS!C for a number of reasons, but I can't wrap my head around someone with this notion.
I'm with you on that. I can't understand how someone could be so unaware of the basic facts about their own religion.
