Forged (10 page)

One of the reasons virtually all scholars agree that Peter did not actually write this letter is that the situation being presupposed appears to be of much later times. When Peter himself died—say, the year 64 under Nero—there was still eager expectation that Jesus would return soon; not even a full generation had passed since the crucifixion. It was only with the passing of time that the Christian claim that all would take place “within this generation” (Mark 13:30) and before the disciples had “tasted death” (9:1) started to ring hollow. By the time 2 Peter was written, Christians were having to defend themselves in the face of opponents who mocked their view that the end was supposed to be imminent. So “Peter” has to explain that even if the end is thousands of years off, it is still right around the corner by God's calendar; everything is still on schedule.

Moreover, the author of 2 Peter is writing at a time when there was already a collection of Paul's letters in circulation, and these letters were being considered on a par with the Old Testament “Scriptures” (3:16). This could not have been during Paul's lifetime,
²²
and early church tradition indicates that both Peter and Paul were killed during the reign of Nero.

These are among the reasons for thinking that 2 Peter almost certainly could not have been written by Peter.
²³
And there is one more compelling reason. There are excellent grounds for thinking that Peter could not write.

Simon Peter, Ancient Palestine, and Literacy

W
HAT DO WE KNOW
about literacy and the ability to write in the ancient world, especially in rural Palestine, where Simon Peter was born and raised? Scholars of antiquity have been diligent over the past twenty-five years or so in trying to understand every aspect of ancient literacy and education. In what is now the classic study, the
1989 book
Ancient Literacy,
William Harris, professor of ancient history at Columbia University, shows that modern assumptions about literacy simply are not applicable to ancient times.
²⁴
Today, in modern America, we live in a world where nearly every child goes to school and learns to read and write. Just about everyone we know can read the sports page and copy out a page of a novel if they choose. But the phenomenon of massive and widespread literacy is completely modern. Before the industrial revolution, societies had no compelling reasons to invest enormous amounts of money and other resources into creating a literate population. It was only with the development of the industrial world that such a thing became both desirable and feasible.

Harris argues that in the ancient world, at the very best of times, only about 10 percent of the population was reasonably literate. By the “best of times” he means Athens, a center of learning, at the height of its intellectual power, during the days of Socrates and Plato (fifth–fourth century
BCE
). Most of these 10 percent were men, as might be expected in a highly patriarchal society. And all of them were in the upper classes, the social and economic elite, who had the leisure and the money (well, their parents had the money) to afford an education. Lower-class people did not learn how to read, let alone write. And the vast majority of people in the ancient world were in the lower classes (to the surprise of many, the “middle class” is another invention of the industrial revolution; in the ancient world virtually everyone was high or low, or very, very low). The only notable exceptions were slaves, who were naturally a very low class indeed, but who were sometimes educated at their masters' expense, so that they could carry out household duties that required literacy skills, such as taking care of the household finances, helping with correspondence, or teaching the children.

When I say that few people could read, “let alone write,” I mean to signal something else quite significant about the ancient world. When upper-class people were educated, reading and writing were taught as two different skills.
²⁵
Today we learn reading and writing
together, and we naturally assume that if people can read, they can also write—not necessarily write a novel, but at least a letter. But that's because of the way we have set up our educational system. There is nothing inherent in learning to read that can necessarily teach you how to write. I know this full well personally. I can read Greek, Hebrew, French, German, and a range of other languages, but I cannot compose a letter in any of these languages. I learned how to read all of them in graduate school, so I could read ancient documents in their original languages and modern scholarship in the languages of Europe. But I never learned how to write them.

Most people in the ancient world could not read. And those who could read often could not write. And in this case by “write” I mean that most people—even if they could copy down words—could not compose a sentence, let alone a well-argued treatise. On the contrary, the people who could compose an ethical essay, a learned philosophical discussion, or an involved religious treatise were highly educated and highly exceptional. And that was in the very best of times. Very, very few people indeed were able to perform these skills in a language other than the one they were raised with. I'm not saying that just 1 percent of the population could do such a thing. I'm saying that far fewer than 1 percent of the population could do it.

It is sometimes thought that Palestine was an exception, that in Palestine Jewish boys all learned to read so that they could study the Hebrew Scriptures, and that since they could read, they could probably write. Moreover, it is often argued that in Palestine most adults were bilingual or even trilingual, able to read Hebrew, speak the local language, Aramaic, and communicate well in the language of the broader empire, Greek. Recent studies of literacy in Palestine, however, have shown convincingly that none of these assertions is true.

The fullest, most thoroughly researched, and most widely influential study of literacy in Palestine during the period of the Roman Empire is by Catherine Hezser.
²⁶
After examining all of the evidence, Hezser concludes that in Roman Palestine the best guestimate is that something like 3 percent of the population could read, and that
the majority of these would have been in the cities and larger towns. Most people outside of the urban areas would scarcely ever even see a written text. Some smaller towns and villages may have had a literacy level of around 1 percent. Moreover, these literate people were almost always the elite of the upper classes. Those who learned to read learned how to read Hebrew (not Greek).

And what is more, once again, far more people could read than could write. The people who knew how to write were primarily men who were priests. In fact, for the entire first century
CE
(the time of Jesus and Simon Peter), we know for certain of only two authors in Palestine who produced literary works (i.e., educated compositions other than tax documents, land deeds, or marriage certificates, etc.): the Jewish historian Josephus and a man named Justus of Tiberius. We still have Josephus's writings, but Justus's don't survive. Both of these men were in the upper echelons of society, and both were inordinately well educated. We know of no other literary authors for the entire century. Was Peter in Josephus's and Justus's class? No, not even close.

What about Greek education in the land of Peter's birth and up-bringing? It is sometimes assumed that since Galilee, the northern part of what we think of as Israel, was occasionally called “Galilee of the Gentiles,” it was overrun by Gentiles in Jesus and Peter's day. And according to a common kind of logic, if there were lots of Gentiles in Galilee, they would have spoken Greek; so to get along, everyone must have spoken Greek. As it turns out, that's not true either.

The most recent thorough studies of Gentiles in Galilee have been undertaken by the American scholar Mark Chancey.
²⁷
Chancey has studied every archaeological find from Galilee from around the time of the first century, has read every single piece of writing from the period of any relevance, and draws a decisive conclusion: the Gentiles in Galilee were almost exclusively located in the two major cities, Sepphoris and Tiberias. All the rest of Galilee was predominantly Jewish. And since most of Galilee was rural, not urban, the vast majority of Jews had no encounters with Gentiles. Moreover, Greek
was not widely, let alone normally, spoken. The vast majority of Jews spoke Aramaic and had no facility in Greek.

How do all these findings affect our question of whether Peter wrote 1 and 2 Peter or any other books? Was Peter among the very upper echelons of the educated elite of Palestine who could compose letter-essays in Greek? Apart from the legendary accounts I have mentioned, all we know about Peter's life comes to us from the New Testament. What we principally learn about him is that before he was a follower of Jesus he was a fisherman from Capernaum in Galilee.

In order to evaluate Peter's linguistic abilities, the place to begin, then, is with Capernaum. A full summary of what we know about Capernaum from Peter's day is provided by an American archaeologist of Palestine, Jonathan Reed.
²⁸
On the basis of archaeological digs and historical sources, it is clear that Capernaum was a historically insignificant village in rural Galilee. It is never mentioned in any ancient source prior to the Gospels. It is scarcely mentioned by any sources after that. It was discovered by archaeologists in the nineteenth century and has been excavated since then. In the time of Jesus it may have had anywhere between six and fifteen hundred inhabitants, so say a thousand.

The archaeological digs have revealed no evidence of any public buildings whatsoever, such as shops or storage facilities.
²⁹
The market for buying food and other necessities must have been held in tents or booths in open unpaved public areas. The town is on none of the major international trade routes. The Roman roads in the area date from a hundred years after Peter's life. There is no trace of any pagan or Gentile population in the town. There are no inscriptions of any kind on any of the buildings. Reed concludes that the inhabitants were almost certainly “predominantly illiterate.” Archaeologists have found no building structures or materials associated with social elites from the first century (e.g., plaster surfaces, decorative frescoes, marble, mosaics, red ceramic roof tiles). The houses were roughly constructed out of stone basalt, and mud or clay was used to fill in the gaps; they probably had thatched roofs.

In short, Peter's town was a backwoods Jewish village made up of hand-to-mouth laborers who did not have an education. Everyone spoke Aramaic. Nothing suggests that anyone could speak Greek. Nothing suggests that anyone in town could write. As a lower-class fisherman, Peter would have started work as a young boy and never attended school. There was, in fact, probably no school there; if there was a school, he probably didn't attend; if he did attend, it would have been in order to receive rudimentary training in how to read Hebrew. But that almost certainly never happened. Peter was an illiterate peasant.

This should come as no surprise, really. As it turns out, there is New Testament evidence about Peter's education level. According to Acts 4:13, both Peter and his companion John, also a fisherman, were
agrammatoi,
a Greek word that literally means “unlettered,” that is, “illiterate.”

And so, is it possible that Peter wrote 1 and 2 Peter? We have seen good reasons for believing he did not write 2 Peter, and some reason for thinking he didn't write 1 Peter. But it is highly probable that in fact he could not write at all. I should point out that the book of 1 Peter is written by a highly literate, highly educated, Greek-speaking Christian who is intimately familiar with the Jewish Scriptures in their Greek translation, the Septuagint. This is not Peter.

It is theoretically possible, of course, that Peter decided to go to school after Jesus's resurrection. In this imaginative (not to say imaginary) scenario, he learned his alphabet, learned how to sound out syllables and then words, learned to read, and learned to write. Then he took Greek classes, mastered Greek as a foreign language, and started memorizing large chunks of the Septuagint, after which he took Greek composition classes and learned how to compose complicated and rhetorically effective sentences; then, toward the end of his life, he wrote 1 Peter.

Is this scenario plausible? Apart from the fact that we don't know of “adult education” classes in antiquity—there's no evidence they existed—I think most reasonable people would conclude that Peter
probably had other things on his mind and on his hands after he came to believe that Jesus was raised from the dead. He probably never thought for a single second about learning how to become a rhetorically skilled Greek author.

Some scholars have suggested that Peter did not
directly
write 1 Peter (as I've indicated, almost no one thinks he wrote 2 Peter), but that he
indirectly
wrote it, for example, by dictating the letter to a scribe. Some have noted that the letter is written “through Silvanus” (5:12) and thought that maybe Silvanus wrote down Peter's thoughts for him. I deal with this question of whether scribes or secretaries actually ever composed such letter-essays in Chapter 4. The answer is, “Almost certainly not.” But for now I can say at least a couple of words about the case of 1 Peter.

First off, scholars now widely recognize that when the author indicates that he wrote the book “through Silvanus,” he is indicating not the name of his secretary, but the person who was carrying the letter to the recipients. Authors who used secretaries don't refer to them in this way.

But why not suppose that Peter used someone else, other than Silvanus, as a secretary? It would help to imagine how this theory is supposed to work exactly. Peter could not have
dictated
this letter in Greek to a secretary any more than he could have written it in Greek. That would have required him to be perfectly fluent in Greek, to have mastered rhetorical techniques in Greek, and to have had an intimate familiarity with the Jewish Scriptures in Greek. None of that is plausible. Nor can one easily think that he dictated the letter in Aramaic and the secretary translated it into Greek. The letter does not read like a Greek translation of an Aramaic original, but as an original Greek composition with Greek rhetorical flourishes. Moreover the letter presupposes the knowledge of the Greek Old Testament, so the person who composed the letter (whether orally or in writing) must have known the Scriptures in Greek.