Illiterate men.

[FallentoReason]

I say it's all just a made up story so the authors of the gospels could make Jesus do or be anything they wanted. We might as well be arguing whether or not Huckleberry Finn was literate or not.

What I'm after in this thread is a better understanding of the internal consistency of the NT. It would be like analysing Star Wars and making sure that there's no contradictions that say Darth Vader was Luke's father but at the same time they also mentioned he actually wasn't. This fact is independent of whether it's real or not.

Of course the NT is somewhat different in nature because it I meant to be a collection of non-fiction work. Essentially I want to see how far the NT can be pushed until things start interfering with history from the point of view of Bible scholars.

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If there was a singular Yeshua the Gospels are based on, he would seem to have been considered a rabbi, which implies some learning, although it could have been by oral tradition. Even if he were illiterate, it doesn't seem unlikely that there would be one or two literate men among the disciples. They weren't ALL fomer fishermen.

Very little can be known for certain of these people, but I don't think there's a good case that the entire group was illiterate.

I guess for the authors of the canonical Gospels, we can say Matthew was most likely able to write as he was a tax collector. Luke was a physician but I don't know if back then that meant you also had the ability to read and write. Mark I'm not sure what his background was and John I also don't know what his background was...