For People Who Think There Was No Historical Jesus

[Confused Ape]

The claim that 1 percent of the Romans could read is not a supportable number. The number is likely to be at least 5 percent and may be closer to 10 percent of the Roman population.

This is supported by at least two things

1 - In the Roman Empire - religion was not the only source of writings - there were literary works, philosophy, and other casual writings mentioned

2 - The Roman Empire had a large network of Libraries - for the public to use. No reason to have them if no one could read.

Reading did fall off during the dark ages again in the world - down to below 5% of the population - but it was higher than that in the Golden age of Rome.

I've been looking into the level of literacy in the Roman empire at the time. I've read various estimates that it was around 10% but 9% just had the basic skills. They could read official inscriptions, manage casual texts and even scrawl graffiti on walls. When it came to advanced works on theology and philosophy, only the 1% with higher education would be able to read well enough follow them.

This doesn't automatically mean that someone without higher education couldn't follow them if they were read out, however. Make your way in the world, become rich and you, too, could own an educated slave to keep the accounts, act as a scribe and read out texts you couldn't manage yourself.

Besides manual labor, slaves performed many domestic services, and might be employed at highly skilled jobs and professions. Teachers, accountants, and physicians were often slaves. Greek slaves in particular might be highly educated.

There are theories that Christianity appealed to the poor, women and slaves but that doesn't mean that no church communities had a rich member. A rich Christian could have an educated slave who was given the task of reading advanced texts borrowed from a library to church elders.