Acts 4:13 ‘When they saw the boldness of Peter and John, and discovered that they were uneducated and ordinary men, they were amazed and recognized these men had been with Jesus.’

Terms such as those translated ‘uneducated’ and ‘ordinary’ were sometimes used of illiterate persons, leading some sceptics to conclude that such men could not have written the letters ascribed to them.

Sceptics such as Bart Ehrman take agrammatoi to mean that Peter and John were illiterate, and that they could not therefore have penned the NT documents attributed to them.  Ehrman argues that, although many could read, few could write.  Still less could they be expected to write in the fluent style of, say, Peter’s first letter.

But this is to jump to too many conclusions (about the meaning of the word itself, about whether, in context, their hearers were very much interested in their literacy levels, about whether they might any case have used amanuenses, and so on).

There is no evidence for the claim, by apologist Robert Clifton Robinson and relying on Jn 14:25f, that the disciples were supernaturally enabled to remember what Jesus said and did and to write it in elegant language.

According to EBC, literacy levels were high amongst 1st-century Jews, whereas theological disputations required rabbinic training.

William Barclay comments:

‘The King James Version says that the Sanhedrin regarded Peter and John as unlearned and ignorant men. The word translated “unlearned” means that they had no kind of technical education, especially in the intricate regulations of the law. The word translated “ignorant” means that they were laymen with no special professional qualifications. The Sanhedrin, as it were, regarded them as men without a college education and with no professional status. It is often difficult for the simple man to meet what might be called academic and professional snobbery. But the man in whose heart is Christ possesses a real dignity which neither academic attainment nor professional status can give.’ (DSB)

Carson and Moo notes:

‘It has long been pointed out that the expression in Acts 4:13 does not mean that Peter and John were illiterate or profoundly ignorant but, from the point of view of contemporary theological proficiency, “untrained laymen” (NEB), not unlike Jesus himself (John 7:15). The astonishment of the authorities was in any case occasioned by the competence of Peter and John when they should have been (relatively) ignorant, not by their ignorance when they should have been more competent. Jewish boys learned to read. Since John sprang from a family that was certainly not poor (they owned at least one boat [Luke 5:3, 10] and employed others [Mark 1:20]), he may well have enjoyed an education that was better than average. And surely it would not be surprising if some of the leaders of the church, decades after its founding, had devoted themselves to some serious study.’ (An Introduction to the New Testament)

More widely, Ehrman has claimed, with respect to the traditional ascriptions of the Gospels to Matthew, Mark, Luke and John:

‘There are good reasons for thinking that none of these attributions is right. For one thing, the followers of Jesus, as we learn from the New Testament itself, were uneducated lower-class Aramaic-speaking Jews from Palestine. These books are not written by people like that. Their authors were highly educated, Greek-speaking Christians of a later generation.’ (How Jesus Became God: The Exaltation of a Jewish Preacher from Galilee)

McClatchie responds:

‘We know very little about Mark (who is only alluded to in Acts 12:12, 25; 15:37-39; and Colossians 4:10). So, this critique can hardly be applied to him.

Luke was a medical physician (Colossians 4:14), so can hardly be considered to be uneducated.

Matthew was a tax collector and therefore probably literature, and likely would have known how to write in Greek, the primary language of commerce at the time. Indeed, Bart Ehrman notes in Misquoting Jesus, “Throughout most of antiquity, since most people could not write, there were local ‘readers’ and ‘writers’ who hired out their services to people who needed to conduct business that required written texts; tax receipts, legal contracts, licenses, personal letters, and the like,” (emphasis added). It is thus not at all implausible that Matthew was literate.

This critique, then, only applies to John. But John seems to have been relatively well off (Mark 1:19-20 indicates that his father, Zebedee, was sufficiently wealthy that he could afford to pay hired servants). This means that he could plausibly have afforded an amanuensis (scribe) or even learned Greek at some point (the early church indicates that John wrote his gospel when he was well advanced in years). It may also be observed that John’s Greek is replete with characteristics that suggest the author’s first language was Aramaic. Such characteristics include his simple syntax and limited vocabulary, and his use of conjunctions — for instance, his frequent use of καί for adversative in addition to coordinative conjunction, like the Aramaic. Furthermore, when quoting the Old Testament, the text often more closely resembles the Hebrew text than it does the Greek Septuagint (e.g. John 12:14-15; 12:40; 13:18; and 19:37).’ (Re-paragraphed)