A relevance-theoretical perspective on the question of why Jesus never wrote a book

Abstract

Many reasons have been given for why Jesus never wrote anything. Some have argued that this was because he, or his audience, was illiterate; some that it was because Jewish rabbis only gave oral teaching; others that it was to avoid the idolatrizing of a divinely authored book. Moreover, given the deep reverence among the Jews for the written word found in the Torah, and the fact that Jesus claimed for himself the same authority as that upon which the Torah was based, it would seem legitimate to ask the question: why did he not seek to displace the Torah by a book of an equivalent or greater authority, like that claimed for the Koran in the Islamic tradition? The goal of this paper will be to bring to the table some linguistic arguments for why Jesus never committed any of his teachings to writing based on certain characteristics of natural language that have been highlighted by Relevance Theory, namely the underspecified nature of linguistic meaning and the consequent need for some way of narrowing down the range of possible interpretations of an utterance, as well as on the decontextualized character of written language.

Keywords:

• exegesis
• relevance theory
• semantics
• pragmatics
• personalism
• textual criticism
• Bible

Notes

1 Hezser (2001: 88–9) adds that, in spite of the existence of this tradition of teaching Jewish boys to read, the historical evidence does not indicate that the writing of Hebrew letters was generally taught in Jewish elementary schools, “although some Jewish children may have been instructed in writing by their parents or one or the other teacher.”

2 Another reason for Jesus not writing anything down is theological in import and concerns the nature of Christian revelation itself. Benedict XVI writes that “being Christian is not the result of an ethical choice or a lofty idea, but the encounter with an event, a person, which gives life a new horizon and a decisive direction.” (Deus caritas est, no. 1) For most Christians, Jesus is God in person revealing himself to men by living and working among them, and the core truth of his preaching is an intimate revelation concerning God’s inner identity, namely that the Divinity is a Trinity of persons, and that Jesus, the Second Person of this Trinity, is the perfect knowledge that the Father has of himself, expressed not as an idea or a text, but as a Person. The fact that He never wrote anything is thus a testimony to the fact that the substance of his revelation to mankind is He Himself, a divine Person who wishes to establish a personal relationship with each human being. Stroumsa’s (2003: 156) claim that “Christianity is the only religion born with a Bible in its cradle” could therefore not be further from the truth: what was in the cradle was a baby, not a book.