Comments by "" (@neutronalchemist3241) on "Earliest Depictions of Jesus in Art" video.
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@jmiquelmb Many people talk of "most something" when trying to find a justification for their very personal beliefs. Actually that only the elites were literate (and used this as a "weapon" to keep the lower strata subjugated) is the old school, represented, IE, by W.Harris. Most modern historians refuted that view, exactly for what I said. There are too many surviving inscriptions specifically destined to the lower classes and/or written by them. Even the bricks were often numbered to mark their pre-planned place in the construction (many Roman buildings were "prefabricated"), but that means that the bricklayer could read numbers.
In middle age, graffiti were the exception, and they were different kind of graffiti. Mostly left by people that were evidently educated to record their passage somewere. In Rome, like in the present world, graffiti on the most trivial matters were the norm. Martial wrote "There’s no place for a poor man to think or
rest. Schoolmasters disturb life in the morning, the bakers at night, the coppersmiths hammer all day". Street schools were so diffused that the lessons disturbed people like the other artisanal activities.
Harris counters these arguments by citing the poor quality of the graffiti, noting that quoting (or more often misquoting) Virgil’s Aeneid on a tavern wall does not make a man literate. Maybe, but it makes him able to read and write.
That's the key. When stating that in ancient Rome the "literacy rate" was "only" from 10% to 20%. Scholars refers to something else than the simple ability to read and write. The ability to read and write at an elementary level (what Petronius in the Satyricon called the ability to "read stone letters") was MUCH more diffused.
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In Rome beard came in and out of fashion several times (you can see wih the bearded and shaved Emperors), but the beard was always associated with the sacerdotal status and with positions of particular power and wisdom (Jupiter was always depicted bearded). That's why i had been finally adopted for Jesus. Among the bearded Jesus images, the author missed the 4th century (very early 4th century for some scholar) "Christ between Peter and Paul" in the catacombs of Marcellinus and Peter. It can be older than that of the Catacombs of Commodilla, and it's quite evident the resemblance with images of Jupiter.
However, after the fall of the Empire, medieval depictions of the saints (Christ with the beard, John the Baptist covered in animal skin, Mattew with the lion, Luke with the eagle...) were made like that not because the artist believed John the Baptist was always covered in animal skin (a symbol of him being an hermit), but to make them canonical, and so recognisable by people that generally couldn't read. Bearded Christ was a convention, and artists knew it was a convention, that sometimes they decided to not follow (IE Michelangelo's Christ in the Last Judgement is beardless).
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@Brother_Piner The medieval graffiti we have are mostly drawings. The Roman ones are mostly written, and not only names, they are jokes, vulgarities, ads, riddles, etc. It's evident that who left them used writing for the most mundane things, and expected the general public, not only a small minority, to be able to read them. What's the sense of a writing that cursed whoever pissed on a wall, if only 1/10 of the people could read it?
You dont' need to be literate to carve your name. It only needs for you to know the "shape" of it. That's why the fact that the Romans carved other words than their names is significative.
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