Is our reading the bible the same as the original audience's hearing it? A case study in the gospel of Mark

Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society, Mar 2003 by Stein, Robert H

The Bible itself contains clear evidence that even personal reading was done out loud. In the story of Philip and the Ethiopian eunuch, we read that the angel of the Lord appeared to Philip and told him to go to the road from Jerusalem to Gaza. After the Spirit led Philip to the Ethiopian eunuch, the meeting is described in Acts 8:30 as follows. "So Philip ran to him, and heard him reading Isaiah the prophet, and asked, 'Do you understand what you are reading?'" From this it is evident that the Ethiopian eunuch was reading to himself out loud.

It is interesting to note that when John the Baptist was born and the relatives and friends wanted to name him "Zechariah," Elizabeth said, "Not so, he shall be called John." Since this was so unusual, they asked Zechariah who was, as you might remember, mute. We then read in Luke 1:63, "And he asked for a writing tablet, and wrote, 'His name is John (RSV).'" The Greek text, however, reads, "And he asked for a writing tablet and wrote, saying, 'His name is John.'" As a result some scholars have suggested that this means that he spoke out loud what he was writing. Yet it must be acknowledged that the expression "wrote, saying" may be a Hebraism meaning "wrote" as in 2 Kgs 6:10, and Luke 1:64 suggests this as well. Another possible example from Luke is found in 16:29. There Jesus responds to the request of the rich man to send Lazarus from the dead to tell his brothers of their need to repent, "They have Moses and the prophets; let them hear them." It is uncertain, however, if this refers to hearing Moses and the prophets read in the synagogue16 or whether "hear" means to "heed." The reading aloud of written materials seems to have been the practice in the following centuries as well. Augustine (toward the end of the fourth century) in his Confessions 6.3 refers to his hero, Ambrose's, unusual practice of reading silently, and suggests that he may have done this to preserve his rather fragile voice. And the Benedictine Rule, Regulation 48, which was written around the middle of the sixth century, gives instruction that during the rest period, when lying on your bed, you should out of courtesy to your neighbor read in complete silence, that is, not out loud in the usual manner.17 Even today the auditory nature of reading is still conveyed by the way we occasionally describe our reading texts. We sometimes say that a particular book or poem "spoke to me" or refer to written instructions "telling us," rather than "indicating to us" or we state that a newspaper "says" that. . . .18

Several other considerations also indicate that the NT writers anticipated that their works would be read aloud to their intended readers. One involves the fact that only a small percentage of people could read in ancient times. Arriving at exact statistics as to how many people could read in biblical times is very difficult. The figures that most often come up are that about 5-10%, at most perhaps 10-15%, of the population in Greek and Roman society could read.19 The percentage of Christians who could read in the first century was probably somewhere between 3-10%.20 With respect to the Jewish population the estimated percentages range as low as 3%.21 Thus any biblical writer would have realized that the vast majority of his "readers" would in fact not be able to read their works at all but would need to hear them read to them.