[Footnote 1:  John viii. 6.]

[Footnote 2:  Testam. of the Twelve Patriarchs, Levi. 6.]

[Footnote 3:  Matt. xxvii. 46; Mark xv. 34.]

[Footnote 4:  Jewish translations and commentaries of the Talmudic epoch.]

The schoolmaster in the small Jewish towns was the hazzan, or reader in the synagogues.[1] Jesus frequented little the higher schools of the scribes or sopherim (Nazareth had perhaps none of them), and he had none of those titles which confer, in the eyes of the vulgar, the privileges of knowledge.[2] It would, nevertheless, be a great error to imagine that Jesus was what we call ignorant.  Scholastic education among us draws a profound distinction, in respect of personal worth, between those who have received and those who have been deprived of it.  It was not so in the East, nor, in general, in the good old times.  The state of ignorance in which, among us, owing to our isolated and entirely individual life, those remain who have not passed through the schools, was unknown in those societies where moral culture, and especially the general spirit of the age, was transmitted by the perpetual intercourse of man with man.  The Arab, who has never had a teacher, is often, nevertheless, a very superior man; for the tent is a kind of school always open, where, from the contact of well-educated men, there is produced a great intellectual and even literary movement.  The refinement of manners and the acuteness of the intellect have, in the East, nothing in common with what we call education.  It is the men from the schools, on the contrary, who are considered badly trained and pedantic.  In this social state, ignorance, which, among us, condemns a man to an inferior rank, is the condition of great things and of great originality.

[Footnote 1:  Mishnah, Shabbath, i. 3.]

[Footnote 2:  Matt. xiii. 54, and following; John vii. 15.]

It is not probable that Jesus knew Greek.  This language was very little spread in Judea beyond the classes who participated in the government, and the towns inhabited by pagans, like Caesarea.[1] The real mother tongue of Jesus was the Syrian dialect mixed with Hebrew, which was then spoken in Palestine.[2] Still less probably had he any knowledge of Greek culture.  This culture was proscribed by the doctors of Palestine, who included in the same malediction “he who rears swine, and he who teaches his son Greek science."[3] At all events it had not penetrated into little towns like Nazareth.  Notwithstanding the anathema of the doctors, some Jews, it is true, had already embraced the Hellenic culture.  Without speaking of the Jewish school of Egypt, in which the attempts to amalgamate Hellenism and Judaism had been in operation nearly two hundred years, a Jew—­Nicholas of Damascus—­had become, even at this time, one of the most distinguished men, one of the best informed, and one of the most respected of his age.