knew it by heart.[2] It is doubtful,
however, if he understood the Hebrew writings in their original
tongue. His biographers make him quote them according to the
translations in the Aramean tongue;[3] his principles of exegesis, as
far as we can judge of them by those of his disciples, much resembled
those which were then in vogue, and which form the spirit of the
_Targums_ and the _Midrashim_.[4]

[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.[