Today, a public service advertisement presents a laptop/netbook as the icon for “be informed.” Next year, the retail price of today’s high-end smartphones is likely to drop under $100. Then the icon for “be informed” should become an image of a smartphone.
For believers, no communications media is more important than that connecting God with humans. Jews and Christians for more than 1500 years read the same sacred scripture, the Tanakh/the Old Testament, in the same language, Greek. Jews and Christians lived in close geographic proximity while interpreting the sacred text rather differently. They both engaged in bitter polemics. The more numerous and powerful Christians often viciously persecuted the Jews. Nonetheless, the Jews continued to use their sacred scripture in Greek translation. That use testifies to the great value of common communications media.
Jewish sacred scripture has been primarily transmitted in Hebrew. However, by the 3rd century BGC, most Jews spoke Aramaic, while the shared, spoken language of urban Hellenistic culture was Greek. Between the 3rd and 1st centuries BGC, Jews translated Jewish scripture into Greek to form the bible version known as the Septuagint.[1] In the second century GC, the Jewish scholars Aquila, Symmachus, and Theodotion (the Three) translated Jewish scripture into Greek. Scripture in Hebrew remained the fundamental Jewish sacred text. However, translating Jewish scripture into Greek made Jewish scripture more accessible to Jews and non-Jews.
In the first century GC, a rapidly growing heretical Jewish/universalized sect called Christians recognized God’s words in Jewish scripture written in Greek. Christians interpreted Jewish scripture in light of the life of Jesus of Nazareth. The life stories of Jesus, the Gospels, quote Greek translations of Jewish scripture. Christians almost surely predominately discussed Jewish scripture in the more accessible Greek. As the Gospels amply indicate, Jesus created a bitter split within the Jewish community. Until recently, Jews were thought to have turned away from Greek translations of Jewish scripture as the increasing number of Christians actively used (mis-used) these translations.
New scholarship indicates that Jews and Christians shared Greek as a scriptural language for more than 1500 years. Texts from the Cairo Genizah indicate that Jews were carrying forward Greek translations of Aquila, Symmachus, and Theodotion about a millennium after they were made.[2] Moreover, Greek glosses probably dating from the ninth century in an early Christian manuscript correspond to Greek texts found in the Cairo Genizah. Both in turn correspond to Greek text in a Jewish Greek translation, written in Hebrew letters, that was published in Constantinople in 1547.[3] Hence Jews did not reject the Greek scriptural language that Christians embraced.[4]
Christians responded directly to Jewish uses of Jewish sacred scripture. Under Louis IX, Christian church officials in France confiscated Jewish texts ostensibly to check them for errors. Many volumes of Jewish writings were burned in Paris in 1242. About the same time, in creating the Morgan Bible for Louis IX, Christian court officials seem to have struggled with what their criticisms of Jews meant for the production of that picture bible.[5]
Sharing communications media tends to encourage conflict. But establishing and maintaining separate communications media is quite costly. Jews’ continuing use of the Greek Bible suggests that net benefits of common sacred communication in Greek outweighed those of insisting on sacred communication exclusively in Hebrew.
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Notes:
[1] The Greek biblical translation called the Septuagint is also known as the LXX. Greek as used in this post refers to popularly spoken Greek. For the Hellenistic period, that Greek is called Koine Greek. The Greek of fifth-century Athens (classical or Attic Greek) differed significantly from Koine Greek.
[2] See de Lange (2007).
[3] The glosses are from the Codex Ambrosianus. See Boyd-Taylor (2007). The Greek Bible in Byzantine Judaism website makes a huge body of relevant evidence available to everyone around the world. It is a masterpiece of modern scholarship.
[4] The history of research section in the Greek Bible in Byzantine Judaism website discusses this shift in scholarly consensus. While the scholars whose research prompted the shift wrote this history, the Greek Bible in Byzantine Judaism website itself testifies to the universal force of the evidence.
[5] See Galbi (2003), Section III.C.
References
Boyd-Taylor, Cameron (2007). “The Greek Bible among Jews and Christians in the Middle Ages: The Evidence of Codex Ambrosianus,” in International Organization for Septuagint and Cognate Studies, and Melvin K. H. Peters. 2008. XIII Congress of the International Organization for Septuagint and Cognate Studies, Ljubljana, 2007. Atlanta, Ga: Society of Biblical Literature.
de Lange, Nicholas (2007). “Jewish Transmission of Greek Bible Versions,” in Peters (2008), XIII Congress, cited above.
Galbi, Douglas (2003). Sense in Communication.
Survey data, estimates, and reasonable parameters suggest that in the U.S., the total harm from identity theft is greater than the total harm from interpersonal violence, excluding murder. Among high-income countries, the U.S. has relatively high rates of interpersonal violence. Since identity theft can be perpetrated via global communications networks, rates of identity theft probably vary less across geographic and cultural space than do rates of interpersonal violence. Hence the total harm from identity theft is probably greater than the total harm from interpersonal violence across countries where electronic records and transactions are used at least as frequently as in the U.S.
U.S. survey data indicates that identity theft is more frequent than interpersonal violence and on average causes less harm, but the greater frequency of identity-theft occurrence outweighs the lower harm. About 5% of persons in the U.S. ages 16 and older experienced one or more incidents of identity theft over a recent two-year period. The corresponding incidence of interpersonal violence reported in the context of a crime survey is probably roughly 1%. Weighing equally reported effects “significant work-related problems” and “significant relationship problems” indicates that identity theft causes about 5% more of such harm than interpersonal violence. Measuring effects on a scale of reported level of distress and using plausible category weights suggests that identity theft causes in total twice as much distress as interpersonal violence.
Considering relative effects and preventive spending suggests that relatively more public resources should be directed at preventing identity theft. Compared to violent crime prevention, relatively little public resources are spent on preventing identity theft. The marginal effects of both types of spending are not well measured, but a variety of measures to deter identity theft plausibly have relatively high marginal effects. Just as for identity theft losses compared to fire property losses, the governing economics seems to be driven by perceptions, communications, and institutionalization.
Data: comparison of identity theft and interpersonal violence (Excel version)
The economics of communicative circumstances have shaped the form of letters. For most of the time since the invention of writing about 5000 years ago, inscriptions primarily concerned authoritative orders, records, and knowledge. These circumstances imply much more frequent reading of inscriptions than writing them. Historically important examples of this balance between reading and writing are sacred texts such as the Bible. [1] Consistent with simple communicative economics, the forms chosen for letters are more closely associated with reading efficiency than writing efficiency.
Within a smaller historical scope, the shift in the form of the printed letter s suggests a similar pattern. Prior to about 1800, a “long s”, which looks like an f without the right part of the cross-bar, was used frequently in addition to the s used nearly exclusively today. The rules for the use of the long s were quite complicated. The demise of the long s is associated with the development of new typefaces and their rapid adoption. At the same time, an important communicative circumstances about 1800 was rapidly growing demand for new books driven by a rage for reading novels. While Benjamin Franklin apparently thought otherwise, not using the long s probably made for easier reading among the growing number of novel readers. Simplification of a script serves popularization of its use.
Size of the market also seems to correlate temporally with the demise of the long s. The demise of the long s in Spanish texts (about 1760) was earlier than its demise in French texts (about 1790) and English texts (about 1800).[2] Including colonial markets, that order of demise is probable the same as the order of the size of the print markets for Spanish, French, and English texts in the late eighteenth century.
Growth of a market and size of a market are somewhat different demand factors. Growth of the reading population in the late eighteenth century plausibly correlates with less competence/experience in reading among customers actively choosing among books. Since supply-side scale economies weren’t significant relative to the total market size in late eighteenth-century printing, the significance of total print market size is harder to understand. Nonetheless, market circumstances, not just particular innovations or conventions, surely have been a major force in the development of letters.
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Read more:
Notes:
[1] Contemporary text messaging exemplifies a much lower reading/writing ratio.
[2] Scroll down toward the end of Andrew West’s awesome post on the long s to see his charts concerning the relevant trends in the use of the long s.
[3] Whether size of the market or growth of the market is a more propitious circumstance for a new business doesn’t have a general answer. Entrepreneurs today ponder and debate this sort of issue.