Acts 4:13

ILLITERACY OF THE APOSTLES

13. “Seeing the boldness of Peter and John, and observing that they are unlearned and ignorant men, they continue to be astonished and recognize that they were with Jesus.” No ingenuity of scholarship can evade the force of this statement of the Holy Ghost. The Greek for unlearned is agrammatoi, from a, “not,” and gramma, “a letter.” Hence, it literally means unlettered, i. e., without a knowledge of letters. They had no common schools in that day. The word translated “ignorant” is idiootai from which have we idiot. Hence, it means that they were idiots, so far as human learning was concerned. They were rude, illiterate rustics, and there is no reason whatever to believe they could read or write. After our Savior called them they may have learned a little about letters. Of this we have no information, as Peter dictated his two brief Epistles to an amanuensis. John outlived all of the other Apostles a whole generation, doing his writing doubtless by an amanuensis when nearly an hundred years old. Why did our Lord select unlearned and ignorant men to preach the gospel to a dying world? He could just as easily have put His hand on the learned rabbis and have commanded the highest culture of the world.

(a) It was safer to use blank paper on which to write the messages destined to save the world, and thus obviate the innate tendency of humanity to incorporate some of their own wisdom along with the precious truth revealed.

(b) The gospel heralds, exposed to all the rigors of polar snows and equatorial heat, ocean waves and sand storms, lodging beneath the stars for a cover, with a stone for a pillow, needed the physical constitution of a hippopotamus and the activity of a kangaroo, which can only be developed by the toils, privations, exposures and hardships of a rough-and-tumble life.

(c) Their example to all their successors is indispensable. God needs an army of evangelists this day like that of Xerxes to save the world. Do you not know if the Apostles had all been collegiate graduates, no others would have the courage to respond to the call, shoulder the responsibilities, brave the dangers, brook the contempt and go to the ends of the earth to save the lost? So fast as church-members grieve away the Holy Ghost and backslide, they confine the preaching of the gospel to the learned. So long as Methodist preachers “were unlearned and ignorant men,” depending on Brush College for their education, they had power to shake heaven, earth and hell and roll a tide of salvation like a sweeping cyclone wherever they went. We do not depreciate learning when sanctified by the Holy Ghost (for unsanctified, it is dangerous and has sent many to hell); but we need all to save a lost world. So we will take the unlearned and not excuse the learned.