Scribes Needed

31 July 2025  Matthew 13:47-53

“Therefore, every scribe who has been trained for the kingdom of heaven is like a householder who brings out of his treasure what is new and what is old.” Matthew 13:52

Certainly, some Scribes in the New Testament opposed Jesus, but not all of them did, and Jesus actually valued the work of the Scribes. Pretty much everything we value about the world today we have because the Jews and the Christians had Scribes.

The Scribes emerged among the Jews because of the Babylonian Captivity (597-536 B.C.), and their role solidified in the generations after. The leaders of the Jews came to the conclusion that the Captivity happened because of serial infidelity to the Law of Moses, so to prevent another such catastrophe it was essential to follow the Law to the letter. That meant, of course, that there had to be copies of the Law available, and people who could explain them. The people who did all that were the Scribes. Jesus valued the function of the Scribes, which is why He taught His disciples so carefully – He meant them to function as, among other things, Scribes, people who would preserve and explain His teaching.

As the generations went by into late antiquity and the Middle Ages, copying and preserving New Testament texts became the vocation of monks. Today there are still over 5800 Greek texts of the New Testament from antiquity, plus many thousands more in Latin, Coptic, Syriac and other languages, totaling 20-25,000 altogether. Even if every text of the New Testament from antiquity were destroyed, we would still have the New Testament from all the quotations of it in the works of the Early Christian Fathers. In short, we have the New Testament today (as well as the Old Testament, as well as the works of the Fathers, as well as all the works of Greek and Roman antiquity that we have) because of an intense commitment in the Catholic Church to reading and writing. That commitment is even more impressive when you consider how expensive books were in the ancient world. A single sheet of vellum or papyrus cost the equivalent of $20. A single Bible cost the equivalent of 20 years’ pay for a moderately comfortable family anywhere in the Roman Empire. Buying a Bible was like buying a house. Bookstores were like jewelry stores – in some you had to pay simply to look. To have a personal library of 200 books (keeping in mind that a “book” in Roman antiquity was any document of 700-1200 lines, what today we would call a magazine article) was a sign of unbelievable, extravagant wealth. The Church in antiquity was not extravagantly wealthy, so the fact that we have so many manuscripts of scripture from antiquity is a sign of intense, extravagant commitment to reading and writing, and study.

With commitment like that, it is not in the least surprising that it was the Catholic Church that created the first universities, from which emerged modern science and medicine, modern engineering, modern scholarship of every kind. We have them all because among the Jews and the Christians there were Scribes, who believed in reading and writing, who believed that there was a good God who created a good universe, who created – and saved – people to think, read, and write about it.

Not all the Scribes in Jesus’ time were His opponents. Jesus made disciples to function as Scribes, preserving and explaining His teaching. He has been making Scribes for a long time. He makes them still.