Glossary
A professional class required to manage complicated writing systems before writing could become speech.
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Topic brief
A Jiang Lens evidence brief for this topic, built from source tags, transcript matches, and linked source refs.
scribes
A professional class required to manage complicated writing systems before writing could become speech.
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Key Notes
model
Jiang compares Augustine's prolific output to Aristotle's, suggesting both worked through teams that converted elite theories into authoritative texts.
model
Jiang says writing was a new and expensive technology comparable to movie making today, usually requiring royal sponsorship and scribal teams to justify kingship.
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model
Before alphabetic writing, writing and speaking were different languages, requiring a professional class of scribes to manage literacy.
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Timestamped Evidence
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"...can surmise something about Augustine. As bishop, he had hundreds of scribes, hundreds of priests, who basically took his theories and turned them into..."
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"And that's how he was able to be so prolific. So think of him as a professor, basically. A university professor, a science professor,..."
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"...you basically needed to be able to support a team of scribes to create any work of fiction. So writing back then is like..."
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"...of people to manage the writing system. Okay? We call these scribes, right? Scribes. The reason why is that writing is not speaking. Speaking..."
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"jesus said the phrases and the scribes have taken the keys of knowledge this is noxious noxious means knowledge okay and hidden them they..."
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"...thousands of them and move them to babylon where they become scribes where they become farmers where they become merchants okay um but again..."
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"Gave to the priest Ezra, the scribe. A scholar of the text of the commandments of the Lord and his status for Israel."
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"Artaxerxes, king of kings. To the priest Ezra, the scribe of the law of the God of heaven. Peace and now. I decree that..."
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"...together into the square before the water gate. They told the scribe Ezra to bring the book of the Lord, the law of Moses,..."
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"...take these manuscripts back to the library of Alexandria. Where our scribes will copy them out. Okay? That's all we're going to do. And..."
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Relevant Lectures And Readings
Reading
A source-grounded reading of Augustine as empire's theologian: the Church escapes history, curiosity becomes sin, love becomes disease, passivity becomes goodness, and Arabia appears as the next place where fugitives from authority will prepare...
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The Bible begins, in this lecture's argument, as political spin for David: a library of collective imagination that turns usurpation, murder, and fear of rivals into legitimacy, identity, and eventually literature.
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Greek civilization begins as a reversal: chaos, illiteracy, and poverty force the polis, the alphabet, and Homer, until poetry teaches a new human being how to see, feel, and think.
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Related Topics
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