Words to Live By,
Learned by Heart

Nobody knows exactly how well Romans read, partly because we don't know what "literate" even meant to them. Someone who could sign a name? Read a notice but never write one? Working from the surviving evidence — inkwells, styluses, and texts scratched onto papyrus, stone, metal, and animal skin — scholars estimate that perhaps one person in ten or twenty, mostly men, had even basic reading and writing skills.

Writing still surrounded daily life. A single Egyptian town, Oxyrhynchus, yielded roughly half a million documents. The Dead Sea Scrolls from Qumran number over 900, most on sheep and goat parchment — papyrus had to be shipped in from Egypt and could be pricey. Walls carried graffiti; graves carried epitaphs; and in Pompeii, a baker named Terentius Neo posed for a fresco beside his wife, who holds a stylus and a wax writing tablet like a badge of standing.

Great libraries anchored the era's book culture, too. Alexandria's, founded in 295 BC, held thousands of scrolls alongside lecture halls, observatories, even a zoo — before fire ravaged it in 48 BC. The Celsus Library at Ephesus also burned with its collection; only its restored facade stands today. Books existed. Readers were rare. That gap is where the creed was born.

Paul quotes the hymn to teach quarreling Philippians a practical lesson — carry yourselves with the humility Christ carried to the cross. But underneath the ethics runs a complete theology of Jesus's story in three stages: eternal pre-existence as God, incarnation and crucifixion, and final exaltation.

The opening phrase, "being in very nature God," is doing precise work. "Being" is a participle, implying existence without beginning; "nature" means essence itself, not mere personality. Father and Son, the hymn insists, have always been one in being. And this eternal one chose to set aside every divine privilege — accepting crucifixion, the execution Rome reserved for its worst criminals.