1. Literacy of Jesus
2. According to Ken Dark, who is reasonably familar with the Nazareth Project:
3. In general, archaeological evidence for the early first-century settlement contains nothing inconsistent with the presentation of Nazareth in the Gospels. If Nazareth were a Jewish village functioning as a center for surrounding agricultural communities and associated with craft-working and quarrying, then this was exactly the sort of place where one might expect there to be a synagogue, whether as a building or public assembly, like that mentioned in the Gospels of Matthew and Mark, and where one might find a τέκτων (tekton), a craftsman, a term used for Jesus and Joseph in the same Gospels. [My emphasis]
4. Nazareth’s monumental architecture, its ashlars and arch keystones hewn by skilled stonemasons, mosaic floors and frescoed walls, stone columns and pediments are clearly later, the result of Jesus’ association with Nazareth, not indicative of Jesus’ Nazareth. Across that ancient Nazareth inhabited in earlier times, including each of the areas excavated by the Franciscans, there is no evidence for public architecture of any kind whatsoever. None of the evidence beneath the modem, Crusader, or Byzantine strata from pits, crevices, or debris packed together for their foundations, suggests that first-century Nazareth was anything other than a modest village void of public architecture. The massive layer representing the Christian construction rests atop a frail and elusive layer representing a simple Jewish peasant life: excavations underneath later Christian structures uncovered no synagogue. Excavating Jesus. J.D. Crossan & Jonathan L. Reed 2001
5. Chris Keith’s argument is very interesting:
6. Keith doesn’t think Jesus could read, but thinks some people thought he could. So, for example, an illiterate farmer in Galilee who knows someone in the village that has some rudimentary literate skills, might think they are more literate than they are while elite scribes in Jerusalem may have looked on the same person as a wanna be.
7. I argue in the book [Jesus’ Literacy: Scribal Culture and the Teacher from Galilee] that Mark and Luke have differing opinions as to Jesus’ social class. Mark 6 claims that Jesus’ hometown rejects him as a synagogue teacher because he is a tektōn, typically translated “carpenter,” but a member of the manual-labor class. (Matthew 13 follows Mark, but has Jesus as the son of a tektōn.) Luke agrees that Jesus’ hometown rejected him, but it’s because of his statements in the synagogue, not because he’s a member of the manual-labor class. Luke, in fact, removes the reference to Jesus being a tektōn, has the audience call Jesus simply “Joseph’s son,” and attributes to him scribal-literate skills of reading and handling a manuscript, even finding the location of a text in scriptio continua. So, in short, there’s a difference of opinion within our first-century sources as to which class Jesus was in. This shouldn’t surprise us. John 7:15 says that Jesus’ own audiences were confused about whether he fell in the scribal-literate class or scribal-illiterate class. Their question “How does this man know letters?” implies that Jesus was in the scribal-literate class; but their qualification “when he’s never been taught” implies that he was not. “The Jews” of John 7:15 thus find Jesus to be a conundrum—he teaches like a scribal-literate person but they know he’s not because he wasn’t educated. Importantly, the narrator never claims Jesus was “not like the scribes” as do Mark and Matthew; he claims only that Jesus is the type of Jewish teacher who made his audiences confused on the issue. I think this claim on the part of the Johannine narrator has a very high degree of historical plausibility.
8. http://newtestamentperspectives.blogspot.com/2012/05/was-jesus-literate-interview-with-chris.html

1. John 8.6, 8 were indeed claims that he could write.
2. Just a general historian perspective to add on. Literacy is a spectrum, and is rarely a binary. Many people even in modern societies can read well enough to get around town and do their jobs but would struggle to read a book. They would certainly call themselves literate while a prolific reader might call them barely proficient in comparison. Even highly literate people can be functionally illiterate in certain technical fields. I can rarely make heads or tails of a car manual or legal contracts. A laborer or carpenter from 2000 years ago might read well enough to draft an informal agreement to build furniture or a house and make some notes about design without formal teaching, but be unable to read Rabbinical texts. Yet, as you say, to a completely illiterate herdsman they would seem literate while to a Scribe they would appear illiterate.
3. To talk about the social class:
4. This social class was actually somewhat upwardly mobile, according to Ben Zion Rosenfeld and Haim Perlmutter’s Social Stratification of the Jewish Population of Roman Palestine in the Period of the Mishnah, 70–250 CE (Brill, 2020). They first distinguish between the destitute (those who had no access to wealth) and the poor (those who struggle to meet the poverty line, which was actually defined in detail in rabbinical sources), which different relative levels to poverty (such as access to shelter, the amount of food shared between members of the dwelling, and so forth); dependent sharecroppers and tenants tended to fall below the poverty line. The laborer (פועל) straddled either side of the poverty line, depending on the availability of work. All socioeconomic classes above this were considered “rich,” which generally meant “not poor” (but with relative levels of its own). The lower middle class largely was comprised of independent craftsmen (אומן), which roughly corresponded to the Greek τέκτων, which was the term for the profession of Joseph of Nazareth. They mention that in the LXX, Philo, and Josephus, unskilled laborers were usually called ἔργον, hired day laborers were termed μισθωτός or μίστος, while professional skilled artisans (such as tailors, shoemakers, potters, jewelers, metalworkers, carpenters, etc.) were sometimes called δημιουργός or ἀρχιτέκτων, with τέκτων as a more general term (in larger projects ἀρχιτέκτων may have been reserved more for directors and architects). They mention that in 1 Kings τέκτων was used to refer to the head builders of the tabernacle, while ἀρχιτέκτων was used for the same thing in Exodus LXX. Josephus in Antiquitates (3.204) states that the craftsmen (τέκτονας) of the tabernacle were paid generously by Moses.
5. All this indicates that τέκτων was roughly equivalent to the term אומן, and had varied levels of access to wealth. Rosenfeld and Perlmutter make the interesting observation that the early Jesus movement drew significantly from this social class, with Peter and Andrew being fishermen, Paul, Prisca, and Aquila being tent makers, and others being laundrymen, scribes, silversmiths, and so forth. “This could indicate that the pursuit of a nonagricultural profession enabled mobility and released the individual from attachment to the land or to a permanent employer, thus allowing for religious contemplation. On the other hand, all of Jesus’ parables are taken from agricultural situations. The reason behind this is that he came from a background where he was a village artisan supplying local farmers” (p. 105). Above the lower middle class were wealthier levels, including soldiers, merchants, and independent farmers (בעל־הבית), who owned land and kept all profits after taxes. The upper class elite included priestly families, high ranking officials, and Herodians.
6. Dr Amy-Jill Levine said that Jesus is the first person in literature to be called “rabbi.”
7. Mary is related to Elizabeth, who had to have been a Cohen to be able to marry Zechariah. It’s entirely reasonable to think he would have been able to learn from that connection.
8. Catherine Hezser’s exhaustive book “Jewish Literacy in Roman Palestine” goes into this heavily. In short, it’s possible Jesus could read and write some Hebrew. It’s far less likely any other language. Key points:
9. Public education didn’t exist. At most, one might pool resources in a community and hire a teacher, but this was uncommon. Most of our sources for Jewish Literacy are post-2nd Century, so hard to determine what the 1st Century CE was like. Literacy was occupation-driven. So a merchant who needed to read and write inventories and receipts was not going to learn how to read and write literature. Just learning to write was not going to teach you how to write literature, as that involved rhetoric and other disciplines. There were 4 languages in play. Hebrew was for religious training. Aramaic was for regional communication and some religious literature like the Mishnah. Greek was for trade and social status. Latin was rare, and was mostly for Romans occupying Palestine. Reading and writing were different disciplines The goal of learning Hebrew was specifically for religious purposes. It was rare enough that there were provisions in the Mishnah for what to do if you could not find someone to read in your village. Non-literate people could still participate in literate society if others read out loud to them One’s father was the primary source of learning Hebrew, and was thin and poorly done for the most part The Rabbinical system didn’t exist until mid-millennium, and really until the early Medieval period. However, the idea of a student-pupil relationship for religious learning did exist in the first century. Greek was pretty controversial for Jews to learn because it was seen as a foreign influence corrupting Jewish tradition. It was learned for social mobility and trade, mostly. There were illiterate Rabbis mentioned in the Mishnah
10. So Jesus might have known how to read and write Hebrew (perhaps some Aramaic too), but it’s questionable how “literate” he was in it. He most likely would have known to read and write Hebrew enough for his religious duties as whatever “Rabbi” meant in the first century, which may have included formulaic legalistic religious duties like writing marriage contracts. It is also noteworthy that the chances of any of his disciples being literate in any language to write the Gospels is essentially nil. Sources: Hezser, Catherine (2001) Jewish Literacy in Roman Palestine. Tuebingen: Mohr-Siebeck. Hezser, Catherine (1997) The Social Structure of the Rabbinic Movement in Roman Palestine. Tuebingen: Mohr-Siebeck.
11. Maurice Casey argued that he could read:
12. The most general features of his ministry are those of a man steeped in the scriptures. He drew on the wellsprings of the prophetic tradi- tion. John the Baptist had however been the only major prophet for centuries, and Jesus was familiar with the works of the prophets themselves. The two major abstract concepts in his teaching, the kingship and fatherhood of God, are both biblical.43 Up to a point, such things might be learnt orally in an observant home, helped by listening orally to the exposition of the scriptures at Jewish meetings on the sabbath and on other occasions. A decisive argument is accordingly to be found in Jesus’ detailed reliance on scripture to establish major points, especially signifi cant matters of halakhah. For example, when challenged by Pharisees because his disciples were plucking grain on the sabbath, Jesus cited in their defense the example of David in 1 Samuel and the purpose of the sabbath at the creation (Mk 2.23- 28).44 The terms with which he began his first argument are especially relevant at this point: ‘Have you not read what David did . . .’. These are not the words of an illiterate peasant! These are the words of a major religious leader arguing with Pharisees whom he could rely on to be learned in the same Hebrew scriptures. Jesus had an unusual exegesis of the end of Malachi 3, according to which the prophecy of Elijah coming again before the day of the Lord had been fulfi lled in John the Baptist.
13. His exposition of this (Mk 9.11- 13) can only be understood in the light of his understanding of other passages, including Isaiah 40 and Job 14.45 This innovative exegesis of several passages together could only be carried through by a person learned in the scriptures. Jesus’ unusual and possibly unique prohibition of divorce was justified by his appeal to texts from the creation narrative of Genesis (Mk 10.2- 9, citing Gen. 1.27; 2.24). His innovative exegesis of these fundamental scriptural texts was preceded by this explanation of Deut. 24.1, which gives scriptural permission for divorce: ‘because of the hardness of your hearts [Moses] wrote this commandment for you’ (Mk 10.5). This shows his awareness of the written text which he interpreted. Jesus of Nazareth pg 161

1. This argument is pretty weak because Casey dates gMark 38-42 A.D. (we know that this is extremely unlikely and wrong).
2. Chris Keith’s Jesus Against the Scribal Elite. The gist of the argument is that Jesus was illiterate, but people thought he could read. A peasant farmer who knows a scribe in the village who is literate on a basic level will think he is much more literate than he is. Seeing Jesus interact with scribes would have the same affect.(edited)
3. In ‘Ancient Literacy’ (Harvard, 1989), William Harris surveys ancient societies from c 800 BCE to 500 CE and comes up a general average of 10%, never exceeding 15-20%, and as low as 5-10% in some places, and very rarely, as high as 20-30%. Harry Gamble, reviewing Harris’ work in ‘Books and Readers in the Early Church’ (Yale, 1995), admitting reservations, says, “his invaluable survey has made it clear that nothing remotely like mass literacy existed, nor could have existed, because the forces and institutions required to foster it were absent.” Additionally, the literacy that existed, co-existed with the culture of reading aloud, often intoned (chanted), so that even limited literacy could have a wide effect on a community. The synagogue, described in some detail in ‘The Synagogue’ essay by Lee I. Levine in ‘The Jewish Annotated New Testament’ 2nd ed. (Oxford, 2017), was a less formalized institution than its modern counterpart. “Scrolls appear to have been introduced into the synagogue hall on an ad hoc basis expressly for the Torah-reading ceremony and then were removed.” The hall itself served a range of social and judicial uses, not just scripture or language study. As far as Jesus reading, that could be taken a number of ways. The Coen brothers movie, ‘A Serious Man’, (not a a scholarly, but still an instructive source here), shows a boy learning to chant a section of the Torah for his Bar Mitzvah, he prepares by listening to his passage repeatedly, and then on the day, is able to recite his passage successfully. Is the young man literate in Hebrew? To a degree. To a similar degree, many old time Catholics were literate in Latin. They could recite their part at services, but not converse or write in Latin. Jesus may have had some degree of literacy, but estimating what that was would be pure speculation.
4. Jesus would not have been able to read, in the sense of composing or reading letters. He would have memorised paraphrases of religious literature in Aramaic called targums (Black’s An Aramaic Approach to the Gospels and Acts was the standard text on this subject, last time I checked). This was a skill reserved for a privileged few, is the standard view. A more sophisticated picture is being proposed now, around a graduated appreciation of what constitutes ‘literacy’ in papers like this (though it deals with a much earlier period): https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0237962

1. The following study proposes that literacy was actually widespread in ancient Israel. Israel was apparently very good at educating its people to read: Arie Shaus, Yana Gerber, Shira Faigenbaum-Golovin, Barak Sober, Eli Piasetzky, Israel Finkelstein. Forensic document examination and algorithmic handwriting analysis of Judahite biblical period inscriptions reveal significant literacy level. PLOS ONE, 2020; 15 (9): e0237962 DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0237962
2. Josephus emphasizes the importance of Jewish literacy for religious education (stating that Jews are urged to teach their children grammar, so they know about the laws and the deeds of their ancestors), it is more probably than not that Jesus was literate. http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.01.0215%3Abook%3D2%3Awhiston%20section%3D26
3. According to Chris Keith:
4. Mark and Luke have differing opinions as to Jesus’ social class. Mark 6 claims that Jesus’ hometown rejects him as a synagogue teacher because he is a tektōn, typically translated “carpenter,” but a member of the manual-labor class. (Matthew 13 follows Mark, but has Jesus as the son of a tektōn.) Luke agrees that Jesus’ hometown rejected him, but it’s because of his statements in the synagogue, not because he’s a member of the manual-labor class. Luke, in fact, removes the reference to Jesus being a tektōn, has the audience call Jesus simply “Joseph’s son,” and attributes to him scribal-literate skills of reading and handling a manuscript, even finding the location of a text in scriptio continua. So, in short, there’s a difference of opinion within our first-century sources as to which class Jesus was in. This shouldn’t surprise us. John 7:15 says that Jesus’ own audiences were confused about whether he fell in the scribal-literate class or scribal-illiterate class. Their question “How does this man know letters?” implies that Jesus was in the scribal-literate class; but their qualification “when he’s never been taught” implies that he was not. “The Jews” of John 7:15 thus find Jesus to be a conundrum—he teaches like a scribal-literate person but they know he’s not because he wasn’t educated. Importantly, the narrator never claims Jesus was “not like the scribes” as do Mark and Matthew; he claims only that Jesus is the type of Jewish teacher who made his audiences confused on the issue.
5. I think this claim on the part of the Johannine narrator has a very high degree of historical plausibility. And if different audiences of eyewitnesses came to different conclusions about Jesus’ scribal-literate status and authority, and I argue in this book for the likelihood that they did (just like some members of his audience attribute Messianic status to him and others rejected it), we should not be surprised that this tension is present in our first-century sources as well, particularly if we believe that these sources do have some relationship to some form of eyewitness testimony. (If I can raise the issue of “eyewitnesses” without being too nuanced about the details, since it’s a complex matter.)
6. According to Ben Zion Rosenfeld and Haim Perlmutter’s Social Stratification of the Jewish Population of Roman Palestine in the Period of the Mishnah, 70–250 CE (Brill, 2020), the independent craftsmen that the terms τέκτων and אומן denoted were roughly equivalent to the lower middle class, so Jesus’ family would not have been so poor as commonly believed. “This could indicate that the pursuit of a nonagricultural profession enabled mobility and released the individual from attachment to the land or to a permanent employer, thus allowing for religious contemplation. On the other hand, all of Jesus’ parables are taken from agricultural situations. The reason behind this is that he came from a background where he was a village artisan supplying local farmers” (p. 105).(edited)
7. If Jesus learned how to read, it’s unlikely it happened in Nazareth. In “Peter, Paul, and Mary Magdalene” (2006), discussing Peter’s likely illiteracy, Bart Ehrman surmises that Galilee’s literacy rate fell in the 5-10% range, lower than the average rate for the time. Galilee was primarily agricultural, and people there struggled to make a living. There was little time or money for education. Galilee possessed only two cities: Sepphoris (a few miles from Nazareth) and Tiberias, both in the 8,000-12,000 population range, and of a predominantly Jewish character. Nazareth had about 400 people; Capernaum, a maximum of 1,700. Neither had public buildings in the first century. (Reed, “Archaeology and the Galilean Jesus,” 2000). There would have been scribes in the villages, operating as administrative middlemen, who knew how to read and write, draft contracts and leases, forward petitions, and ensure execution of legal responsibilities (Arnal, “Jesus and the Village Scribes,” 2001). Could Jesus have been involved with them? We can’t really know. Synagogues in pre-70 Galilee would have been as much political meeting places as religious ones. Whatever familiarity Jesus had with scripture would probably have been through a synagogue, though Nazareth, as small as it was, is unlikely to have had one.
8. Recent scholars that claim that Jesus was illiterate
9. I’ve already mentioned Chris Keith. Bart Ehrman makes the claim frequently in his books (for instance I just finished Jesus Before the Gospels) based primarily on the reconstruction of the culture of Palestine at the time, estimated literacy rates for different social classes, and the assumption that Jesus was a working-class carpenter until he started his mission.
11. Models of Literacy
12. There are two models for literacy, Finlay’s Primitivist model – which suggests only 1-2% of the population would be able to afford literacy, and a contending model which shows that up to 30% of the population consists of a sort of ‘middle class’. This contending model for literacy would mean that roughly 8-25% of householders could read – so in a village of 1000 people, containing 200 householders, maybe 30 could read and write Hebrew. Roughly 10,000 people in Judaea would be able to speak and write Greek and that limits the ability to only the elite, and disregards any women, children, or non-elites, and Wise follows down a trail of argument that you could end up with almost 50,000 people being literate in Greek in Judaea. Greek literacy was a little less, perhaps 20% of the householders, but they knew it well – not just a signatory level, but to a decent comprehensive level, much better that they generally knew Aramaic. Wise’s argument is slightly more complex than I’m making it, but he ends up with a figure of roughly 65% of male householders were literate to some degree, but the caveat is in how you define literacy. If you aggregate everything together (and it’s a fair amount of complex extrapolation), perhaps 5-10% of the male population could read books. 16% could sign their name in the appropriate language (which is a another definition of literacy) and there’s quite a bit of wiggle room on those numbers and they only refer to written languages, not what you’d speak. Jews were differently literate in languages for different reasons.
13. Speaking-wise there’s no problem with di or even tri-glossic tendencies, and Judaea is a reasonable example. Languages will be used in particular settings – what you speak in the market place is not what you’ll speak amongst friends and family. Greek and Hebrew would certainly have been superstrate, with Aramaic being substrate. The whole question is whether all that written literacy (which tended to clump in the upper echelons) would have made its way down to Jesus et al. He could probably speak all 3 languages (and perhaps Latin), whether his followers (which included a large number of people outside the 12 it should be remembered) could read and write is not really answerable. They could have – whether they did is the other question. Whether they bothered to (and it got lost) or it got collected later on is a different question, but there’s nothing to stop them having done so. If you want plausibility, then yes, they could have, assuming they lived long enough.
15. Were the disciples illiterate?
16. The well known study by Catherine Hezser, Jewish Literacy in Roman Palestine, states that literacy was not that widespread in the first century in the area of the Galilee (i.e., not widespread at all, being far less than 10%; Ehrman claims around 1% [p. 73] in his book Forged. When one looks at this study better, it seems like she is only really discussing the type of literacy involved with technical pieces like philosophical treatises or rabbinic level works. She is much more open earlier in her study though to merchants and trades people knowing some Greek, especially if it is part of an political-administrative role, often tied to commerce, or other tasks tied to a religious context (see her work, pp. 94, 243, 276-87) According to Darrel L. Bock, Evidence does exist of extensive commerce and knowledge of Greek in Tiberias and Sepphoris, both of which are located close to Capernaum and Nazareth respectively. In fact, these larger Sea of Galilee communities are seen as so important that John Dominic Crossan, hardly a conservative interpreter of Scripture, argues that Jesus would have almost certainly practiced carpentry in Sepphoris and engaged in a kind of international trade and exchange of ideas. All of this assumes some level of linguistic and cultural engagement.
17. Literacy and education were also a concern to Jews in the first century it seems. This has been argued in a series of articles by Marsitella Botticini and Zvi Eckstein. One entitled “From Farmers to Merchants: Voluntary Conversions and Diaspora; A Human Capital Interpretation of Jewish History,” Centre for Economic Policy Research Discussion Paper 6006. discusses Jewish practice from 200 BC into the Post-Islamic period. The other paper is similar. It is entitlted “Jewish Occupational Selection: Education, Restrictions, or Minorities,” The Journal of Economic History 65 (2005): 922-48. In the second article, they discuss the situation of education in Judaism before 70 CE starting on p. 932. The authors note how Simeon ben Shetah in the first century BCE and Joshua ben Gamla in the first century CE promoted education starting for boys from the age of six and seven. The decree is noted in the Talmud. Josephus confirms something like this, noting the importance of children’s education in Against Apion 1. section 12 and 2. section 19. Here is Against Apion 1.12.60, “Our principle care of all is this, to educate our children well; and we think it to be the most necessary business of our whole life to observe the laws that have been given us, and to keep those rules of piety that have been delivered down to us.” Here is 2.19.78, where he discusses how well people know the law, “for our people, if anybody do but ask any one of them about our laws, he will more readily tell them all than he will tell his own name, and this in consequence of our having learned them immediately as soon as ever we became sensible of anything, and of our having them, as it were engraven on our souls. Our transgressors of them are but few; and it is impossible, when any do offend, to escape punishment.” A final text is 2.25.204. It reads that the law “orders that they [children] be taught to read (kai grammata paideuein ekeleusen), and shall learn both the laws and deeds of their forefathers.”
18. Bernard Spolsky and is work called “Triglossia and Literacy in Jewish Palestine of the first century.” International Journal of the Sociology of Language 42 (1983): 95-109. Martin Hengel’s Judaism and Hellenism made the point about the spread of Greek and Greek culture among Jews. We have Greek papyri at Qumran. Greek was banned from being taught either in 116 CE (after the war with Quietus) or after 70 CE, but that assumes it was being taught before then (See m Sotah 9.14, some manuscripts refer to Titus here, others Quietus). We know it functioned in places like Caesarea and Beth Shean. The use of the LXX also shows its influence. Most funerary inscriptions we have are in Greek. I do not want to exaggerate here. Greek would not have been the main language for many, but merchants would have learned it at a basic level and the fact Peter (for example) travels into Gentile areas to minister orally suggests some facility with the language unless we insist he traveled with an interpreter!
19. We have little reason to suspect, at least in the case of Matthew and John, that their traditional authors would have even been able to write a complex narrative in Greek prose. According the estimates of William Harris in his classic study Ancient Literacy (p. 22), “The likely overall illiteracy of the Roman Empire under the principate is almost certain to have been above 90%.” Of the remaining tenth, only a few could read and write well, and even a smaller fraction could author complex prose works like the Gospels.
20. Judaic Studies scholar Meir Bar-Ilan (“Illiteracy in the Land of Israel in the First Centuries CE“) finds that only about 3% of the population was literate, and most of this portion would have lived in cities or large towns (not typical of where the disciples of rural Galilee were from). Likewise, Catherine Hezser in Jewish Literacy in Roman Palestine (p. 496) argues:
21. If ‘literacy’ is determined as the ability to read documents, letters, and ‘simple’ literary texts in at least one language and to write more than one’s signature itself, it is quite reasonable to assume that the Jewish literacy rate was well below the 10-15 percent (of the entire population, including women) which Harris [Ancient Literacy] has estimated for Roman society in imperial times.
22. https://web.archive.org/web/20160603021315/https://faculty.biu.ac.il/~barilm/illitera.html

1. Bart Ehrman (Forged, p. 73) explains:
2. ]Most people outside of the urban areas would scarcely ever even see a written text. Some smaller towns and villages may have had a literacy level around 1 percent. Moreover, these literate people were almost always the elite of the upper class. Those who learned to read learned how to read Hebrew (not Greek).
3. Likewise, we have archaeological evidence which suggests that Peter, who is described alongside John as αγραμματος (“illiterate”) in Acts 4:13, was in fact illiterate based on excavations of his hometown in Capernaum. As Ehrman (Forged, pp. 74-75) explains:
4. In order to evaluate Peter’s linguistic abilities, the place to begin, then, is with Capernaum … The archaeological digs have revealed … there are no inscriptions of any kind on any of the buildings …
5. Reed [Archaeology and the Galilean Jesus, pp. 140-169] concludes that the inhabitants were almost certainly ‘predominantly illiterate’ [even in Aramaic] … In short, Peter’s town was a backwoods Jewish village made up of hand-to-mouth laborers who did not have an education. Everyone spoke Aramaic. Nothing suggests that anyone could speak Greek. Nothing suggests that anyone in the town could write. As a lower-class fisherman, Peter would have started work as a young boy and never attended school. There was, in fact, probably no school there. Bear in mind that John is described as αγραμματος (“illiterate”) alongside Peter in the passage, for whom we have very strong archaeological evidence that he was probably illiterate. Furthermore, both James and John the sons of Zebedee are likewise described as living around Capernaum. The best interpretation of the passage is thus that Acts 4:13 is describing Peter and John as both lacking Rabbinic training and being illiterate.
6. Likewise, the internal evidence of the Gospel of Matthew contradicts the traditional attribution to Matthew (or Levi) the tax collector. While tax collectors had basic training in accounting, the Gospel of Matthew is written in a complex narrative of Greek prose that shows extensive familiarity with Jewish scripture and teachings. However, tax collectors were regarded by educated Jews as a sinful, “pro-Roman” class (as noted by J. R. Donahue in “Tax Collectors and Sinners: An Attempt at Identification“), who were alienated from their religious community, as is evidenced by the Pharisees accusations against Jesus in Mark 2:15-17, Matthew 9:10-13, and Luke 5:29-31 for associating “with tax collectors and sinners” (μετα των τελωνων και αμαρτωλων). (https://www.jstor.org/stable/43714979) Regarding the authorship of the Gospel of Matthew, scholar Barbara Reid (The Gospel According to Matthew, pp. 5-6) explains,(edited)
7. “The author had extensive knowledge of the Hebrew Scriptures and a keen concern for Jewish observance and the role of the Law … It is doubtful that a tax collector would have the kind of religious and literary education needed to produce this Gospel.”
8. Here’s what Bart Ehrman says on tax collectors:
9. People today often say that since this person was a tax-collector he must have been literate. That’s not true at all, so far as I know. There were all levels of tax collectors working for the corporations throughout the empire who collected revenues for the central Roman government from the provinces. There were upper-level administrators (who probably would have been literate) to the lower-level guys who came banging on your door for money. There’s nothing in the text to indicate that Matthew, if he existed, was in the upper echelons of the administration. He’s sitting at a tax booth. That means he’s simply the guy you give your money to. He would have given it to his superior who would have passed it on, with all the revenues of the other tax collectors in the same region, to the advisor over him, who could collect all the moneys for the region and pass them on …. and so forth. Presumably someone of Matthew’s status would have had to be able to count and to add up money. But being able to add is not the same as being able to read, let alone being able to write, let alone being able to compose writing, let alone being able to compose high-level prose!
10. https://ehrmanblog.org/why-was-the-gospel-of-matthew-attributed-to-matthew/

To conclude, it is not obvious to say that he was literate/illiterate. He was likely able to read/write a little bit (barely), but not extremely literate in any case