Paul thought he was living at the end of time, and people needed to prepare for the imminent kingdom of God.
Explain why you believe Paul should have been educating people in literacy, logic, and the maths given that context.
As a general rule, peasants, slaves, laborers, aka Paul's laity, are not intellectuals either then or now.
Anyone who has read Romans knows Paul is not an ignoramus.
Pope Francis is probably the most highly educated leader of a nation-state on the planet.
Western science and intellectual history is heavily in debt to Medieval Christian scholasticism, logic, natural philosophy, and the Catholic universities. Scholasticism inculcated a habit of disputation, logic, and skeptical inquiry which in many ways still undergirds modern science. That kind of organized disputation, logic, skeptical inquiry was unique to Europe and is probably a major reason empirical science first developed uniquely in Europe rather than anywhere else.
The problem is, most of us were taught in junior high school in the 1960s, 70s, ad 80s, that the Medieval period was a "dark age" utterly devoid of anything intellectually interesting and really just worth forgetting about. Anyone who has read the historical literature of the last 40 years, knows the High and Late Medieval Age was a dynamic period of European history pregnant with historically important developments in natural philosophy, logic, disputation, and skeptical inquiry which are largely attributable to Christian institutional evolution.
