In fact, the matter is not all that strange if we recall what was hinted at earlier, that communities of all kinds throughout antiquity generally used the services of the literate for the sake of the illiterate. For in the ancient world “reading” a book did not mean, usually, reading it to oneself; it meant reading it aloud, to others. One could be said to have read a book when in fact one had heard it read by others. There seems to be no way around the conclusion that books—as important as they were to the early Christian movement—were almost always read aloud in social settings, such as in
...more
