Pastor Ryan started teaching a Sunday school class on how to read the Bible. He mentioned something briefly in his introduction that was very interesting - The majority of believers in the past would have learned the Word of God in a corporate setting via preaching and public reading, not from their own Bibles. Think about it. Until the invention of the printing press, copies of the Bible were written and bound by hand. A laborious and time-consuming process. Until the Reformation, the Bible was not written in the language of the average person in the pew. Also the cost would have been prohibitive for the average person. But even after the Reformation, how long did it take for copies of the Scriptures to be readily available? Was it after the Industrial Revolution that books became more affordable via mass production? Even then, there was the issue of literacy, which I don't think became as widespread until reforms in public education. This brief aside in Pastor Ryan's c...