Everything I said is well established fact. For most of the religion's existence, Christians did not read their Bibles, verily, they had not the ability to read at all! The would receive their word of God from their priest, or pastor, or whatever preacher led them in worship, most never owned a Bible of their own, though they would have other things like crosses and rosaries. Even after the Bible was made widely available, and printed in a language the common man could read, and the common man was literate, there was still the lingering taboo of reading the Bible as a layman, in some circles (and not only talking catholics here), it was even seen as a heresy to do so. So most did not, BTW, they also refused to celebrate christmas, because that too was a heresy, they considered it a pagan holiday, and they considered it idolatry, either way, it was an offense to the lord for a christian to do so. The time of a group of literate christians who sat reading passages from their own copies of the good book was a very, very recent development in the religion's history. All this is incontestable fact. We then had the enlightenment, reformation, revolution, and the Edwardian and Victorian periods of the age of industry, here morals got more relaxed and taboos became less strict, so more and more people started cracking open their black books and looking it over. Thus the modern practice of considering reading the bible yourself as something a good christian does had eventually became a more and more popular idea, for a modern christian, they would see it as bizarre for someone to consider it otherwise. A lot of this comes down to how schisms and religious conflicts had led to a personalization and individualization of Christianity, where before God's worship was attended to by the flock, it became (mostly out of necessity) a matter of God being worshipped by the lone sheep. This personal idea of God is also something newer to christianity, but has become the majority opinion such that most modern christians cannot understand how it used to be different, and more based on the relationship God had with the community rather than with the members of it. Christianity has changed, and it is about to change again.