How familiar was the average Christian of the contents of the Bible back when most people couldn’t read Latin, let alone read at all? Would they be familiar with all the stories, even the more salacious ones? Would they know anything about the more minor prophets such as Obadiah or Haggai?
I’m guessing during those time, people were preoccupied in providing a living and so got their bible info during service.
Increased literacy, the invention of the printing press, and the rise of Protestantism all coincide. Martin Luther is famous for using the printing press to spread his ideas, including Protestantism.
I bring that up because the Catholic Church, especially in those days, was all about the average layperson getting their knowledge of religion and the Bible from their priest. The whole idea of the average person reading the Bible to form their own ideas came about with the Protestant reformation. IIRC was one of the the points of contention that Martin Luther had with the Catholic Church.
To make a long story short, the average Catholic (since we’re largely talking about the times before Martin Luther and Henry VIII if we’re talking about widespread illiteracy) got most of their knowledge from what their priest taught at Mass, not from reading the Bible themselves.
That’s probably true, but keep in mind that it still leaves an awful lot of time to hear about Bible info. Medieval Christian communities had lots of religious holidays, way more than we have public holidays today; the feasts of most saints of any note were public holidays, with the results that in some areas, a third to almost a half of the days of the year were non-working days on which you were supposed to attend church.
And don’t forget that churches in the pre-Reformation period were often highly decorated with frescos or mosaics of Bible stories.
At least in England, organizations like guilds used to put on religious plays which often used characters and stories from the Bible.
My grandmother grew up in Mexico (born 1895), her and my grandfather would wake up at maybe 1:00 at night to walk to the sunrise service. She was assigned to learn several passages from the Bible from childhood and put them to memory as part of her obligation to the church. At 98 we took my niece (her grandniece) to see her and she held her hand tightly and recited what seemed to be about 12 minutes of the Bible (in Spanish) as a blessing to her.
When she died at 103 the preist at her funeral explained this ability/obligation to everyone and everyones face was awestuck that people could actually do that. She had well over 103 direct blood desendants present, I guess she fullfilled her obligation to the church.
The Catholic Church had its periods of being adamantly, at times violently, against lay people reading the Bible, hence knowing what was in it. Thomas More ordered people burned at the stake for translating and printing the bible into a language that the common folks could speak. And he was canonized in 1935.
The Gutenberg press wasn’t even invented until 1440 AD, so most religious content was handed down from generation to generation in the form of stories. I believe Old Testament script was carried around by the Israelites in the Ark of the Covenant, which was considered holy along with its contents. So, the large majority of Hebrews didn’t read anything. When the New Testament came along, the disciples and apostles told the stories, and what is known as “The Gospels”, purportedly written by Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, were the first written texts. Unlike the OT that was written in Hebrew specifically for the Jewish people, the NT was written in Koine Greek, a very common language spoken in that region at that time. After the death of Christ, the apostles began to take the religion to the Gentiles, people of other countries and traditions. That’s when the apostle Paul wrote his letters to the churches.
The sermons were in English (or whatever the local vernacular was ) throughout the middle ages so that was were the vast majority of people got their biblical knowledge. There were passion plays and such but the vast majority of biblical knowledge (and any kind of outside knowledge, besides gossip and oral folk tales) came from the clergy via sermons. Their importance to medieval life cannot be over stated.
What?
If we are to believe the Tanakh, Josiah is the last person to have seen the Ark and he purpotedly lived c. 640-609 BCE, i.e. before the the Babylonian destruction of Jerusalem in 587 BCE. And since most of the Tanakh was written during and after the Exile, the script was hardly carried around in the Ark. The Ark was for the Ten Commandments.
What, again?
Paul’s letter predates the Gospels with up to half a century.
I know that. I’m wondering how much of the Bible the priests taught. For example, could most people at least name every book? (“Habakkuk? Our priest never mentioned any Book of Habakkuk. Sounds made up.”)
Correct. Their source material was written and was, IIRC, just prior to Paul.
This was going to be my response. Lots of Bible stories were staged and that was a major source of familiarity.
To be clear, though, a story being presented theatrically meant something really different a few hundred years ago. More details:
The Catholic Church has a long history of standardising liturgy, including readings from scripture. Priests are not free in choosing the passages from the Bible (“pericopes”) that are read during Mass; they’re predefined and collected in books (“lectionaries”) that specifically contain pericopes in the sequence in which they’re intended to be read over the course of a liturgical year. To my knowledge these don’t go through every line of the entire Bible, but the most important bits (the gospels, the psalms, and the prophets from the Old Testament) are well covered, and have to my knowledge been since the Middle Ages, even though the precise sequence has been reformed many times.
While Mass was conducted in Latin (with a few local exceptions) homilies in the vernacular could optionally be included. They were not a formal part of Mass. Over at the Internet Archive there’s a modern english translation of old english homilies from c. 1000 CE. My skim of the first few dozen pages or so didn’t reveal a lot of direct biblical quotation.
It’s a 600+ page book, without an index unfortunately. Methinks the answer to the OP is in there (at least for England), but it would require hours to figure it out.
The standard canon of the Christian Bible was compiled and standardised long before the invention of printing, and the church, especially monasteries, preserved and passed down this standard canon throughout the Middle Ages. A hand-copied Bible is still a Bible; you don’t need printing to have a religion based on a sacred scripture.
But printing allowed for more continuity, didn’t it?
Yep. Although it’s not exactly clear when different portions of the Bible made the transition from oral to scribed.
It allowed for cheaper, and hence more widely available, copies. But in terms of continuity of the text, printing didn’t make that much of a difference. It’s true that Bible scholars will occasionally question the veracity or interpretation of a particular verse on the basis of the argument that the error of some scribe who was copying the text in the Middle Ages corrupted a passage; but the overall compilation of the books that make up the Bible occurred long before Gutenberg. Otherwise, Gutenberg wouldn’t have known which version of the Bible to print.