Much has been written about the relationship between ritual and writing in the world's religious traditions and societies. Sometimes ritual and literate activities have been taken as opposite poles in typologies of religious traditions. The German Egyptologist and cultural critic Jan Assmann, for example, has distinguished between two types of religion: cult religions and book-based ones. In the latter, the literary texts, in the form of a body of canonical writings, become “the pivotal factor, and ritual is left with only a framing and accompanying function” (Assmann 2006: 122). In cult religions, by contrast, the transmission of religious knowledge is based primarily on the principle of ritual repetition and the text—if a culture is literate—is embedded in the ritual and subordinated to it.

There is no denying that literacy has had an enormous impact on the cultural evolution of religions and societies (e.g., Goody 1986, 1987, 2000; Pyysiäinen 1999; Yunis 2003). It is also beyond doubt that literacy heavily influenced the formation of early Christianity (Gamble 1995; H. G. Snyder 2000; Heines-Eitzen 2000; Klingshirn & Safran 2004). From its earliest beginnings, Christianity was deeply engaged in the careful study and interpretation of the Jewish scriptures and producing its own texts. Part of these texts eventually came to constitute a Christian canon (i.e., a list of books that were acceptable for public reading in the context of worship; Gamble 1995: 215).