A Case for Public Reading of Scripture

To underscore an earlier observation, this corporate reading of texts in early churches, and in synagogues, also makes less crucial the widely agreed view that in the Roman era only a minority, perhaps a small minority, of people were sufficiently literate to be able to read such extended literary texts. All that was needed was one person in a given church or synagogue able to read out a text, all the others present thereby enabled to have knowledge of the text and be affected by it.— Destroyer of the gods: Early Christian Distinctiveness in the Roman World, page 116