It would hardly be too much to say that literary culture in Europe, much of Africa and the Americas is inseparable from the culturally transformative power of Christianity. Two thousand years ago, textually preserved literacy and literature were substantially unknown beyond certain Mediterranean and Oriental cultures. Learning spread slowly. Chinese textual culture of the first century B.C. was largely restricted to matters of bureaucracy (politics and economics) and ancestral legend. Only a tiny elite, the chu-tzu, mastered and recapitulated fragments of pertinent oral tradition in textual form. In the Mediterranean and contiguous Middle East, this pattern was varied and enriched by the appearance of epic narrative (Homer), philosophical reflection (Plato, Aristotle), and religious drama (Euripides, Aeschylus, Sophocles) of the Greeks. The Romans were scions of their Greek stock but more managerial; under the administrative demands of empire, text-based literacy broadened somewhat. Then came the Christians.

What marks the emergence of Christian influence in literature is the appearance and dissemination of the Gospels themselves—not as an elite but as a popular and vernacular body of texts. In the eventful koine reportage of the Gospels, the breathless countercultural story in Acts, and the multicultural apostolic letters of the New Testament there emerges a counterliterature: it was no longer ethnocentric and was concerned not with statecraft or elite entertainment, but with the transformation of ordinary lives.

It is to the Great Commission itself that we owe the myriad cultural transformations effected by the Bible. In most of Europe, as in Africa, South America, and in many other parts of the world, the birth of literacy and literature essentially, not accidentally, coincides with the arrival of Christian missionaries. Before the arrival of the missionaries, there had not been an effective means of writing in these cultures. Literature, as we think of it, was the province of oral culture only. Biblical translation and paraphrase was typically undertaken in the first or second missionary generation, providing for hundreds of languages the first instance of their written form. The second generation of texts, as is the case with Anglo-Saxon England, typically consists of creative works of Christian reflection and Scriptural formation. King Alfred the Great (d. 851), alone called "great" among the kings of England, earned his reputation not by his military exploits but by translating and introducing Christian classics to his people. Thus, in a barbarous Germanic culture—where once all power grew from spilling blood—it became increasingly possible to say, as Lord Lytton would put it later, "the pen is mightier than the sword."

King Alfred is an example of those who have, in every part of the world where the gospel has come, recognized that the power of Scripture to liberate increases proportionally with access to the text. Alfred thought learning to read was his own greatest early accomplishment. He also considered the most important obligation of his stewardship as king that of providing Christian literature translated into English (Scripture, commentary, spiritual counsel). He well understood that a capacity to read with discriminating and thoughtful intelligence was of incalculable value for one who would be faithful to the Word of God, and above all essential for anyone whose sense of obligation to the gospel included obedience to the Great Commandment. The new literacy allowed Christian teaching to grow exponentially. The capacity to read and write in each vernacular language spurred not only the preservation of old story, but also the creation or recording of new stories, narrative and poetry and wise reflection transformed by the Good News. This new literacy made possible a much more democratic education; shepherds and plowboys, once having learned to read the vernacular Scriptures, became as capable of rising to positions of leadership in the Church and the world as the offspring of landlords and noblemen. By the time of the Reformation and the invention of printing, this revolutionary effect of biblically sponsored textual learning had thus transformed cultural and political process as well.

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