“I believe there was at least one copy of the bible in every household, most people had access to at least some of scripture.”
This is simply untenable in the early centuries of the Church. First, everything had to be hand-written - there were no printing presses at all until the mid-15th Century. Therefore, hand-writing copies of Scripture took lots of time and was expensive to accomplish. Even when considering the Old Testament had plenty of time to be disseminated by the beginning of Christianity, it is not true that even every Jew had a copy. It was only possible for the synagogues and the extremely wealthy individual to have the OT books at hand. In the first centuries of Christianity, the same problems apply, only now you have to add 27 more books and distribute them to a larger group of people. Couldn’t be done. It is simply silly to say that a copy of the Bible was in every household back then, just from the impossible logistics. Add to that that many of the early Christians couldn’t read, many were slaves and couldn’t own a Bible or hide one, and having too many Bibles floating around in an era of widespread persecution would lead to sacrilegious confiscation/destruction, etc. When the NT Christians were “studying Scripture,” they were doing so as communities using the books of the Bible they had, virtually never as individuals.
Exactly!
And I might add this...suppose someone comes to Ephesus one day bearing a letter that says it was from St. Paul. HOW do the Ephesians know it was actually written by St. Paul or under his authority?
Methinks people don't realize how important the Church *as an institution* was in verifying the Scriptures.