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give or take very few years....they didn't start printing anything for years after the press was invented, there was only one of them until, over time they proved efficient....then people who wanted to print something had to buy a press and learn how to use it. Then they started to print things, I'm fairly certain that the Bible was fairly high on their priority list although I don't know why it should be. The VAST majority of the people coulddn't read mostly because they had nothing to read. Over time, however, as people had access to an affordable book, and had learned to read it ( I don't know what they learned to read on) the bible over many years, became available to all.....1600 years probably isn't that far off....a meaningless number anyway!!....I'll give you a hundred years.....the year 1500 maybe

Sigh...is this the terycarl version of Bible history? Are you aware that great libraries existed in Egypt (Alexandria), Rome, Anatolia (Constantinople), Africa, Greece, India, Iran, Iraq, Israel, Syria, China as well as others (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_libraries_in_the_ancient_world)? What do you think they contained, picture books? If nobody could read, why did they exist? Who wrote all the thousands of documents they contained? Are you aware that the Bible was the book most early Americans used to learn to read? That young Hebrew children used the Scriptures to also learn to read?

I'm not sure who you mean when you say the "vast majority of people" couldn't read. It certainly is provably false as we STILL have books that date to before Christianity existed. If you want to toss out numbers (i.e., Roman Catholicism is 2014 years old; the printing press didn't exist for 1600 years) to demonstrate the antiquity of Roman Catholicism or there wasn't a need for the Bible, it's your responsibility to be accurate - they are hardly meaningless numbers.

Are you aware that great libraries existed in Egypt (Alexandria), Rome, Anatolia (Constantinople), Africa, Greece, India, Iran, Iraq, Israel, Syria, China as well as others

of course I am aware of them, but they certainly weren't like your local public library where virtually anyone can check out a book and take it home. The average person could not make use of those libraries because they couldn't read. Books were not available to the average person because they were hand written and extraordinarily expensive. The major libraries, of course had books, documents and such, but if you lived in say Bethlehem, you had to either walk or ride a donkey to wherever the library was....then you might be able to actually hold a book and perhaps, if you were one of the very few literate people from there, obtain some knowledge from it.