Illiterate Christians from the Beginning
Around the first century, not many people could read even in Rome and Jerusalem.
And it is said that it was truly rare that any person had ability to write in those days around the Mediterranean. Some might be able to read, but only few could write. Then, who in fact wrote the Gospels?
From the beginning, they who followed Christ Jesus were all Judaists at the time. They had already their own holy books or the Jewish Bibles.
The process by which scriptures became canons and Bibles was a long one, and its complexities account for the many different Old Testaments which exist today. Timothy H. Lim, a professor of Hebrew Bible and Second Temple Judaism at the University of Edinburgh, states that, "The Old Testament (OT) or Tanak was written in Hebrew and Aramaic. This collection of books was not written by one man, nor did it drop down from heaven as assumed by fundamentalists. It is not a magical book, but a collection of authoritative texts of apparently divine origin that went through a human process of writing and editing.”[18] By about the 5th century BC Jews saw the five books of the Torah (the Old Testament Pentateuch) as having authoritative status; by the 2nd century BC the Prophets had a similar status, although without quite the same level of respect as the Torah; beyond that, the Jewish scriptures were fluid, with different groups seeing authority in different books.
Greek Bible
The scriptures were first translated into Greek in Alexandria between about 280–130 BC.[20] These early Greek translations – supposedly commissioned by Ptolemy Philadelphus – were called the Septuagint (Latin: "Seventy") from the supposed number of translators involved (hence its abbreviation "LXX"). This Septuagint remains the basis of the Old Testament in the Eastern Orthodox Church.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Testament#From_scripture_to_canon:_formation_of_the_Old_TestamentProbably it was beyond the imagination of those original followers of living Christ Jesus to write a new version of the holy book of Judaism to present Christ Jesus as the Son of God. They were all Judaists. And, they were most probably illiterate.
Indeed there are no scenes in the Gospels where Christ Jesus took up the holy book of Judaisms or the Old Testament, read any sentences in it, and explain its meaning to or discuss it with His disciples. On the contrary, Christ Jesus rebuked Scribes or those who could read the holy book on various occasions. He taught illiterate people as if He Himself had been illiterate. Christ Jesus did not use any brochures or tracts in His mission.
Even after the death or disappearance of Christ Jesus after the Crucifixion, surviving disciples tried to make His teaching reach only poor people around them, namely illiterate poor Israelites, except the bold mission to foreigners by St. Paul. Those disciples could not, most probably, read and write. And they were also Judaists. They must have had no idea of writing any book about Christ Jesus, since nobody could read such a book even if they been able to write it.
But as time went by, the situation changed. One generation after the death or disappearance of Christ Jesus, those who listened to successors of the original disciples were not necessarily poor and pure Judaists. With efforts of St. Paul and some other believers, well educated Israelites, foreigners, heretics, Greeks, Romans, etc. came to accept the teaching of Christ Jesus. Some of them needed written material to teach or lean the religion being established on its own and separated from Judaism. Yet, in the first and second centuries when the New Testament was written and complied, only a few people could read and write, maybe around 10% of all the population around the Mediterranean under the Roman rule.
Literacy rate of ancient Rome compared to Europe's middle ages?
There is no way to calculate literacy rates for certain in either society, so we can only rely on sheer guesswork here. In both societies, the vast bulk of the population - like 80-90% at least - were illiterate farmers. Only the upper classes and urban middle classes, a small minority of the population, would have had a use for literacy.
Still, the evidence (and the consensus among historians) pretty conclusively points to the Roman empire having much greater literacy than medieval Europe, at least until the last century or so of the Middle Ages. The Roman Empire had state-subsidized education, nothing like a modern public school system but still much more expansive than medieval church-based education. The empire was also much more urbanized than medieval Europe - maybe 10% of the population. The Middle Ages had probably less than 5% of its population in cities, though again the number rose in the later Middle Ages.
The main evidence for more widespread Roman literacy is the KIND of writing you find in the Roman Empire. Practically all medieval texts (until you start getting merchants' contracts and records around 1100 onwards) were written by churchmen or tutored aristocrats, and are fairly formal in character. In the Roman Empire, you find a lot more casual writing - notes taken by soldiers stationed at Hadrian's Wall, graffiti from the brothels of Pompeii, etc. These kinds of things show that reading and writing was more a part of routine daily life and not just formal business.
Just to pull numbers out of a hat, I would say that the Roman Empire might have had a literacy rate around 10%, maybe 20% tops, and medieval Europe probably under 5% in the early Middle Ages, rising gradually to around 10-20% by the end (15th century).
https://answers.yahoo.com/question/index;_ylt=A0SO80D1mzpUZOgANTBXNyoA;_ylu=X3oDMTExdnAzNG4wBHNlYwNzcgRwb3MDNQRjb2xvA2dxMQR2dGlkA1VJQzFfMQ--?qid=20120416014255AAI0hWo
Nonetheless, it was lucky for the early Christianity to be taught in the Roman Empire where the literacy rate was relatively higher than in other regions. The Gospels should be used effectively in missions of early Christians in the Empire.
But a possibility that a man who knew and heard from direct successors of original disciples could also write must have been small. That should be why we have today only four versions of Gospels. (And all the four versions seem to be mostly rooted in one common document called the Q source or the like. It means that only one literate early-Christian decided the fate of Christianity in later centuries up to date.) Otherwise, more episodes, facts, deeds, acts, and teachings of Christ Jesus must have been left in a written format.
Conversely, most of early Christians in the era of the Roman Empire came to believe in Christ Jesus without reading the Gospels at all. It is a miracle, isn't it?
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Psa 10:12 Arise, O LORD; O God, lift up thine hand: forget not the humble.