Picture the scene: it's a midweek church meeting, or perhaps a home group. Everyone's Bible is out. The speaker is comparing Chronicles with Kings. The differences are fascinating. The details are examined forensically. At the end of the meeting everyone feels a bit mentally frazzled, but they know a bit more than they did.

That's Bible study for you. The modern evangelical knows how to do it: you pore over each word and each phrase, because it's the Word of God. A bit of Greek and Hebrew does no harm, either – but not too much, because the Word is for all God's people, not just scholars.

Amen to that. But what evangelicals don't always appreciate is how very, very strange this activity would have been for most of the church's history. That model of discipleship, involving deep engagement with the Scriptures, private and group study, the comparison of texts and a semi-academic reading, would have been not just odd but impossible for the vast majority of Christians in any period except the relatively modern.

Because for most of Christian history, most Christians haven't had Bibles; and if they had, they wouldn't have been able to read them.

It was only with the invention of printing in the 15th century that the mass distribution of the Scriptures became possible – and even then it took a while. It wasn't until the 17th century, in England at least, that printing and greater literacy began to create a population for whom the kind of activity we take for granted became routine.

That means for at least 1600 years, and probably longer, our typical Protestant evangelical Bible study wouldn't have been typical at all.

And that's important, because it makes us ask questions.

What about all the Christians who lived before the technological advance that gave us printed Bibles, or the social advance that gave us better education? Were they worse Christians than we are because they didn't read the Scriptures?

And if the answer is, 'Obviously not', then what can we learn from their discipleship – and what are the perils we're exposed to from technology that they weren't?

And – crucially – do we, by our obsession with the written text, run the risk of excluding those for whom reading in this analytical way isn't natural, creating an underclass of those who don't read and an officer class of those who do, subtly – or not so subtly – discriminating against those less biblically-literate?

Let's be clear – I've spent my life studying the Bible. I'd be the last person to under-value it. It is full of treasure and reading it has immensely enriched my life, not least because it's a hard book: it takes real effort to understand it properly.

But neither do I believe we should ignore the testimony of three-quarters of Christian history.

Of course they knew the Bible stories, because they were told them. If they were lucky, they saw them blazing in the stained glass windows of the great medieval churches. If they had good priests and pastors, they might have known psalms and prayers by heart. But they wouldn't have sat down to discuss the finer points of Colossians and Romans, or the precise relationship of Jude and 1 Peter.

Their discipleship, I suspect, tended to the practical rather than the theoretical. It was about how to live better in the world, rather than how to tick the right doctrinal boxes. It was driven by ethics, rather than orthodoxy. The Spirit was active not just through the Word, but in their minds and hearts and in their communities. God did not suddenly show up when Johannes Gutenberg made his breakthrough invention.  

The problem with a particular kind of evangelicalism is that when it comes to discipleship – and it's one to which I belong, so I know the dangers – the Bible has become more important than anything else. So the content of belief, rather than its consequences in the lives of believers, is given too much weight (there's even a knock-down riposte: what you believe inevitably has consequences. Up to a point, only).

The Bible will always stand at the fountain-head of discipleship. We learn how to be Christians from Jesus, and we learn about Jesus in the Bible. But that's not the same as saying you can only be a Christian – or only be a good Christian – if you're capable of the intense study and textual analysis touted by some strands of evangelicalism today. If that's not you, don't worry: you're in good company and you are not second best. Most Christians throughout most of history have become Christlike through prayer and corporate worship.

Mark Woods is the author of Does the Bible really say that? Challenging our assumptions in the light of Scripture (Lion, £8.99). Follow him on Twitter: @RevMarkWoods