One reason the church was so powerful was the fact that clerics (church officials) were largely the only ones who could read. This meant that the common people had to rely on the priests to tell them what the Bible said, and what God intended them to do. Since most people were illiterate, they did not have access to the works of the great thinkers, such as Greek philosophers and Roman historians. Since the ideas of most great thinkers are built on a foundation of the thoughts of other great thinkers, the common man had no means of either reading or writing great ideas that did not come from the church. I wonder how history would have been different had the church not been so powerful. What if literacy had started in another group or religion had come to hold power because of it?