As dangus said above, the really early church had the Greek Septuagint, which was a ~250 BC Greek translation of the Old Testament. Literacy was at best 10%. So the early church was still highly oral in tradition.
The early church did not compile the various writings which now comprise the New Testament until after a couple of hundred years. But they did circulate the letters and Gospels between churches from the beginning. Paul encouraged it in his writing. Part of the "fullness of time" cited by Christ was the preparation of the world for the planting of the church. Briefly, the preparation included: (1) dispersion of Jewish communities around the Mediterranean, (2) Pax Romana allowing peaceful travel, (3) Roman road system, (4) translation of the Old Testament into Greek, and (5) universal use of Greek around the Mediterranean.
Notice that the groundwork for many of these prerequisites was laid centuries before the first coming of Christ! :)
Literacy was at best 10%. So the early church was still highly oral in tradition.
Just to tweak: the ancient Christians *did* continue the Jewish method of proclaiming the Word in their Liturgies. By the 2nd century, there were moves to standardize which texts were worthy of inclusion into liturgies. So while it’s true that most early Christians probably never laid hands on a bible, it was central to early Christian worship.
On a tangent I hope you’ll find interesting:
As I noted before, The Gospel of St. John probably consists of several liturgical readings compiled together as John’s death approached. The existence of such proto-gospels before their canonical publication probably explains much of the relationship between their texts:
Church fathers (Irenaeus IIRC?) attest to a Hebrew version of St. Matthew as early as AD 50. And indeed, many textual analysts find that portion seem less natively Greek than others. What’s odd is that it’s the most Greek portions that parallel St. Mark perfectly. Why would Mark condense Matthew using only the most Greek portions? Answer: it happened the opposite way. Matthew added almost all of Mark’s writings to his own. But why? Because Mark wrote with the authority of St. Peter! (or at least his popularity). As Mark spread throughout the Roman world, Matthew aligned his local version to Mark’s. (Indeed, Mark would later script the liturgy.)
Likewise, St. Luke recognized the Hebrew nature of St. Matthew, and sensed that the very literal Greek audience would misunderstand the mythological style of Matthew, and become scandalized by it. So he wrote a very historical gospel: Whereas Matthew traced Jesus’ lineage through the Kings of Israel, Luke does so through the lowly origins of Jesus. Luke uses existing stories from Matthew, but also possibly from the Blessed Virgin Mary herself, and St. John, in addition to his own eye-witness.
[This is NOT to say Matthew is partly fictitious! He never actually wrote “... was the father of ...,” but simply “... begat ...” Nothing implies the immediacy of “was the father of.” Hence, Matthew was able to confirm the geneaology to the numerological expectations of the contemporary Hebrews.]