How did Christianity lead to the development of punctuation? To understand, we must go back to the third century BC, to the Hellenistic city of Alexandria in Egypt. There, a librarian named Aristophanes developed the earliest form of punctuation. Prior to Aristophanes' invention, the words and letters in Greek texts had been written with no spaces between letters or words. A reader was expected to figure out on his or her own where to pause or stop when reading. Aristophanes realized that by inserting symbols into the text, readers could know where to pause. Consequently, he developed a system comprised of dots aligned with the top, middle, or bottom of each line to indicate pauses of different lengths. Unfortunately, as Keith Houston, writing at the bbc.com website informs us:
When the Romans overtook the Greeks as the preeminent empire-builders of the ancient world, they abandoned Aristophanes' system of dots without a second thought. Cicero, for example, one of Rome's most famous public speakers, told his rapt audiences that the end of a sentence "ought to be determined not by the speaker's pausing for breath, or by a stroke interposed by a copyist, but by the constraint of the rhythm" ("The Mysterious Origins of Punctuation," Sept. 2, 2015).
As it would turn out, it took the advent of Christianity for the idea of punctuation to be revived. As Houston notes:
...As the Roman Empire crumbled in the 4th and 5th Centuries, Rome's pagans found themselves fighting a losing battle against a new religion called Christianity. Whereas pagans had always passed along their traditions and culture by word of mouth, Christians preferred to write down their psalms and gospels to better spread the word of God. Books became an integral part of the Christian identity, acquiring decorative letters and paragraph marks...and many were lavishly illustrated with gold leaf and intricate paintings.
As it spread across Europe, Christianity embraced writing and rejuvenated punctuation. In the 6th Century, Christian writers began to punctuate their own works long before readers got their hands on them in order to protect their original meaning. Later, in the 7th Century, [Archbishop] Isidore of Seville...described an updated version of Aristophanes' system [of dots]...Moreover, Isidore explicitly connected punctuation with meaning for the first time...
Irish and Scottish monks would soon be adding spaces between words to facilitate reading, and in the late 8th century a monk named Alcuin would develop what we know as lower-case letters (previously, only upper-case letters had been used). By the time Gutenberg published the first printed Bible in the mid-1450s, the punctuation we are familiar with had become standard for European languages. However, some non-European languages would take longer to adopt Western-style punctuation. For example, Chinese did not begin using Western-style punctuation until the 2oth century. Prior to that, scholars had added their own punctuation to a text while reading, while specific characters (symbols for words) were used to indicate the beginning and end of sentences (for details, see Sun Jiawei, "How China Adopted Western Punctuation," Sept. 29, 2021 at theworldofchinese.com).
In short, Christianity has contributed in both dramatic and seemingly mundane ways to the world in which we all--believers and non-believers--live, and that includes something we see every time we read a book or a blogpost like this one--punctuation.
Image of Holy Bible from Wikimedia Commons