Assume someone declared in 1964 that Scripture could only be interpreted by those who had computers. This would cede interpretation to government agencies and fairly large corporations, and so would hardly be populist. It would even be an elitist position today, although those in the first world might not recognize it as such.

Writing is as much a technology as computing is, and so sola scriptura would have been an elitist position until well after the printing press reduced the cost of texts by massively incrising their supply. This leads to the paradox that to advance sola scriptura in the time when Scripture was actually written would have required sola ecclesia or solo magisterio, and so even under the hypothesis that Scripture was written to have sole authority the authority would be as corporately vested as any technology that can now be only owned by a business.

I don’t say this to solve the claim of sola scriptura – presumably those who favor the modern form could see the drop in the cost of writing technology as providential and demanding just the major reform in the Church that occurred. But I am interested in the hypothesis of sola scriptura as a cost-of-technology problem, which shifts the question to something like What did the authors of Scripture think about the fact that writing was a corporately owned technology? Was this a bug or a feature?