The Bible isn't very accessible in reality. It has a lot of stories but they don't make a ton of sense out of context and the context is missing by default unless you get a heavily annotated version. So you can read the Bible and become familiar with the characters and general themes (often internalizing a number of false narratives about the contents) but still not really get it - in part because it's a collection from very different authors over vast swatha of time, carefully curated and pared down to suit various agendas.

This is a big part of why Christianity isn't actually that focused on Biblical scholarship. More about churches and patriarchy, having "special" dudes tell you what it means and why you have to listen to them or you are a bad person who should be shunned or worse. The focus is on social control, historically to support the ruling class, and the stories provide a canon story embedding for the nerds that ask why.

Marxism is also not very accessible but this isn't just due to Marx writing like a big nerd in the 19th century and there being a few rare terms in it. It's because the topic itself also requires a large amount of contextualization and explanations to understand. Its fundamental premise is that the society you are embedded in is operating on a hidden agenda in plain sight and that you must learn how to recognize the propaganda and work against the oppressive forces that it serves, oh and it's entirely about economic relations whose common narratives are a pack of lies that nevertheless look true with a lazy analysis and virtually every "legitimate" expert will support that pack of lies. And to begin our analysis of the secret plain sight agenda that dictates our lives we have to start by abstracting our day to day economic lives, establishing terms, questioning popular narratives and dabbling in some exploration for epistemology and social change.

Marxism could be translated into every language and given out for free in every form and it would still have big challenges in understanding it for most people. This is a big part of why our responsibility is to teach it. We make it accessible through directly speaking to one another and organizing sessions and relating it to our shared struggles. It becomes accessible through concerted effort rather than being stories with ubiquitous (yet still misunderstood) cultural reference.

Christians have more resources and funding than most communists organizations, theres an actual interest by the big churches in converting Native Americans, Asians and Africans, which is why languages like Guaraní were preserved and promoted by the Jesuits in places like Paraguay (at sometimes having more speakers than Spanish).

And besides all of that, actual marxist text tends to get ignored in favor of local leftist writers and ideologies like José Carlos Mariátegui, Peronism, Trabalhism, in places like the Global South. Though most of these are heavily inspired by Marx's works, they tend to have some criticism and favor local culture and views over what they see as a Europeanism.

Start leaving Mao's Little Red Book in the bedside drawer of hotel rooms.

Yeah Christianity had a head start on Marxism by thousands of years so it makes sense. Add in the cold war too and I can imagine why Marx wasn't aimed at more niches in the west like the bible was.

I think that it is both resources and size of the movements and focus. The USSR and CPC didn't seem to really prioritize converting everyone to that extent and there is no other Marxist movement with the resources to do much of this. Many Marxist organizations will prioritize other actions and struggles rather than pure accessibility and evangelism. Where both there are large Christian organizations and donations from rich Christians to fund this work.

I did end up being dragged to a Protestant church for Easter Sunday, and I did meet a guy doing this type of work. He is a linguist and is supported for 6-9 months a year to go to a Western African nation and work on developing written scripts for several of the indigenous languages that don't have one, as the first step to translating the Bible to that language. So that they don't have to learn English or French to read the Bible. And that is just one missionary organization working in a small nation that already has a not insignificant Christian population due to colonialism.

Gotta preserve these endangered languages by uploading numerous mistranslations of the Bible to YouTube. To preserve these cultures, you see.

Going to replace the Gideons Bible in ever hotel room I stay in with Parenti.

One serves capital, the other serves labor.

Yeah it always sucks to learn how Christianity has such a fucking head start because it was started by white Catholics with a myopic cultural worldview that they infected on the rest of the world.

Imo goes back to the idea of no gods and no masters. Jesus was a guy who would have been a Marxist