Lindisfarne Gospels, frontispiece to the gospel of Mark, c. 715 CE
23 November 2025
There is perhaps no book as influential in the development of the English language as the Christian Bible. But to understand how the Bible influenced our language (and our history) we need to understand what the “Bible” is and how the translations we read today came into existence.
The Bible is not a single, cohesive book but rather a number of different collections of texts, and different faith traditions have different versions of the canon of texts included within it. The canon of the Roman Catholic Bible, for instance, was first formulated at the Council of Rome in 382 CE, containing 46 books in the Old Testament and 27 in the New. (Claims that the canon was formulated at the Council of Nicaea in 325 CE are incorrect.) In contrast, Protestant Bibles typically contain only 39 books in its Old Testament, with 14 noncanonical books, the Apocrypha, often inserted between the Old and New Testaments. The Hebrew Bible, or Tanakh, consists of 24 books; many of the individual books in the Christian Old Testament are combined into single books in the Tanakh.
The individual texts that make up the canon of scripture were composed at different times over a period of some 1,600 years. And portions of individual books were often composed at different times and later combined into the books we have today. The oldest portion may be the “Song of Sea,” a poem that appears as Exodus 15:1–18, which was probably written in the late thirteenth century BCE. The newest book of the New Testament is probably Second Peter, written c. 120–150 CE. Furthermore, the dates of composition are quite different from the earliest extant copies. For instance, the composition of Leviticus may date to the sixth century BCE., while the oldest extant copy of portions of book is from the third century BCE. Many of oldest copies of the books of the Christian New Testament date to the second century CE.
Nor were the books of the Bible necessarily composed by the people to whom they are traditionally attributed. Moses, who is a literary creation and not a historical figure, did not write the Pentateuch. The canonical gospels were not written by Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. And some of the letters commonly attributed to Paul were written by others.
And, of course, the English (and other) translations that we read today are interpretations of the original texts—all translation necessarily involves a degree of interpretation and editing of the text’s meaning. The Hebrew Bible was, of course, originally written in Hebrew, but over a period of a thousand years in which that language changed significantly. The Christian New Testament was primarily written in Koine (i.e. Hellenistic) Greek, although some of the books, particularly the Gospel of Matthew and the opening of the Gospel of John, may have been originally written in Hebrew or Aramaic.
Overlaid on top of this mélange of books from different periods, texts, and languages is a complex history of translation into English. It’s important to keep this in mind when one refers to the “Bible.” Even this essay is a high-level overview; the details are more complex than I outline here. And there are many, many more English translations than I list here. I only include the most significant in terms of how they influenced the development of the English language. For an excellent discussion of details and examples of specific challenges in biblical translation, see N. T. Wright’s 2011 The Monarchs and the Message: Reflections on Bible Translation from the Sixteenth to the Twenty-First Century.
Source Material
These are the primary original-language texts and non-English translations of those original texts from which English translations of the Bible are drawn.
Septuagint
The Septuagint is a collection of second- and third-century BCE, Hellenistic (Koine) Greek translations of the Hebrew Bible. It is called the Septuagint (literally seventy) because tradition holds that its translation of the Pentateuch was produced by seventy translators. Technically, the title Septuagint refers only to the translation of the Pentateuch, but the word is commonly used to refer to this translation of the entire Hebrew Bible. The Septuagint provided the source texts for the Christian Old Testament in most early translations into English.
Vetus Latina
The Vetus Latina (literally Old Latin) is not a single Bible, but rather a collection of Latin translations of various Septuagint books and New Testament texts that preceded Jerome's late fourth-century Vulgate translation. There are some eighty surviving manuscripts containing these translations, some existing only as fragments. The surviving manuscripts date from c. 350–1300 CE, but the Latin translations of the texts they contain are older.
Vulgate
The Vulgate is Jerome’s late fourth-century translation of the Bible, a revision of the Vetus Latina. It is so called because Jerome used the vernacular Latin of the fourth century rather than the classical Latin of Cicero and Virgil. During the medieval period this was the translation most often used by the Roman Catholic Church, and it became the official Bible of the Church in the sixteenth century. This is the source text I most often cite on Wordorigins.org, rather than citing the Greek or Hebrew originals, as it was the version of the Bible that most writers in English would have relied upon during the medieval period. A revision known as the Nova Vulgata (New Vulgate) was published in 1979.
Masoretic Text
The Masoretic Text is the authoritative version of the Hebrew Bible (the Tanakh) used by Rabbinic Judaism. It is so called because the texts were produced based on Hebrew and Aramaic texts by a group of Jewish scholars known as the Masoretes working in what is now the Middle East between the seventh and tenth centuries CE. The oldest surviving complete version of the Masoretic Text is the Leningrad Codex, which dates to 1009 CE. The Masoretic Text is the source text for most Protestant translations of the Christian Old Testament.
Textus Receptus
The Textus Receptus (Received Text) is a collection of early printed Greek New Testament texts. The original edition was published by Erasmus in 1516 and was revised by later scholars. Early Modern translations of the New Testament into English relied heavily on the Textus Receptus as their source. More recent translations into English rely upon it less, as the number of Greek manuscripts available today is far greater than those available to Erasmus, who had only eight Greek manuscripts at hand.
Samaritan Pentateuch
The Samaritan Pentateuch is a version of the Torah written in Samaritan Hebrew dating to the Second Temple Period (516 BCE–70 CE). It came to the attention of European scholars in the seventeenth century, and subsequently has been used, along with the Masoretic Text, for translations of the Christian Old Testament.
Dead Sea Scrolls
The Dead Sea (or Qumran) Scrolls are a collection of Jewish manuscripts dating from the third century BCE to the first century CE. They were discovered between 1946–56 in caves in the Palestinian West Bank. They include the oldest surviving complete copies of several books of the Hebrew Bible, although most of the scrolls survive only as fragments. Study and publication of the scrolls are an ongoing process. Since their discovery, translators have used them, along with other source texts, for translations of the Christian Old Testament.
Old English Translations
There were a number of English translations of individual books of the Bible prior to the Norman Conquest but no translations of the complete Bible during that period. While these are the earliest translations of biblical books into English, in the textual genealogy of translation these are something of a dead end, as following the Norman Conquest they gradually became unreadable and forgotten.
Lindisfarne Gospels
London, British Library Cotton MS Nero D.IV is an illuminated Vulgate version of the gospels thought to have been produced by Eadfirth (d. 721), the bishop of Lindisfarne, an island off the coast of Northumbria that housed a monastery. In the tenth century, someone added a word-for-word interlinear, Old English gloss to the Latin text. While it is a gloss rather than a full translation, it is complete and thus represents the oldest extant version of the gospels in English.
West Saxon Gospels
The four gospels were translated into the West Saxon dialect of Old English in the late tenth century.
Paris Psalter
Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale, MS Fonds Latin 8824 is a complete Old English psalter (i.e., the book of Psalms). The manuscript dates to the mid eleventh century, but the translation probably dates to the late ninth century. The first fifty psalms are poetic translations, and the remaining one hundred psalms are in prose. The poetic translation of the psalms is often attributed to Alfred the Great, and while it is doubtful that he translated them himself, at least unaided, the creation of the psalter was likely done at his direction.
Old English Hexateuch and Heptateuch
The Old English Hexateuch is a translation of the first six books of the Christian Old Testament (the Pentateuch plus Joshua). The translation was produced over the course of the late tenth to early eleventh centuries. The Hexateuch survives in seven manuscripts, most of them fragmentary. Ælfric of Eynsham (d. c. 1010) translated the first portion of Genesis and may have played a role in the overall editing and production of the early translations. And Byrhtferth of Ramsay (c. 970–c. 1020) may have been responsible for partially translating and compiling London, British Library, MS Cotton Claudius B.iv. One manuscript, Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Laud Misc. 509, also contains the book of Judges; hence it is known as the Old English Heptateuch.
Old English Biblical Poems
Poetic versions of portions of a number of biblical books were composed in Old English. These are not strictly “translations” as we commonly use that term today, but rather poetic interpretations. These include poems based on passages from Genesis, Exodus, and Daniel, as well as poems about Christ from the gospels.
Wycliffite (Middle English) Translations
John Wycliffe (c. 1328–84) was an English Roman Catholic priest and theologian who, along with others who shared his reformist views, translated portions of the Vulgate into Middle English. Wycliffe was a proto-Protestant reformer of the Catholic Church. Over 250 Wycliffite manuscripts by Wycliffe and his followers survive, of which 20 are of the entire Bible—the first complete translations of the Bible into English. These are also known as Lollard Bibles, Lollardy being a popular name for the reformist movement with which Wycliffe was associated. Wycliffe was posthumously declared to have been a heretic and his works ordered to be burned, although, as the number of manuscripts that survive attest, that last order was not terribly successful. Unlike the earlier Old English translations which were largely forgotten after the Norman Conquest, Wycliffite Bibles would form the basis for many subsequent biblical translations.
Early Modern Translations
Most Early Modern translations of the Bible into English were Protestant endeavors. The early ones were done in opposition to the official, Roman Catholic hierarchy, while the later ones, done after Henry VIII’s split from the Catholic church, were sometimes done under the auspices of the new Anglican officialdom.
Tyndale’s Translations (Coverdale Bible)
While he himself never published a complete Bible, William Tyndale’s (c. 1494–1536) translations of biblical books into English may be the most important from the perspective of the history of the language. Many later translations of the books that Tyndale translated, including those in the King James Version, are essentially revisions of Tyndale’s work. Tyndale’s translations were primarily based on the Vulgate, but he was the first anglophone translator to consult the Greek and Hebrew originals, that is Erasmus’s Textus Receptus for the Greek New Testament and Hebrew sources for the Pentateuch. Between c. 1522–35 Tyndale translated and published the New Testament, the Pentateuch, the historical books of the Old Testament, and the book of Jonah. Tyndale, who worked in the Netherlands, was arrested in 1535 and executed the following year for being a “Lutheran,” not specifically for translating the Bible, which was not illegal in the Netherlands.
In 1535, Myles Coverdale, working from Martin Luther’s German translations and from the Vulgate, completed Tyndale’s translation project and published the first complete, printed (i.e., not handwritten manuscript) Bible, including the Apocrypha, in English. In 1539, Coverdale also published the Great Bible, the first authorized English Bible. This edition contained revisions of passages from his 1535 edition that Henry VIII and the new Anglican hierarchy had found objectionable.
Geneva Bible
With the return of Catholicism to England under the reign of Mary I (r. 1553–58), earlier translations of the Bible were suppressed, resulting in a new translation being produced in Geneva, Switzerland by Calvinist scholars. This translation, and especially the accompanying annotations, is Calvinist in tone and doctrine. It is based on Tyndale’s translations with new translations of the remaining books from Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek texts. The New Testament was published in 1557 and the complete Bible in 1560.
The Bishop’s Bible
The restoration of the Church of England under Elizabeth I required a new translation, as the Presbyterianism of the annotations in the Geneva Bible, especially those concerning church polity, did not suit the Anglican church. The so-called Bishop’s Bible was published in 1568 and substantially revised in 1572, with a final edition published in 1602. While it was the Bible used in Anglican churches, the Geneva Bible remained popular and in print. The Bishop’s Bible’s most significant legacy is that it was used as the base text for the King James Version.
King James Version (Authorized Version)
Since the Geneva Bible continued to be in unofficial, widespread use, Anglican authorities decided a new translation was required to combat the threat of Calvinist Puritanism. As a result, the King James Version was published in 1611. The translation used the Bishop’s Bible as the base text, supplemented with consultation of the Textus Receptus for the New Testament, the Masoretic Text and the Septuagint for the Old, and the Vulgate for some books of the Apocrypha.
One particular 1631 printing of the KJV became known as the Wicked Bible because, due to a printer error (or practical joke), Exodus 20:14 read “Thou shalt commit adultery.”
The KJV was revised in 1769 and again between 1881–94.
Despite its language being rather archaic to present-day readers, the KJV is widely praised for its literary style, although many of its literary innovations attributed to it can actually be traced to Tyndale. It remains in widespread use today, especially among evangelical Protestants.
Note that while, contrary to a popular belief, King James I ordered the translation, he had almost nothing to do with the actual translation. His only substantive contribution to the translation was commanding that it contain no marginal notes and that it use phrasing that reflected the episcopal structure of the Anglican church, such as church as opposed to congregation and priest as opposed to elder—a response to Presbyterianism of the Geneva Bible.
Douay-Rheims Bible
The Douay-Rheims Bible is a translation of the Vulgate into English, a product of the Roman Catholic Counter-Reformation. The New Testament portion was first published in Rheims in 1582. It was followed by the Old Testament, published in Douay from 1609–10. It has been revised multiple times since, most notably by Bishop Richard Challoner between 1749–52. Other, later translations have overtaken it in popularity among many anglophone Catholics, but the Challoner revision remains the most popular in the more traditional Catholic circles.
Modern Translations
The following is just a sampling of the more popular translations out there. There are many others.
New Revised Standard Version Updated Edition (NSRVUE)
The NSRVUE is a 2021 update to the 1989 NRSV, which in turn is a revision of the 1952 RSV. It is based on the latest critical editions of the Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek source manuscripts. (The original RSV was the first English translation to make use of the Dead Sea Scrolls). The intent was to create a readable and accurate translation that would appeal to as many Christian denominations as possible. The NSRVUE is widely regarded as the most scholarly and accurate of the English translations. Its editorial policy is to use gender-inclusive language where it does not misrepresent the patriarchal nature of ancient societies, which limits its appeal among more conservative circles.
The NRSVUE is widely used among mainline Protestant denominations in the United States and Canada. The Roman Catholic editions are approved for use by that church.
New International Version (NIV)
The NIV was first published in 1978 and underwent a major revision in 2011. The intent behind the NIV was to produce a translation in Present-Day English to replace the King James Version. The NIV is based on critical editions of the Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek source manuscripts. Editions using gender-inclusive language were published in Britain in the 1990s but were not made available in the US because of opposition by conservative Christians. The UK gender-inclusive editions were discontinued with the publication of the 2011 revision, which used some, but not all, of the gender-inclusive language of the earlier UK editions.
The NIV is perhaps the bestselling versions of the Christian Bible today, although it has been rejected by the Southern Baptist Convention for its gender-inclusive language and it does not include the Apocrypha, making it unsuitable for Roman Catholic and Orthodox readers. It is praised for its readability, but that readability sometimes comes at a cost to scholarly accuracy.
New King James Version (NKJV)
Published in 1982, this is a modernization of the KJV that replaces archaic and inaccurate terms, while retaining the style and tone of the original. While more readable than the original KJV, it is still formal and stilted in style, and it does not take into account modern scholarship on the manuscript sources.
English Standard Version (ESV)
Published in 2001, with a revision in 2016, the ESV is an evangelical update of the RSV that avoids the gender-neutral locutions of the NRSV. The scholarship and language are somewhat outdated, but it is popular among evangelical denominations.
Which Translation to Use?
There is no “best” translation of the Bible. The choice of which translation is appropriate depends on the circumstances and context. For instance, I mentioned that I frequently refer to the Vulgate on Wordorigins.org, as that would have been the Bible familiar to most medieval English people. If working in a later period, perhaps the KJV would be more appropriate. If one wishes a translation that adheres most closely to the scholarly understanding of the oldest extant, original-language manuscripts, then the NSRVUE is probably the best choice. And if one wishes to find a translation for devotional use, then one where the aims of the translators tend to be in line with one’s theological outlook would probably be most useful.
Image credit: Unknown artist, c. 715 CE. London, British Library, Cotton MS Nero D.iv, fol. 93v. Wikimedia Commons. Public domain image.
