A short narrative history of Bible translation for the Protestant 66 book canon
Long before the Christian era the Hebrew Scriptures began to move out of Hebrew into other languages. The first major milestone was the Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible known as the Septuagint. Produced in stages in the third and second centuries before Christ for Greek speaking Jews in Alexandria, the Septuagint made the Hebrew scriptures accessible to the Hellenistic world and later became the Bible of the early Greek speaking Church.
As Christianity spread west, Latin became the main language of the Western Church. By the fourth century a scholar and translator named Jerome was commissioned to revise the Latin texts and to produce a more reliable Latin Bible. Jerome’s work, completed over several decades around the end of the fourth century into the early fifth century, produced what we call the Vulgate. For more than a thousand years the Vulgate was the standard Bible of Western Christianity and the text most readers encountered.
Medieval and early medieval translation work often involved local languages and partial translations, but systematic translations of the full Bible into vernacular languages were rare and sometimes dangerous. In English the first full translations were produced from the Latin Vulgate rather than from the original languages. John Wycliffe and his followers produced English manuscript translations in the late fourteenth century, a project that set the stage for later English Bible development.
The printing press and the Reformation changed everything. From the early sixteenth century reformers insisted that ordinary people should read scripture in the language they spoke. Martin Luther’s German Bible and William Tyndale’s English New Testament, translated from the original Greek, were revolutionary because they used the earliest available Hebrew and Greek sources rather than relying solely on Latin. Tyndale’s work directly influenced nearly all subsequent English translations. His martyrdom for translating the Bible into English underlines how politically and religiously charged translation could be.
The sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries saw a cascade of national and denominational translations. English versions moved from Tyndale, Coverdale and the Great Bible, to the Geneva Bible and the Bishop’s Bible, and finally to the Authorized Version commonly called the King James Version published in 1611. The King James Version combined the scholarship and linguistic craft of many translators and had a lasting literary and religious influence in the English speaking Protestant world.
From the seventeenth century to the nineteenth century the textual basis for translations matured slowly. Scholarly advances in manuscript discovery, in critical editions of the Hebrew and Greek texts, and in historical linguistics eventually produced major nineteenth and twentieth century revisions and new translations. The late nineteenth and twentieth centuries also introduced distinct translation philosophies: formal equivalence, which aims for word for word faithfulness, and dynamic equivalence, which aims for sense for sense readability. These philosophies produced different modern English versions such as the Revised Version, the American Standard Version, the Revised Standard Version, the New International Version, the New American Standard Bible, and many others. Important modern work in textual criticism and in compiling critical editions of the Greek New Testament underpins most current translations.
In the modern era Bible translation became a global enterprise. Over the twentieth and twenty first centuries international Bible societies, missionary translation agencies, and local church movements have produced translations into hundreds of languages. By the early 2020s more than seven hundred languages had a complete Bible, and thousands more had either a New Testament or portions of scripture. Translation work continues at scale today as organizations coordinate to get the Bible in the languages people actually speak. Those statistics illustrate how translation moved from an elite, regional enterprise to an enormous global project.
Two practical conclusions emerge for anyone reading about the Protestant 66 book canon. First, the English and other modern translations you know are the product of long chains of scholarship, manuscript discovery, theological dispute, and practical choices about how to render ancient idioms into modern speech. Second, the precise text behind many English versions reflects choices about whether to follow older medieval manuscript traditions or to favor readings supported by earlier and more diverse Greek and Hebrew witnesses. For readers and congregations that means translation choice often reflects priorities such as literal fidelity, contemporary readability, denominational preference, and the editorial choices of the teams that produced each version.
Recommended books and resources on Bible translation and its history
Below are well known, readable, and scholarly works you can link to from your site or list on a resources page. I list titles with authors and a short note about their focus.