From ancient manuscript to your hands.
Written across 1,500 years on three continents in three languages. Copied by hand for fifteen centuries. Translated into more tongues than any other book in human history. Here is how it travelled.
The earliest writings
Words first set down in Hebrew, on papyrus and animal skin, by a wandering people.
The oldest portions of the Hebrew scriptures were composed during the Bronze Age — the laws, songs and origin stories of Israel passed first through oral tradition and then committed to writing on papyrus and parchment scrolls.
Moses is traditionally credited with the Torah — the first five books — written in the wilderness between Egypt and the promised land. These texts are stored in the Ark of the Covenant and copied by hand for centuries by trained scribes.
Songs of a kingdom
King David and the temple musicians shape the prayer-book of Israel.
Under David and Solomon, Jerusalem becomes a cultural and religious centre. The Psalms — 150 prayers and songs spanning grief, praise, lament and trust — are gathered for use in temple worship.
Wisdom literature flourishes alongside them: Proverbs, Job, and Ecclesiastes wrestle with how to live, suffer and find meaning. These remain among the most quoted texts in human history.
Voices in exile
Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel and the twelve speak into political collapse.
As Israel and Judah are conquered and carried into exile in Assyria and Babylon, the prophets emerge — poets and dissidents calling their people back to faithfulness and naming the cost of injustice.
Much of the Old Testament reaches its final written form during and after the exile, as scribes compile the law, history and prophecy of a scattered nation determined not to forget who they are.
Hebrew becomes Greek
In Alexandria, seventy scholars translate the scriptures into the language of empire.
Under the Ptolemies, the Hebrew Bible is translated into Koine Greek in the great library of Alexandria. Tradition holds that seventy (or seventy-two) scholars produced the work — hence the name Septuagint.
It is the first major translation of scripture into another language, and it becomes the Bible of the early Christian church. Most Old Testament quotations in the New Testament come from this Greek version.
Letters and gospels
Paul writes to young churches; four gospel-writers shape the story of Jesus.
Paul's letters to the churches at Thessalonica, Corinth, Rome and beyond are the earliest Christian documents we possess — written within twenty years of the crucifixion.
The gospels of Mark, Matthew, Luke and John are composed in the following decades, drawing on eyewitness testimony and oral tradition. Revelation, written near the end of the first century, closes the canon.
Jerome's Latin Bible
A scholar in Bethlehem produces the Bible of Western Christianity for a thousand years.
Commissioned by Pope Damasus, Jerome retreats to a cave in Bethlehem and labours for over twenty years translating the entire Bible from Hebrew and Greek into Latin — the common tongue of the empire.
His translation, the Vulgate, becomes the standard Bible of the Western church for the next millennium. Every cathedral, monastery and parish in Europe reads from it.
The Lindisfarne Gospels
On a wind-bitten island off Northumbria, monks paint the gospel into being.
Eadfrith, Bishop of Lindisfarne, creates one of the great masterpieces of medieval art: a hand-illustrated copy of the four gospels in Latin, made with lapis lazuli, oak gall ink and gold leaf.
Across Europe, monastic scriptoria — at Iona, Kells, Wearmouth, Cluny — preserve the scriptures through the so-called dark ages. A single Bible can take a monk a decade to copy.
The Bible in English
John Wycliffe translates the Vulgate into the language of the ploughman.
An Oxford scholar and reformer, Wycliffe is convinced that ordinary people should be able to read scripture for themselves. He oversees the first complete translation of the Bible into English.
It is hand-copied and circulated in secret. Wycliffe is condemned posthumously; his followers, the Lollards, are persecuted. Decades after his death his bones are exhumed and burned. The vernacular Bible has begun.
The first printed Bible
Movable type changes the world — and the Bible is its first masterpiece.
In Mainz, Johannes Gutenberg prints around 180 copies of the Latin Vulgate using movable metal type — the first major book printed this way in Europe.
What once took a scribe years can now be produced in weeks. Within fifty years, more Bibles are in circulation than had existed in all the previous fourteen centuries combined.
A Bible for the ploughboy
William Tyndale prints the first English New Testament from the original Greek.
Forced into exile in Germany and the Low Countries, Tyndale translates the New Testament directly from Erasmus's Greek text. Smuggled into England in bales of cloth, it transforms the language itself.
Phrases we still use — 'the powers that be', 'the salt of the earth', 'a law unto themselves', 'fight the good fight' — are Tyndale's. In 1536 he is strangled and burned at the stake. His final words: 'Lord, open the King of England's eyes.'
The Authorised Version
Forty-seven scholars produce the translation that shapes English for four centuries.
Commissioned by King James I at the Hampton Court Conference of 1604, six companies of scholars at Westminster, Oxford and Cambridge spend seven years on a new English Bible — drawing heavily on Tyndale.
The King James Version becomes the most widely read book in the English language. Its cadences shape Milton, Bunyan, Lincoln, Dickens, Eliot, King — and the rhythms of the language itself.
Into every language
The British and Foreign Bible Society begins translating scripture for the world.
Founded in London, the Bible Society sets itself the audacious task of putting the scriptures into every living language. Translators and printers fan out across the globe.
By the end of the twentieth century the Bible has been translated, in whole or in part, into more than 2,000 languages — more than any other book in human history.
A discovery in the desert
A Bedouin shepherd finds the oldest Hebrew manuscripts ever known.
In caves above the Dead Sea at Qumran, a shepherd boy stumbles upon clay jars containing scrolls a thousand years older than any Hebrew Bible then in existence.
Among the finds: a near-complete scroll of Isaiah, 24 feet long. When compared with medieval copies, the text proves astonishingly stable — copied faithfully across a millennium.
Modern English translations
A new generation of translations brings scripture into contemporary speech.
The New International Version is published in 1978, the work of more than a hundred scholars across denominations. The English Standard Version follows in 2001, the Christian Standard Bible in 2017.
These translations draw on the Dead Sea Scrolls, advances in linguistics, and the best available manuscript evidence — giving modern readers access to the texts in their own idiom.
The most printed book in history
Over 5 billion copies. 396,000 sold in the UK in 2025 alone.
The Bible has been translated into more than 3,500 languages. Roughly 100 million copies are printed every year. It outsells every other book on earth, year after year.
And yet the story is not really one of numbers. It is the story of a book that, having survived empires, exile, fire and forgetting, still lands in the hands of one ordinary reader at a time — and quietly does its work.
"The grass withers and the flowers fall, but the word of our God endures for ever."Isaiah 40:8