Description
How Many Bibles Are There in English?
You may have heard that there are 200, 300 or 400 Bibles in English. How about over 1,700! This is not a book about the “Bible” translated into English. It is about scripture translated into English. What’s the difference? The Bible is a collection of sixty-six books, inspired and preserved by God. The Bible contains every word God has given to mankind. But, if you translate only one book of the Bible into English, you have not translated the entire Bible into English, you have translated scripture into English.
Many times, when men first began translating scripture into English they only translated Psalms, or Proverbs or Genesis or the Gospels. Thus, this is a catalog of their efforts as well as those who later translated the entire Bible into English.
Here are some examples:
Old English
1. c. 700, Blickling Psalter: (Psalms), sometimes referred to as the Lothian Psalter.
14. c. 990, The Wessex Gospels: (Gospels), translated from Old Latin into the West Saxon dialect, by Alfric of Eynsham.
Middle English
34. c. 1300, Acts, Pauline, Gen. Epistles: (Acts/Paul & Gen Epistles), the identity of the translator is unknown.
42. 1380, The Wycliffe Bible: (NT), although long claimed to be translated from Latin there is a possibility it was translated from an Anglo-Saxon translation of the Byzantine Text, by John Wycliffe.
55. c. 1400, The Paues Bible: (portions of the NT), by Anna Carolina Paues. Paues presents portions of NT books in a strange order: 1 & 2 Peter; James; 1, 2, 3 John; Romans; 1 Cor. (only 12 chapters); 2 Cor. (Only chapter 6); 1 & 2 Thess.; Hebrews; 1 & 2 Tim.; Titus; Acts and Matt 1-6 The rest of Matthew and the remaining gospels are omitted. This translation contains both Acts 8:37 and 1 John 5:7. The first portion:1 Peter- Pauline epistles is in a South-Western dialect of Middle English. The remainder is in a dialect found in the Northeast Midlands.
This work was reprinted in 1904 entitled: A Fourteenth Century English Biblical Version. It was reprinted at least one more time in 2018.
Modern English
61. 1500, A Ryght Profytable Treatyse Compendiously Drawen Out Of Many and Dyvers Wrytynges Of Holy Men: portions of scripture, by Betson. Betson translated both portions of scripture as well as Roman Catholic superstition.
63. 1525, The New Testament: (NT), Erasmas published his first Greek New Testament Text in 1516. Luther translated this text into German in 1522 and sparked the Reformation.
Three years later, in 1525, William Tyndale, using Erasmus’ Greek text, published the first entire New Testament ever to be translated into Modern English. While it was welcomed by the common people this effort to place God’s words into the hands of the common people ran afoul of Catholic authorities. Tyndale was hunted down, captured and on October 6, 1536, tied to a stake, strangled to death and then burned…all for the “crime” of giving the common man a copy of the Bible in his own language. His dying prayer was, “Lord, open the King of England’s eyes.” (He did!)
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