Version

A Bible version is a translation of the Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek Scriptures into another language. The oldest and most influential ancient version is the Septuagint (LXX), a Greek translation of the Hebrew Old Testament produced by Jewish scholars in Alexandria beginning around 250 BC and widely used by the New Testament writers and the early Church. The Latin Vulgate, translated by Jerome in the late fourth century AD and authorized as the official Bible of the Western Church, shaped European Christianity for over a millennium. Other ancient versions—the Syriac Peshitta, the Coptic, the Ethiopic, the Armenian—are valuable witnesses to early textual traditions and the global spread of the faith.

The history of English Bible translation begins with John Wycliffe's fourteenth-century rendering from the Latin and accelerates dramatically with William Tyndale's pioneering work from the original Greek and Hebrew in the sixteenth century. The King James Version (1611) achieved a literary and theological authority that endured for centuries. Modern translations—the RSV, NIV, ESV, NASB, and many others—draw on advances in textual criticism, manuscript discovery, and biblical scholarship. Each version involves choices about manuscript traditions, translation philosophy (formal vs. functional equivalence), and literary register, making the study of versions an important discipline for serious students of Scripture.