Bible
Title page of the first complete English Bible, printed in Zurich in 1535. Miles Coverdale's translation, of Luther's German Bible, was based on the Vulgate edition and Tyndale's translation of the New Testament.
The sacred book of Judaism and Christianity, containing a collection of sacred writings (scriptures). The Old Testament, recognized by both Jews and Christians, is called the Hebrew Bible in Judaism. The New Testament comprises books recognized by the Christian church as sacred doctrine from the 4th century. The Roman Catholic Bible also includes the Apocrypha.
Bible reading
Christians believe that the Bible is the revealed ‘Word of God’; it is a written source of authority, passing on both spiritual and moral truth. In Christian church services, the Bible may be read by a
Christian minister or by someone from the congregation. It is usually placed on a
lectern (stand), which is often carved in the form of an eagle with outstretched wings.
Sermons (religious lectures) are often based on a theme from the Bible.
Translations
It was only in the 13th century that single-volume Bibles with a fixed content and order of books became common, largely through a Paris-produced Vulgate of 1200 and the Paris Bible of 1230. The first English translation of the entire Bible was by a priest, Miles Coverdale, in 1535; the
Authorized Version, or
King James Bible (1611), was long influential for the clarity and beauty of its language. A revision of the Authorized Version carried out in 1959 by the British and Foreign Bible Society produced the widely used US translation, the Revised Standard Version. A conference of British churches in 1946 recommended a completely new translation into English from the original Hebrew and Greek texts; work on this was carried out over the following two decades, resulting in the publication of the New English Bible (New Testament in 1961, Old Testament and Apocrypha in 1970). Another recent translation is the Jerusalem Bible, completed by Catholic scholars in 1966.
| The Bible was selling more than ever in the USA in 1998, with the ‘New International Version’ more popular than the ‘King James’ version. Tyndale House publishers reported sales figures up 41% 1997–98 and Catholic Book Publishing a 30% increase 1996–98. |
| Missionary activity led to the translation of the Bible into the languages of people they were trying to convert, and by 1993 parts of the Bible had been translated into over 2,000 different languages, with 329 complete translations. |
| The King James Bible has probably sold more copies than any other book in history, and is still popular, especially among fundamentalists. The Good News Bible has been the most popular translation into modern colloquial English. Two new versions of the Bible were published in the mid-1990s: the Contemporary English Version (1996), which rejects old biblical language in favour of a contemporary spoken style, and the Schocken Bible (1995), a translation of the Pentateuch, which attempts to renew the shock of the original Hebrew. As more manuscripts are discovered, disputed readings become clearer, so that in some respects modern translations are more accurate than older ones. |
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