The Formation of the Christian Bible

The Christian Bible, the most-printed book in the entire world, has a fascinating story. Spanning potentially thousands of years of history, beginning with the early exploits of the Jewish community, continuing into the years just after the crucifixion of Jesus of Nazareth and culminating with a murky, gore-soaked look at the end-times, this epic tale is the basis of all Christian religion. Combining the ancient writings of the Hebrew Tanakh (composed of The Torah, Nevi’im and and Ketuvim) with various deuterocanonical (Greek meaning ‘belonging to the second canon’ – essentially books not originally included in the Tanakh) additions early church fathers built the Christian Old Testament. While there is some minor disagreement on the contents of the Old Testament in various Christian traditions, there is (practically) universal agreement upon the 27 books of the New Testament. The contents of the New Testament were outlined very early in the Christian community, though it would be centuries before they would be formally recognized as canon.

Let’s focus for a moment on the linguistic reach of the Christian Bible. It is as epic as the stories it includes. While early efforts to translate the Bible into the vernacular were resisted by some Christian traditions, with the rise of Protestantism herculean efforts have been applied to making the Bible available in as many languages as possible. As of 2010 there are almost 2,500 different translations of the Bible. This number includes the multiple translations made in a single language, like English, which has dozens of versions. 451 language communities have the entire Bible in their native tongue, and just over 1,000 have the entire New Testament. Of the 6.5 billion people on the earth today, only 350,000 (roughly 6%) of them do not have any access to a Bible in their native language. That level of market saturation has never been achieved by any text before or since.