How we got the English Bible
Every English translation on this site is part of a story that runs back more than six hundred years — and for most of that time, putting the Bible into English was illegal and dangerous. Knowing the outline makes the family resemblances between translations, and the arguments about them, a lot easier to follow.
c. 970 · England
Old English glosses
Anglo-Saxon scribes write English word-for-word between the lines of Latin gospels — the gloss added to the Lindisfarne Gospels is the famous example. There is still no continuous English Bible.
The Lindisfarne Gospels, with Aldred’s word-for-word Old English gloss squeezed in above the Latin around 970 — the oldest surviving English translation of the Gospels.Lindisfarne, c. 700; gloss c. 970. British Library — public domain. 1382 · England
The Wycliffe Bible
The first complete English Bible, translated from the Latin Vulgate by John Wycliffe and his circle and copied by hand. The church condemned it; owning one could be treated as heresy. Decades after his death Wycliffe's bones were dug up and burned.
The opening of John in a Wycliffite Bible — the first complete English Bible, copied by hand from the Latin Vulgate and owned at the risk of a heresy charge.England, late 14th century — public domain. 1516 · Basel, Switzerland
Erasmus prints the Greek New Testament
For the first time the Greek text is available in print. Erasmus worked from about seven medieval manuscripts, with only one incomplete copy of Revelation; his text, lightly revised, became known as the Textus Receptus and stood behind every Protestant translation for the next 350 years.
The final page of Erasmus’s 1516 Greek New Testament — the end of Revelation, his Greek beside his own Latin. His one manuscript of Revelation was missing its last leaf, so he back-translated the closing verses from the Latin; those readings passed into the Textus Receptus and the King James.Johann Froben, Basel, 1516 — public domain. 1526 · Worms, Germany
Tyndale's New Testament
William Tyndale produces the first English New Testament translated directly from Greek, and the first to be printed. Copies are smuggled into England in bales of cloth. He goes on to translate much of the Old Testament from Hebrew before he is betrayed, strangled, and burned near Brussels in 1536.
The Gospel of John in Tyndale’s 1526 New Testament — the first printed English New Testament, translated straight from the Greek.Printed by Peter Schöffer, Worms, 1526. British Library Board — public domain. 1535 · Antwerp, Belgium
The Coverdale Bible
Miles Coverdale publishes the first complete printed English Bible, filling the gaps Tyndale never reached by working from Latin and German. The Psalms in the Book of Common Prayer are still his.
1537 · Antwerp, Belgium
Matthew's Bible
John Rogers, a friend of Tyndale's, publishes it under the pseudonym “Thomas Matthew” to hide that it's substantially Tyndale's own banned work — his New Testament and the Old Testament books he'd finished before his execution, with Coverdale filling the rest. The first time Tyndale's actual Old Testament translation appears in print. Archbishop Cranmer gets it in front of Henry VIII, who licenses it for sale and reading throughout England within ten days — one year after his government hunted Tyndale to his death.
1539 · Paris & London
The Great Bible
The first English Bible authorized for public reading in churches, chained to the lectern so it could not be carried off. Largely Tyndale and Coverdale, lightly revised. Printing began in Paris until the French authorities intervened; the type and sheets were moved to London to finish.
The 1539 Great Bible — the first English Bible authorized for reading in churches. Henry VIII, at the top, hands the Word down through Cranmer and Cromwell to the crowd.Grafton & Whitchurch, London, 1539 — public domain. 1560 · Geneva, Switzerland
The Geneva Bible
Made by English Protestants who had fled to Geneva. The first English Bible with numbered verses, printed in readable roman type, and heavily annotated — effectively the first study Bible. It was the Bible of Shakespeare, the Puritans, and the Mayflower.
The title-page woodcut of the 1560 Geneva Bible: Israel at the Red Sea, the pillar of cloud between them and Pharaoh’s army — the Exodus scene the Geneva exiles chose for their Bible.Geneva, 1560 — public domain. And the inside: 1 Samuel in the Geneva Bible. The packed margin notes — a running commentary crowding every column — are what made it the Bible of the Puritans, and what the bishops set out to answer.Geneva Bible, first published 1560 — public domain, via the Internet Archive. 1568 · London
The Bishops' Bible
The Church of England's official answer to the Geneva Bible's pointed marginal notes. Never much loved, but it became the starting text for the King James translators.
The Bishops’ Bible — Genesis 3 and 4, the curse and the first murder. The Church of England’s official reply to the Geneva Bible, and the text the King James translators were told to revise. Shown in a later printing.London, 1602 printing of the 1568 translation — public domain, via the Internet Archive. 1611 · London
The King James Version
Commissioned by James I and produced by about 47 scholars in six companies. They revised the Bishops' Bible against the Hebrew and Greek — but leaned so heavily on Tyndale that most studies put 75–85% of the KJV New Testament in his words. The text most people read today is a lightly modernized 1769 edition.
The engraved title page of the 1611 King James Version, designed by Cornelis Boel.Printed by Robert Barker, London, 1611 — public domain. And the inside: the first page of Genesis in the 1611 edition — black-letter type, a decorated “In the beginning,” and cross-references crowding the margins on either side.Printed by Robert Barker, London, 1611 — public domain. 1885 · England
The Revised Version
The first official overhaul of the KJV, incorporating manuscript discoveries of the 1800s.
1901 · United States
The American Standard Version
The American members of the Revised Version's translation committee publish their own preferred edition — restoring “Jehovah” for the divine name, American spelling and idiom — once the 14-year agreement not to compete with the British edition expires. Barely read on its own, but its literal, precise style becomes the base text for the NASB, the Amplified Bible, and the RSV. Six of the translations on this site descend from it: the NASB, LSB, Amplified, ESV, NRSVue, and WEB.
1952 · United States
The Revised Standard Version
A thorough revision of the ASV in modern English. Controversial in conservative circles — partly over rendering Isaiah 7:14 as “young woman” rather than “virgin” — but it became the trunk from which both the ESV and the NRSV grew.
1971–present · United States
The modern translations
The NASB (1971), NIV (1978), NKJV (1982), NRSV (1989), NLT (1996), ESV (2001), and CSB (2017) arrive in quick succession, and new translations keep coming — the product of better manuscripts, changing English, competing translation philosophies, and a competitive publishing market.
The through-line: Tyndale
The single most important figure is the one most people have never heard of. William Tyndale was a gifted linguist who believed an ordinary person should be able to read Scripture in their own language. In 1520s England that was a criminal position, so he left for Germany, learned enough Hebrew to be among the first Englishmen to use it, and printed a New Testament translated straight from Greek.
Copies were smuggled home in cloth and grain shipments; the authorities burned the ones they caught, and eventually they caught Tyndale. He was strangled and burned in 1536. The next year, the same king’s government licensed a Bible built substantially on Tyndale’s own translation — published under the fake name “Thomas Matthew” to hide whose work it really was. Two years after that, an English Bible went into every parish church, openly built on Tyndale’s work this time.
His phrasing carried straight through the Great Bible, the Geneva Bible, and the Bishops’ Bible into the King James Version, where studies estimate three-quarters or more of the New Testament is still his wording. “Let there be light,” “the powers that be,” “my brother’s keeper,” “the salt of the earth” — all Tyndale. When the ESV or NRSVue calls itself part of a translation “tradition,” this is the tradition it means: the RSV revised the 1901 ASV, which revised the 1885 RV, which revised the KJV, which was mostly Tyndale.
Where the text itself comes from
Every translator above worked from copies. No original manuscript of any biblical book survives; what survives are thousands of handwritten copies in Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek, made over more than a thousand years. Comparing them to recover the original wording is called textual criticism, and it is why a modern Bible has footnotes like “some manuscripts read…”.
Tyndale and the King James translators had only a handful of late medieval copies. Most of the oldest manuscripts only became available long after 1611.
What survives, how old it is, when it was found, and what the Textus Receptus, Critical Text and Majority Text really are.
Bible Translation Tree
Of the twenty-six translations compared here, a third are branches of the same tree, rooted in Tyndale and the King James Version — the rest are fresh, independent work from the original languages.