382–405 AD
Rome & Bethlehem
Jerome's Latin Vulgate
Commissioned by Pope Damasus I, Jerome translated the Bible into everyday Latin. It became the Catholic Church's standard text for the next 1,000+ years.
The Bible's journey from the first complete bound manuscript to the translations on shelves today — roughly 1,676 years, traced place by place.
The two earliest known complete Bibles — Old and New Testament, all four Gospels, bound as one Greek volume. Before this, texts circulated as separate scrolls and letters.
Commissioned by Pope Damasus I, Jerome translated the Bible into everyday Latin. It became the Catholic Church's standard text for the next 1,000+ years.
Church leaders formally confirmed the 27-book New Testament canon — closing the question of which Gospels and letters belonged.
Jewish scribes standardized the Hebrew Old Testament, adding vowel points and notes to preserve exact pronunciation — the Masoretic Text still used today.
John Wycliffe and followers produced the first full English translation — by hand, from the Latin Vulgate, decades before the printing press existed.
The first book ever mass-printed with movable type — the Latin Vulgate. It made Scripture reproducible at scale for the first time in history.
The first printed Greek New Testament, assembled from ancient manuscripts. It became the base text nearly every Reformation-era translator worked from.
Martin Luther translated the Bible into German directly from Hebrew and Greek, not Latin — a defining act of the Protestant Reformation.
William Tyndale printed the first English New Testament translated straight from Greek. It was banned in England; he was executed for heresy in 1536.
Miles Coverdale completed the first full printed English Bible, finishing what Tyndale had begun but never lived to complete.
Commissioned by Henry VIII, this became the first English Bible authorized for public reading in Church of England services.
Produced by English Protestant exiles under John Calvin's Geneva. First Bible with numbered verses and study notes — the Bible the Pilgrims carried to America in 1620.
The Church of England's official answer to the popular but politically pointed Geneva Bible — later the base text King James's translators revised.
English Catholic exiles produced their own translation from the Latin Vulgate, as a Catholic counterpart to the Protestant English Bibles.
Commissioned by King James I, partly to counter the Geneva Bible's anti-royal notes. Became the dominant English Bible for the next 300 years.
The first major scholarly revisions of King James English, incorporating older manuscripts discovered in the 19th century.
A mid-century update aiming for accuracy and readability, becoming a standard text in American seminaries and churches.
A fresh translation from original languages by international evangelical scholars — today one of the best-selling English Bibles.
1,676 years after Sinaiticus and Vaticanus were bound together, the same text — reshaped, retranslated, argued over — is still being read.