No original manuscript of any biblical book survives. The Hebrew text rests on the Masoretic codices of the tenth and eleventh centuries, checked against the Dead Sea Scrolls, the Samaritan Pentateuch and the Greek Septuagint. The Greek New Testament rests on some 5,800 catalogued manuscripts, ranging from the credit-card-sized Papyrus 52 to the great fourth-century codices Sinaiticus and Vaticanus, which are the earliest surviving near-complete Bibles. Modern critical editions reconstruct the text from these witnesses; the printed Bibles of the Reformation era rested on far fewer and later ones.
Jerome's Latin Vulgate, produced between about 382 and 405, was the Bible of Western Europe for over a thousand years and the basis of Catholic translation until the twentieth century. Vernacular versions were made throughout the Middle Ages, but the ones that mattered came later and were contentious. The Wycliffite Bibles of the 1380s and 1390s, translated from the Latin by followers of John Wycliffe, were condemned and their circulation criminalised in England in 1409. William Tyndale translated from Hebrew and Greek instead, printed his New Testament abroad in 1526, and was strangled and burned in 1536 before finishing the Old Testament.
The King James Version of 1611 was produced by six companies of translators working from the original languages and leaning heavily on Tyndale, whose wording it preserves in large stretches. It shaped English prose for three centuries and remains in use.
Translation has since become an industrial enterprise. As of 2025, the full Bible exists in around 776 languages, the New Testament in a further 1,798, and some portion of scripture in around 1,433 more, covering over 4,000 of the world's roughly 7,400 living languages. No other book approaches that reach.