Did You Know 03: The World’s Most Translated Book

Some translators spent 66 years bringing the Bible to their own people. Here’s why the world’s most translated book keeps demanding more languages, not fewer.

The Bible has contributed many phrases to the English language that are still commonly used today, and it holds another record too: it’s the most translated book in human history.

As of the most recent count, the complete Bible — Old and New Testaments — has been translated into 769 languages, with the United Bible Societies adding sixteen new complete translations in a single recent year alone, reaching communities in India, Tanzania, and Burkina Faso. That number climbs every year, and for the first time in history, more than six billion people now have access to the whole Bible in a language they call their own.

But that figure is only the beginning of the story. The New Testament alone has been translated into over 1,500 languages, and at least some portion of Scripture — a single book, a handful of verses — exists in more than 3,300 languages out of the roughly 7,100 living languages spoken on earth today. No other book, religious or secular, comes anywhere close. Shakespeare has been translated into perhaps a hundred languages. The Bible has been rendered into thousands, often by translators who first had to build a written alphabet for a language that had never before been put to paper.

That labor has rarely been quick or easy. The Isnag people of the Philippines waited sixty-six years for the complete Bible in their own language — a project spanning generations of translators before it was finally finished. And the work is far from over. Organizations like Wycliffe estimate that more than 1,600 languages still have no Scripture and no translation currently in progress, spoken by tens of millions of people who have never held a page of the Bible in words they grew up speaking.

Why does this matter so much to the people who do it? Because a translated Bible isn’t simply a linguistic achievement. It’s the difference between hearing about God in someone else’s language and hearing Him, unmistakably, in your own — the same difference the two travelers on the Emmaus road discovered when the Scriptures were finally opened to them in words they could understand. Behind every one of those 769 translations is the same conviction: that God’s voice was never meant to stay locked in Hebrew and Greek, but was always meant to reach every tribe, in every tongue, on every continent — however long it takes to get there.