Tracing the physical journey of the biblical text — manuscript by manuscript, translation by translation — from the great 4th-century codices to the NIV of 1978.
This map is stylized for legibility, not drawn to precise scale or coastline. Regions are labeled with the political names in use at the time of each event. One correction to the record: the Geneva Bible was printed in Geneva in 1560 — it reached Plymouth with the Pilgrims on the Mayflower in 1620, sixty years later. Both dates are marked below.
One of the two oldest near-complete Greek Bibles, likely copied in Alexandria's scriptorium tradition, containing Old and New Testament in Greek uncial script.
The other great 4th-century Greek codex, later preserved at Saint Catherine's Monastery in the Sinai, rediscovered in 1844.
North African Christians, writing in Latin earlier than Rome did, produced the "Old Latin" translations — the raw material Jerome would later revise.
Jerome, working from a cave near the traditional birthplace of Jesus, translated the Old Testament from Hebrew and revised the Gospels from Greek, unifying centuries of Old Latin fragments.
Church councils confirmed the biblical canon in the late 4th century; over a thousand years later, the Council of Trent (1546) declared the Vulgate the church's official Latin text.
Old English translations of the Gospels appear — the earliest roots of scripture in the English language, centuries before modern English existed.
John Wycliffe produced the first complete hand-written English Bible, translated from the Vulgate, arguing scripture — not the Pope — held final authority.
Johannes Gutenberg's movable-type press printed the Latin Vulgate — the first major printed book in the West, ending the era of purely hand-copied scripture.
Desiderius Erasmus published a printed Greek New Testament, the forerunner of the Textus Receptus that Reformation translators would work from directly.
Martin Luther translated the New Testament into German from Erasmus's Greek text, fueling the Reformation's core idea: scripture in the language of the people.
William Tyndale, exiled from England, printed the first English New Testament translated directly from Greek. Roughly 90% of his phrasing would survive into the King James Version.
The first English Bible authorized for public use in parish churches, combining the work of Tyndale, Coverdale, and John Rogers.
Translated by English Protestant exiles, this was the first English Bible with numbered verses and study notes — the household Bible of Shakespeare's England.
Commissioned by James I and produced by nearly 50 scholars, the KJV drew heavily on Tyndale and the Geneva Bible, becoming the dominant English Bible for centuries.
The Mayflower Pilgrims carried the Geneva Bible — printed sixty years earlier — across the Atlantic, planting English scripture in the New World.
John Eliot printed a translation into Algonquian, a Native American language — the first complete Bible printed on American soil, preceding any English-language edition printed here.
Over 100 scholars completed a fresh translation from the original Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek texts — the NIV, one of the best-selling modern English Bibles.