In Our Own TongueHow the Bible Reached the World’s Languages

Every Man in His Own Language

On the day of Pentecost, in Jerusalem, a crowd of Jews and proselytes gathered from Parthia to Rome heard the apostles speak, and every one of them heard the wonderful works of God in the language he had grown up speaking. Since that day the Bible has been carried into one language after another: Greek, Latin, Syriac and Coptic in the first centuries, Gothic, Armenian and Slavonic in the centuries after, the languages of Europe in the age of printing, and the languages of Asia, Africa and the islands in the age of the missionary translators. The work is still going on. Of the 7,396 languages people speak today, about 776 have the whole Bible, and more than half have at least some part of it.

Luke uses a particular word for what the crowd heard. When he says that every man heard them speak in his own language¹, the Greek word is the one for a manner of speech, the language a man was born to. It occurs only six times in the New Testament, all of them in Acts. Three of those six name the Hebrew tongue, and one of them is the risen Christ speaking to Saul on the Damascus road "in the Hebrew tongue" (Acts 26:14). The Lord spoke to Saul in his own language, and at Pentecost the Spirit spoke to the nations in theirs.

Now when this was noised abroad, the multitude came together, and were confounded, because that every man heard them speak in his own language.

Acts 2:6
KJV

Matthew Henry drew from this scene a conclusion about Bible translation itself. Commenting on the crowd that heard the apostles in their own tongues, he wrote that it was "a plain intimation of the mind and will of God, that the sacred records of God's wonderful works should be preserved by all nations in their own tongue; that the scriptures should be read, and public worship performed, in the vulgar languages of the nations." By "vulgar" he meant the common speech of ordinary people, the language spoken at home and in the market.

Scattered at Babel, Gathered in Christ

The many languages of the earth first appear in Genesis 11. The whole earth had one language until the people of Shinar set out to build a city and a tower and make a name for themselves, and the LORD came down and confounded their speech. The Hebrew word for language in that chapter is the ordinary word for lip², used by extension for speech and language. The chapter before it lists the families of Noah's sons, each settled in its own land, "every one after his tongue, after their families, in their nations" (Genesis 10:5). For the full account, see The Tower of Babel: The Origin of Nations and Languages.

Therefore is the name of it called Babel; because the LORD did there confound the language of all the earth: and from thence did the LORD scatter them abroad upon the face of all the earth.

Genesis 11:9
KJV

The very next chapter of Genesis begins God's answer to the scattering. He called Abram and promised him that "in thee shall all families of the earth be blessed" (Genesis 12:3). The prophets looked forward to a Son of man to whom would be given a kingdom, "that all people, nations, and languages, should serve him" (Daniel 7:14). At Pentecost the Spirit was poured out on the church, and the nations that had been divided by language heard one message in many languages.

Arator, a Christian poet of Rome who put the book of Acts into Latin verse in 544, wrote that at Pentecost "the humble order gathers again what arrogant people scattered." The connection between the two events is traced in The Tower of Babel and Pentecost: A Reversal, and the day itself in Pentecost: The Coming of the Holy Spirit.

Before his death, Christ told his disciples that the gospel would be preached in all the world before the end, and after his resurrection he sent them to teach all nations. Both sayings look past Israel and past Greek, the common tongue of the eastern half of Rome's empire, to every people on earth. More on the second of them is in The Great Commission: A Closer Look at Matthew 28:18-20.

Go ye therefore, and teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost:

Matthew 28:19
KJV

And this gospel of the kingdom shall be preached in all the world for a witness unto all nations; and then shall the end come.

Matthew 24:14
KJV

Paul's words to the Romans show why translation follows from those commands. A man must hear before he can believe, and he can only hear in a language he understands. That is the reason the church has translated the Scriptures wherever it has gone.

So then faith cometh by hearing, and hearing by the word of God.

Romans 10:17
KJV

The First Translations

The first translation of the Scriptures was made before the coming of Christ. Jews living outside the land of Israel, many of them in Alexandria in Egypt, spoke Greek, and from about the third century before Christ the books of the Old Testament were put into Greek for them, beginning with the five books of Moses. This Greek Old Testament, the Septuagint, was the Bible of many of the first churches, and the apostles often quoted it. Its history is told in The Septuagint (LXX): The Greek Old Testament.

As the gospel moved out from Jerusalem, translations followed it. In the West, where Latin was spoken, the early churches made their own Latin versions of the Scriptures, which Jerome revised and retranslated at the end of the fourth century in the version later called the Vulgate. In the East, the churches of Syria read the Peshitta, a Syriac translation whose Old Testament probably dates from the second century and whose New Testament was in standard use by the early fifth. In Egypt, the Scriptures were put into Coptic, the language of the Egyptian people, during the third and fourth centuries. In Ethiopia, they were put into Ge'ez, the language of the Ethiopian church, between about the fifth and the seventh centuries.

Several peoples received an alphabet so that they could read the Bible. Ulfilas, a fourth-century bishop to the Goths, devised a Gothic alphabet of 27 letters, most of them drawn from Greek, and translated the Bible into the Gothic language. He held the Arian teaching about Christ, which the councils of the church rejected, but his translation gave the Goths the Scriptures. The finest surviving copy, the Codex Argenteus, is written in silver and gold letters on purple parchment. In Armenia, a monk named Mesrop Mashtots created the Armenian alphabet in about 405, and with it the Scriptures were put into Armenian, first in part from the Syriac and then, by the 430s, from the Greek. In 863 two brothers from Thessalonica, Cyril and Methodius, were sent from Constantinople to the Slavs of Moravia at the request of their prince, Rostislav. They devised the Glagolitic alphabet for the Slavonic language and translated the Scriptures and the liturgy into it. The Cyrillic alphabet, still used for Russian, Ukrainian, Serbian and Bulgarian, grew from their work and carries Cyril's name.

Printing and the Reformation

Until the fifteenth century every Bible was copied by hand, one book at a time. Printing with movable type, first used for a whole Bible by Johannes Gutenberg at Mainz in the 1450s, made it possible to produce copies by the hundred and the thousand. The first Bible Gutenberg printed was in Latin. Within a century printers were producing the Scriptures in the languages people spoke.

Martin Luther's German New Testament appeared in September 1522 and his complete German Bible in 1534. In 1526 William Tyndale's New Testament, translated from the Greek, was printed at Worms and smuggled into England; see William Tyndale: The Man Behind the King James Version. The same conviction moved translators across Europe. Casiodoro de Reina published the first complete Bible printed in Spanish at Basel in 1569, and Cipriano de Valera's revision of it appeared at Amsterdam in 1602. The Unity of the Brethren printed a Czech Bible at Kralice in six volumes between 1579 and 1593. Gáspár Károli, a Hungarian pastor, finished the first complete Hungarian Bible, printed at Vizsoly in 1590. In the Netherlands the Synod of Dort ordered a new translation from the Hebrew and Greek in 1618, and the States-General authorised the finished Statenvertaling in 1637.

Several of these Bibles are still read. The Czech Kralice Bible, the Hungarian Károli Bible and the Dutch Statenvertaling each remained the standard Bible of its people for centuries, much as the King James Version did in English.

The Missionary Translators

In the nineteenth century the work of translation passed largely to missionaries and the Bible societies that printed what they translated. The British and Foreign Bible Society was founded in London on 7 March 1804. Thomas Charles of Bala had come to London asking for help to supply Welsh Bibles, and Joseph Hughes, a Baptist minister, asked why a society to supply Bibles should stop at Wales when it could serve the kingdom and the world. The Society and the Bible societies that followed it in other countries paid for the printing of translations all over the world.

William Carey, a Baptist shoemaker turned missionary, went to India in 1793 and settled at Serampore near Calcutta. His Bengali New Testament finished printing on 7 February 1801. With the other Serampore missionaries and Indian scholars who worked beside them, he translated the whole Bible into six languages of India and parts of it into some twenty-nine more. Henry Martyn, a chaplain of the East India Company, translated the New Testament into Hindustani and then went to Persia to make a better Persian version. He finished it at Shiraz in 1812 and died at Tokat that October, on his way home to England, at the age of thirty-one. His New Testament was printed in 1815.

In China, Robert Morrison completed a New Testament in Chinese in 1813, and with William Milne he translated the Old Testament as well. Their whole Bible was published at Malacca in 1823. In the same years Joshua Marshman at Serampore printed a complete Chinese Bible of his own. In Burma, Adoniram Judson, an American, spent two decades on the Burmese Bible, including nearly two years in prison during the war between Burma and Britain. He finished the translation from the Hebrew and Greek on 31 January 1834 and published a revised edition in 1840. In Beirut, Eli Smith began an Arabic translation with the scholar Butrus al-Bustani. After Smith's death in 1857, Cornelius Van Dyck carried the work on, and the complete Arabic Bible was printed in 1865.

Where the Work Stands Now

The Wycliffe Global Alliance publishes yearly figures drawn from the records of the translation agencies. As of August 2025 the Alliance counted 7,396 languages in use in the world. About 776 of them had the whole Bible, about 1,798 more had the New Testament, and about 1,433 more had at least one book. More than ninety-nine per cent of the world's people could read or hear some part of Scripture in a language they understand.

The Alliance also keeps a list of languages that need a translation and where none has yet begun. In 1999 that list held more than five thousand languages. By August 2025 it had come down to 544, spoken by about 36.8 million people, and translation work was under way in 4,457 languages.

The Editions on This Site

The Bible text on this site comes in 46 translations across 40 languages, counting Chinese twice for its simplified and traditional characters. Seven translations are in English, and each of the other 39 is an edition in its own language. Any verse can be opened in any of them from the verse page or the chapter reader. Many of these editions have the history told above behind them. The Arabic text is the Smith and Van Dyck Bible of 1865. The Burmese text is Judson's. The Persian text, the Old Persian Version of 1895, is a revision by Robert Bruce and his helpers of the Persian Bible that began with Henry Martyn's New Testament.

Each of these is the work of people who believed, as Tyndale did, that a reader should have God's word in the language he knows best. Some of them gave years to it, and some gave their lives.

Before the Throne

The book of Revelation gathers up the whole story. The Greek word for tongue³, used for the organ of speech and by extension for a language, stands seven times in Revelation beside nations, kindreds and peoples. In the new song sung to the Lamb, the redeemed are bought out of every one of them.

And they sung a new song, saying, Thou art worthy to take the book, and to open the seals thereof: for thou wast slain, and hast redeemed us to God by thy blood out of every kindred, and tongue, and people, and nation;

Revelation 5:9
KJV

John also saw an angel flying with the everlasting gospel, sent to every nation and tongue on earth. The translators described above did their part in that sending, one language at a time.

And I saw another angel fly in the midst of heaven, having the everlasting gospel to preach unto them that dwell on the earth, and to every nation, and kindred, and tongue, and people,

Revelation 14:6
KJV

At the end, John saw the result. The many languages that began at Babel are present before the throne, and every one of them is used in praise of God and of the Lamb.

After this I beheld, and, lo, a great multitude, which no man could number, of all nations, and kindreds, and people, and tongues, stood before the throne, and before the Lamb, clothed with white robes, and palms in their hands; And cried with a loud voice, saying, Salvation to our God which sitteth upon the throne, and unto the Lamb.

Revelation 7:9-10
KJV

The work of putting the Scriptures into every language is still going on, and its outcome is sure, because God has promised that his word will do what he sends it to do.

So shall my word be that goeth forth out of my mouth: it shall not return unto me void, but it shall accomplish that which I please, and it shall prosper in the thing whereto I sent it.

Isaiah 55:11
KJV