Number of English Translations of the Bible

Answers to your Scripture questions

I am afraid no one can give you an exact number for the English translations and paraphrases of the Bible printed since Tyndale's New Testament of 1526. In part this is due to the difficulty of determining what should be defined as a new translation as opposed to a correction or a revision of an existing translation. There is the additional question of how we should count translations that include not a complete Bible or Testament, but just a group of books or even a single book. And then, of course, there is the difficulty of sheer numbers. With all these caveats in mind, the number of printed English translations and paraphrases of the Bible, whether complete or not, is about 900.

The most comprehensive English bibliography of the subject is the one compiled by William J. Chamberlin, and published in 1991, as “Catalogue of English Bible Translations.” The section covering the canonical books (including the Deuterocanon) has 806 pages. The book does include some ghost entries and a few repetitions, but gives you a fair idea of the number and variety of English translations.

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