An Exhibition of Superlative Books: The Most Translated Book in the World

Irish historian Eamon Duffy, in ‘A People’s Tragedy: Studies in Reformation’ (pictured, Bloomsbury, 2021, page 83) writes that “There are more than 350 different translations of the Bible into English, more than into any other language. And if we count English versions of the New Testament, or of individual books or clusters of books such as the Psalms or the Gospels, the number of different English Bible translations runs into thousands.” Note the quiet sub-clause “more than into any other language”, which only hints at the scale of translations into those “other” languages. Wikipedia, quoting Wycliffe Bible Translators, summons the numbers: “The full Bible has been translated into 704 languages, the New Testament has been translated into an additional 1,551 languages and Bible portions or stories into 1,160 other languages. Thus at least some portions of the Bible have been translated into 3,415 languages.” The books of the Bible, a set of between about forty and about seventy depending on our tradition, have much to say about books. Adam lay y-bounden, four thousand winters thought he not too long, and all for an apple that he took, as clerks find written in their book. The medieval English carol gives a nod amusedly to its own written world. Whatever the claims of the oral tradition for the Genesis story, the carollers sing that they live in debt to their text-based society, even down to its Latin puns. Soon after, we find the Tower of Babel, that original symbol of the translator.  The confusion of tongues engenders a need to reduce chaos and improve clarity through translation, something that requires intensive listening, not just more speaking. Establishing new versions of Scripture is a permanent challenge. Indeed, a permanent challenge within one language. Revelation with lightning, in fact lightening, effect initiates what the heavy-duty words themselves plod out in their vastly various vernaculars. Words shift in meaning. Even the greatest story ever told is retold in all sorts of contradictory ways, one of the intents being to teach us perspective, to show humility, to accept something might get lost. Scripture also warns us against indulging in superlatives. The person who goes about making out they’re the mostest, is heading for a fall. This can extend to translations of the Bible. As Eamon Duffy says of the 1611 King James Bible, “even now in the USA there is a powerful federation of more than a thousand evangelical churches who believe that this so-called Authorized Version is actually superior to the original Hebrew and Greek scriptures it translates.” (page 84) The 47 translators of that version (fancifully pictured by George E. Kruger) would be the first to disagree, knowing as they did that the full breadth and depth of meaning of the originals cannot be carried over into one perfect copy. Which is why we have concordances, commentaries, dictionaries, interlinears, and all the other biblical apparatus that add an extra permutation to the Bible’s claim as most translated book. Ecclesiastes says that of the making of many books there is no end, and much study is wearisome to the flesh. Yet how many of these extra texts outside the text do we need to know what Ecclesiastes might be saying? Translation is here to stay.