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- Greek ta biblia `the books' the sacred
- book of the Jewish and Christian religions.
- The Hebrew Bible, recognized by both Jews and
- Christians, is called the Old Testament by
- Christians. The New Testament comprises books
- recognized by the Christian church from the
- 4th century as canonical. The Roman Catholic
- Bible also includes the Apocrypha. The first
- English translation of the entire Bible was
- by a priest, Miles Coverdale, 1535; the
- Authorized Version or King James Bible 1611,
- was long influential for the clarity and
- beauty of its language. A revision of the
- Authorized Version carried out 1959 by the
- British and Foreign Bible Society produced
- the widely used Revised Standard Version. A
- conference of British churches 1946
- recommended a completely new translation into
- English from the original Hebrew and Greek
- texts; work on this was carried out over the
- following two decades, resulting in the
- publication of the New English Bible (New
- Testament 1961, Old Testament and Apocrypha
- 1970). Another major new translation is the
- Jerusalem Bible, completed by Catholic
- scholars in 1966. Missionary activity led to
- the translation of the Bible into the
- languages of people they were trying to
- convert, and by 1975 parts of the Bible had
- been translated into over 1,500 different
- languages, with 261 complete translations.
-