Bradford B. Taliaferro has published an Encyclopedia of English Language Bible Versions. According to Amazon:
This encyclopedia is the first book to identify, explain and categorize more than 1,400 versions of the English Bible!
Taliaferro’s encyclopedia boasts
- 407 different Bibles
- 53 Old Testaments
- 407 New Testaments
- more than 180 variants of the Authorized Version
- 50 unfinished Bible versions
- internet versions along with print versions
- and more
There are so many versions that the author had to create “difference tables” to help differentiate between versions which are quite similar. The index includes version titles, nicknames, abbreviations, translators, dates, source texts, and more.
On his blog, the author has noted some translations did not make their way into the encyclopedia, including the new Alpha Bible, a variant of the King James Bible with the books in alphabetical order.
All this in English. Versions in other language do not find their way into Taliaferro’s massive work. It takes 553 pages to contain all the information. Not surprisingly, 692,573 books on Amazon.com sell better than this Encyclopedia. On the other hand, some of the Bible versions sell very well indeed.
So if you were bewildered by the many versions of the Bible in English, be glad you did not know the half of it – or even one tenth!
I have not begrudged that we have many translations in English. But it is a bit embarrassing that we have so many that a man can spend a good part of his life just cataloging them. It would be nice if the remaining 1900+ languages without the Bible got translations before we add enough new versions in English that Mr. Taliaferro feels the need to update his encyclopedia.
If you liked this, you might like this video entitled “Just the right Bible” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7L_GxJmFgIo
Heart Language 