Bible Facts

The Bible is the best-selling book of all time. Although 50 Bibles are sold every minute, it is never shown on the best-seller lists because it dwarfs the sales of all other books.

The Bible was written over a period of 1,500 years by more than 40 individuals. The authors were from many backgrounds, including prophets, fishermen, kings, philosophers and poets, and they lived in 10 different countries in Asia, Africa and Europe. They wrote in one of three languages including Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek. There are over 80,000 versions of the Bible throughout the world, and the entire Bible exists in over 530 languages. The Bible is accessible to 98% of the world’s population in a language in which they are fluent.

The 1454 Gutenberg Bible (in Latin) was the first book to be printed on a movable metal type printing press and after three years of printing, Johannes Gutenberg created about 180 copies without any printing errors. There are nearly 900 printed English versions of the Bible, and the first hand-written English manuscripts were written by John Wycliffe, (translated from the Latin) in the 1380s A.D. In 1526, the Tyndale New Testament became the first printed English edition, while the first English translation of the entire Bible was published in 1535 by Miles Coverdale.

The King James Version (KJV) is the most popular English Bible (first created in 1611), while the New International Version (NIV) is the second most popular English Bible (the New Testament from 1973 and the full Bible from 1978). Worldwide, the NIV outranks the KJV as the best-selling Bible translation. Between 1815 and 1975, it is estimated that 2.5 billion Bibles were distributed, and a total of 7.5 billion are thought to be in print. The Gideons, founded in 1899, distribute one million Bibles every week . By 2015 the Gideons had placed 2 billion Bibles and New Testaments in schools, hotels, prisons, hospitals and among the military.