The sacred writings of the Christian religion; Also called: bible, Good Book, Holy Scripture, Holy Writ, Scripture, Word of God, Word.
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.
translations.
It was only in the 13th century that single-volume Bibles with a fixed content and order of books became common, largely through a Paris-produced Vulgate of 1200 and the Paris Bible of 1230. The first English translation of the entire Bible was by a priest, Miles Coverdale, 1535; the King James Version, or King James Bible 1611, was long influential for the clarity and beauty of its language. A revision of the King James Version carried out 1959 by the British and Foreign Bible Society produced the widely used American translation, the 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 recent 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 1993 parts of the Bible had been translated into over 2,000 different languages, with 329 complete translations.

ETYM French bible, Latin biblia, pl., from Greek biblia, pl. of biblion, dim. of biblos, byblos, book, prop. Egyptian papyrus.
A book regarded as authoritative in its field.