You pick up the Bible from the shelf, open it on your phone or read a verse at the start of Club, and maybe you have never stopped to wonder: how did this book get here? It was not printed all at once. It was written over more than a thousand years, in three languages, on pieces of leather and plant, and it traveled through empires, deserts and oceans until it reached your hands.
This story is one of the most incredible there is. It involves scribes who counted letter by letter, translators who risked their lives, caves in the desert that kept secrets for two thousand years and a man named João Ferreira de Almeida, who began translating the Bible into Portuguese while still a teenager. Let's walk this journey together, from the beginning.
What was the Bible written on? Papyrus, parchment and a lot of patience
Before there was paper like your notebook, whoever wrote used what nature offered. Papyrus was made from a plant that grew along the banks of the Nile River, in Egypt. They cut the stalk into thin strips, crossed one layer over the other, pressed and dried them. The result was a yellowish sheet you could write on with ink and a pen. Cheap, but fragile: over time, moisture rotted everything.
Parchment was nobler and more durable. Made from animal skin (sheep, goat, calf) scraped, stretched and smoothed, it lasted for centuries. It was expensive, so each sheet was worth a great deal. A single large scroll could require the leather of an entire flock. That is why no one wasted space: they wrote tightly, on both sides when possible.
At first, the texts were kept in scrolls, long strips wound around wooden rods. Reading meant unrolling from one side and rolling up the other. Later, Christians helped popularize the codex, the format of sewn pages similar to a book today. It was more practical: you could leaf through it and find a passage quickly, without unrolling meters of material.
Who copied the Bible before the printing press? The scribes
For more than a thousand years, no machine existed at all. Each copy of the Bible was made by hand, one word at a time. The men who did this work were the scribes, and for the Jews copying the Scriptures was almost an act of worship. They treated every letter as sacred.
The care was impressive. Groups of Jewish scribes, later called Masoretes, created meticulous rules. They counted how many letters there were in each book and knew which letter fell exactly in the middle. If, upon finishing, the count did not match, the entire copy could be rejected. They did not trust memory: they compared against the original at all times.
Human errors, of course, happened. A swapped letter, a skipped line. But precisely because there were so many copies, made in different places, scholars can compare them with one another and see where someone slipped. It is like having hundreds of witnesses to the same event: if almost all say the same thing, you know what was in the original text.
How were the 66 books chosen? The canon
The Bible is not a single book. It is an entire library: 66 books in total, written by dozens of different authors, in eras separated by centuries. A natural question then arises: who decided that these books would be included and others left out? That recognized list is what we call the canon, a word that originally meant ruler or measure.
The process was not a hasty vote in a closed room. It was a slow recognition, over generations. The communities of faith observed which books actually had authority: whether they came from recognized prophets or apostles, whether they matched the rest of the revelation, whether they were used and respected by the people of God. Books that did not pass these criteria simply were not accepted as Scripture.
For the Old Testament, the Jews already recognized their books long before Jesus. For the New Testament, the church confirmed the writings of the apostles over the first centuries, until there was broad agreement. It is worth understanding something important: the church did not give authority to the books, it recognized the authority they already had. If you want to get to know each one from the inside, take a look at our page about the books of the Bible.
Read alsoFavorite Bible stories for club programsThe great translations: from Greek to Latin, from German to Portuguese
The Bible was originally written in Hebrew and Aramaic (the Old Testament) and in Greek (the New Testament). But not everyone read those languages. The first great translation was the Septuagint: around the 3rd century before Christ, Jewish scholars in Alexandria, in Egypt, rendered the Old Testament into Greek, because millions of Jews already lived outside Israel and spoke Greek in daily life. According to tradition, about 70 translators did the work, and that is where the name comes from.
Centuries later, Latin became the dominant language of the West. The pope asked a brilliant scholar named Jerome to produce a reliable Latin translation. Between the years 382 and 405, Jerome translated the Bible directly from Hebrew and Greek into Latin. His work became known as the Vulgate, from vulgata, something like for the people, and it was the Bible of Europe for more than a thousand years.
Then came a huge step: putting the Bible in the language that ordinary people actually spoke. In the 16th century, the German reformer Martin Luther translated the Bible into German, so that anyone could read it on their own, without depending only on the priests. This idea of a Bible accessible to the people spread across Europe and opened the way for translations into many other languages.
And in Portuguese? The courage of João Ferreira de Almeida
Portuguese's turn came. The most important name in this story is João Ferreira de Almeida, born in Portugal around 1628. While still very young, at just over sixteen years old, he began translating the New Testament into the Portuguese language. It was a gigantic task for someone so young, but he devoted himself body and soul.
According to the Brazilian Bible Society, the first edition of Almeida's New Testament in Portuguese was published in 1681, in the city of Amsterdam, in Holland. It is the oldest translation of the Bible into Portuguese made directly from Hebrew and Greek, and not from another intermediate translation. Almeida worked on the Old Testament for the rest of his life and did not finish it; others completed his work after his death.
If you have ever read a Bible in Portuguese with the word Almeida in its name, you held the fruit of that work. The versions many use today, such as the Almeida Revista e Atualizada and the Almeida Revista e Corrigida, descend directly from that effort begun by a teenager driven by the desire that his people could read the Word in their own language.
Can we trust it? The manuscripts and the Dead Sea
Here comes the question that may be on your mind: with so much copying by hand, so much translation, so much time passing, did the text stay faithful? Or did it become a giant game of telephone? The answer from the evidence is encouraging. There are thousands of ancient manuscripts of the Bible spread around the world, far more than of any other work of antiquity. The more copies you have to compare, the easier it is to reconstruct the original text.
The most famous example is the Dead Sea Scrolls. In 1947, Bedouin shepherds found by chance, in caves near the Dead Sea, in the Qumran region, jars with extremely ancient scrolls. Over the following years, about 930 manuscripts were recovered from eleven caves. Among them were copies of Old Testament books more than two thousand years old, including an almost complete scroll of the book of Isaiah.
What happened when this extremely ancient scroll of Isaiah was compared with the Bibles we use today? The resemblance was striking. Despite so many centuries of distance and hand-copying, the message held. This fits with the very promise that the book of Isaiah records: "The grass withers and the flowers fall, but the word of our God endures forever" (Isaiah 40:8, NIV). It does not prove everything by itself, but it shows something real: the text you read today is substantially the same one those hands copied two millennia ago.
The most translated book in the world and what that says to you
This whole journey, from papyrus to scribes, from Greek to Latin, from German to Almeida's Portuguese, has a destination: to reach you. And it arrived in an extraordinary way. The Bible is, by far, the most translated book in the history of humanity. According to the Bible societies, it has already been translated, at least in part, into more than three thousand languages, and the work continues to reach peoples who still do not have the text in their own language.
Think about what that means. A shepherd, a prophet, a fisherman wrote on fragile scrolls thousands of years ago. Scribes counted letters. Translators faced dangers. A young Portuguese man spent decades poring over Hebrew and Greek. And the result of all this is within your reach, for free, in your pocket. Few things in history have been kept with such care by so many people.
Maybe you are just starting out or you have doubts, and that is okay. Having questions is part of faith, and you can read more about this on our page about doubts of faith. The invitation here is simple: since so many people worked for centuries to put this book in your hands, why not open it and read? The journey that brought the Bible to you now meets your own.