Furthermore, it is the fact sustained by scholarship and history that numerous versions of the scriptures were made, in the early Christian centuries, into other languages and dialects;--the Slavonic, Arabic, Persic, and Armenian tongues; earlier still into the Gothic tongue and the Ethiopic dialects of Abyssinia; and still earlier into the Coptic, Latin, and Syriac dialects. [It was the estimate of Gibbon, the historian of the _Roman Empire_, that there were probably six millions of avowed Christians when Constantine began to patronize Christianity in 313 A. D. And, allowing that there was one copy of the scriptures (of the New Testament or one of its books) to each three hundred Christians--not an extravagant supposition, considering what the sacred writings were to the early believers--there were probably not fewer than twenty thousand copies of the New Testament or individual books or their parts scattered throughout the world when Christianity came into royal favor in the Roman Empire.] These unnumbered copies in Greek--which long continued to be the spoken language for a large part of the world's population--together with the vast number of versions made from the original Greek into the languages and dialects of adjacent and contemporaneous peoples in order to meet the need of the first Christian Churches in wide areas of the Roman Empire, down to and after its fall, suggests the amplitude of the sacred writings _in manuscript_ during the early centuries of our Era. This is proclaimed as from the house-top in the large and constantly increasing number of manuscripts, in different languages, which have been rescued as relics from an otherwise chaotic era. It is the estimate of Dr. Marvin R. Vincent that no fewer than 3,829 manuscripts have been discovered and catalogued. These have been gathered from many lands--Turkey, Egypt, the Ægean region, Cyprus, Greece, Italy, ancient Macedonia, Palestine, Africa, Spain, the Sinaitic Peninsula, Asia Minor, and in fact, from all Bible lands, and are preserved in the world's greatest libraries.
Professor Dobschütz summarizes the history of the versions and translations of the Bible, throughout the centuries to the invention of printing, as follows: "In the first period we found the Bible translated from the Greek into Latin, Syriac, Coptic; in the next period Gothic, Armenian, Georgian, Libyan, and Ethiopic were added, not to mention several revisions of former translations. About 600 A. D. the Bible was known in eight languages; in each of these there had been several attempts at translating. There were different dialects, too; in Coptic no less than five. The spread of Christianity in the next period is shown by the fact that the Bible is translated--and this again several times--into Arabic and Slavonic from the Greek, and into the German, Anglo-Saxon, Celtic, and French from the Latin--rather should I say, parts of the Bible, for it was only parts which people at this period tried to translate."[15] And he shows us how this movement to give the Bible to the people in their own vernacular spread--from the thirteenth century on until the invention of printing--into south-eastern France, over Italy and Germany, into England and Bohemia, and, possibly, into Scandinavia; and declares, truly, "it is like a net thrown all over Europe."