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For eleven hundred years the Western church made the Bible available only in a Latin translation. Prior to this, however, there had been extensive Bible translating activity on three continents. With the sixteenth-century Reformation, the Reformers again made translation into the vernacular a priority, resulting in translations in various European languages. As the nations of Europe raced to colonize the rest of the world, especially in the nineteenth century, Protestant missionary activity among the peoples being colonized saw a third wave of Bible translation into their languages. Bible translation is one of the most effective mission tools.

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Desiderius Erasmus was the first to make the Greek New Testament available in printed form. By doing so he established the form the Greek New Testament would take for almost four hundred years. Consequently, vernacular translations based on the Greek reflected that form. In the English-speaking world, where the King James Version dominated until the 1980s, his influence persisted for over 450 years. Some aspects of it persist in the majority of English versions in use today.