How do you find a copy of the earliest translation of the Bible?

• It's possible to find an English/Greek original manuscript of the earliest translations! See the Ancient/Rare Bibles link under Related Links below.
  

• Pre-KJV English versions include John Wycliff's in 1382, William Tyndale's in 1525-35, Miles Cloverdale's in 1535, Thomas Matthew's in 1537, the "Great Bible" in 1539-68, Richard Tavener's in 1539, the Bishop's Bible in 1568, and the Douay or Douai (Catholic) version first printed in 1609-10. It should be noted that all of the New Testaments of these (except the Dounay, which is from Jerome's Latin) were based on the Greek text known as the "textus receptus," which is simply the Greek text which found its way into Europe, and most of them were from Erasmus's printed Greek New Testament published in 1515-16. It was not until the mid-1800s that the really ancient copies of the Bible, the New Testament, and individual NT books began begin discovered--copies which long pre-date the textus receptus. These are what more recent versions are based on, so really many of the newer ones are more faithful to the most ancient Bibles than are the older English translations.
  

• To the question about a "copy of the earliest translation of the Bible" there are 2nd century scraps of the Ten Commandments which predate the 10th century Massoritic Hebrew texts. Copy/Paste this link into your web browser: http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/09627a.htm But think about the question in pragmatic terms. If Adam and Eve and all their kinfolk were able to communicate orally, it is reasonable to expect that they managed to convey their thoughts using symbols, much as I am doing but more effectively, and I do not think it is unreasonable to expect that early Israelis and other nations documented births, deaths, livlihoods, commerce, war, famine, law, poetry, song and drama. The Israelites were passionately zealous in their preservation of God's word, however, it is completely unreasonable to expect their worthy etchings to survive 5,000 years without retelling and rewriting. The fallacious notion of the superiority of modernity causes us to rationalize that we are evolving and that our ancestors must have been idiots, not unlike a teenage boy's dim view of his father, assuming they had no drive to be excellent. I do not subscribe to that notion, instead believing the opposite, decay, to be truer and accept the KJV as a very good translation of earlier texts. It is not perfect, as only God is. I trust God's word not by my faith in men, but by my faith in God. You can spend the rest of your life in the honorable study of Greek, Aramaic and Hebrew to reach the same basic conslusions as the KJV, based upon extant (existing) manuscripts barely one thousand years old. I personally prefer using Bullinger's Companion Bible along with Strong's Exhaustive Concordance and Smith's Bible Dictionary as they have already done a fair job of dedicating their lives to a deeper and more meaningful understanding of God's word. Misunderstandings about topics like this highlight the difference between religious upbringing and faith in God. As organized religion is never mentioned in the Bible, faith should govern reasonable people. Therefore, it is a troubling question for some who believe God's word is infallible, as I do, because it implies the possibility of malicious human manipulation. And so, the questioner's use of the word "translation" rattles those too easily shaken in faith.

• If you mean the original New testament, then the answer is, you cannot find any of the original. All we have now are copies, of copies, of copies of the alleged original. How many meaning were added, altered, omitted from the alleged original is anybody's guess.

• A very readable book on English translations of the Bible is F. F. Bruce's "History of the Bible in English." On variations in the underlying manuscripts of the New Testament, I recommend Bart D. Ehrman's "Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why."

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