A spate of books published last year, both popular and scholarly, traced the translation of the Bible into English. The best of these, David Daniell’s “The Bible in English,” was unfortunately overshadowed by Adam Nicolson’s altogether insufficient history of the Authorized Version, “God’s Secretaries.” The translation of the Bible into English occupies only two pages of “Whose Bible Is It?” (Yale University Press, 276 pages, $24.95), the latest book by Jaroslav Pelikan, which is a justified reminder of the late and relatively minor role played by English in the development of Christianity.

Mr. Pelikan begins with an account of the gradual transfer of oral tradition into written text, attempting to explain how each part of the Jewish and Christian scriptures was understood by the community it was originally addressed to. The book’s middle chapters put the Reformation translations into the wider history of biblical translation, narrating the remarkable story of how these Hebrew, Greek, and Aramaic teachings came to be disseminated to all the corners of the world.

Even after Hebrew scripture had been written down, Mr. Pelikan points out, there were no vowels; the status of these sounds, and thus the meanings of the written words themselves, were passed down by oral tradition. It was by translation into Aramaic and then Greek that the words begin to take on an independent existence. The Septuagint, the translation into Greek of the Torah and prophetical and historic scripture, was undertaken not as an effort to spread the Jewish teaching to the Gentiles but to bind together the increasingly diffuse Jewish Diaspora (itself a Greek word).

Its effects outside that culture, however, were immediate. The fusion of Hebrew prophecy and Greek philosophy that is the hallmark of Christianity began with the Septuagint. Likewise it is the link, linguistically, between the Old Testament and the New. Though Jesus spoke Aramaic, the majority of the works of the New Testament were written in Greek, and tend to cite the Septuagint as their source for scripture; it was the Septuagint translation of Isaiah’s “young woman” as “virgin” that Christians pointed to as proof of their doctrine of Christ’s Virgin birth. Mr. Pelikan speculates that many Jews probably came to regret that their holy texts had been made widely available by translation into Greek. The prophesy in Psalms that the Jewish Bible would be “honored among nations” came true through the work of a proselytizing Christianity that persecuted Jews themselves and certainly presented a version of Jewish history and teachings very different from that they told themselves.

The next significant work of Biblical translation was the work of one man, Jerome (c. 340-420). His Latin translation, the Vulgate, was the most influential scholarly work in history, and Jerome shared much in common with those who would later translate these sane texts into their own vernaculars.

Like them, he was concerned with putting the words of holy writ into the hands of literate people in their own language – the very name “Vulgate,” Mr. Pelikan points out, indicates something like “vernacular.” (The idea of Jerome’s translation as beyond reproach or revision came much later; in official Church doctrine, in fact, it came after Luther’s break with Rome.)

And though the Vulgate introduced certain errors and perpetuated others, it was – in good Reformation practice – drawn from the original languages rather than translations. “Almost uniquely among his contemporaries and successors,” Mr. Pelikan writes of Jerome, “he was a ‘three language man,’ [Greek, Latin, and Hebrew] as Augustine once called him.” He was certainly the last great Christian scholar of Hebrew for a millennium.

Jerome, in his own way, pointed to the great vernacular translations that began with Wycliffe and bore fruit in Luther and Tyndale. But these had been facilitated by two great works of Renaissance that criticized and corrected Jerome. The massive Complutensian Polyglot Bible, printed under the patronage of Cardinal Francisco Ximenez de Cisneros, archbishop of Toledo and grand inquisitor, included the Vulgate, the Hebrew text, the text of the Septuagint, and relevant commentary by Jewish scholars, followed by the New Testament in Greek. Almost simultaneously, Erasmus was working on his critical Greek New Testament.

Erasmus pointed out the errors of Jerome, as well as those of the Septuagint scholars. Jesus, for instance, called for his followers not to do penance, as the Vulgate had it – that is, to take part in a Church-sponsored sacrament – but to repent, something quite different. Luther translated Erasmus’s Greek into German, so there is an obvious linguistic link between them, but the above example makes clear the doctrinal one, as well.

As Mr. Pelikan traces these achievements of biblical scholarship up through the present day and the Bible’s translation into literally hundreds of languages, it becomes clear that part of his lesson is how these texts of an ancient desert culture have never ceased to be part of our living oral culture. The verses of the Psalmist, the writings of Moses, the teachings of Jesus do not belong to any single race or sect, but speak to us all.

Even now these same words are read daily, silently and aloud. They are reflected in our names, our figures of speech, our patterns of thought. And they still underlie our arguments about truth, morality, and virtue – including our arguments about the bible itself. “The proper framework for understanding the Bible is nothing less than a total community,” Mr. Pelikan writes.

The continued debates about the meaning of scripture, the continued dissension between devout Christians and devout Jews (not to mention Muslims, another “people of the book”) are to Mr. Pelikan signs that the Bible remains a living book. It takes a mind as capacious and a man as genuinely wise as Mr. Pelikan to see unity in such dissension. His book makes a compelling case that the Bible really is, and remains, “a message for the whole human race.”