The sacred character of religious language collides head-on with religion’s universal vocation to express its contents in multiple secular languages. The expansion and intensification of the exchanges between cultures for two millennia has gradually done justice to the principle of "equivalence without identity” which manifests itself in competing translations and retranslations of canonical texts. The evangelizing missions, Buddhism, the Islamic conquests, the Western academies, form many different scenes of attempts to translate what seems untranslatable. The case studies that comprise this issue address the transformation of the biblical text in its internal multiplicity as scripture as well as in its various national versions, from the Renaissance to today.