 Within five years more than 5,000 copies of the Esperanto Bible had sold.An Esperanto organization devoted to Biblical and Oriental Studies, the "Internacia Asocio de Bibliistoj kaj Orientalistoj", beginning in the 1960s, attempted to organize the translation of a new, ecumenical Esperanto Bible version, but the project eventually lapsed, with only Gerrit Berveling's translation of Numbers ("Nombroj", 1999) published.However, Dr. Berveling, a Dutch Free Church theologian and classical linguist, has translated most of a new version of the New Testament, eschewing the syntactically overliteral tendencies of the British and Foreign Bible Society version, which is perhaps most akin to the English Revised Version of 1881.