The Bible was translated into Punjabi in the nineteenth century by missionaries working with Punjabi assistants whose names are usually not recorded, and printed in Gurmukhi at Ludhiana and later at Lahore.
The translation had to invent or adapt a religious vocabulary in Punjabi for concepts the language had not needed, and it drew heavily on the existing vocabulary of the Guru Granth Sahib Ji to do it.
That makes the Punjabi Bible one of the earliest sustained pieces of expository prose in the language, alongside the Sikh tract literature that followed it.
A Shahmukhi Punjabi Bible exists for the Pakistani Christian community, which is Punjabi-speaking and reads Urdu script.
The Punjabi Christian hymn tradition, the zaboor, sets the Psalms to Punjabi folk tunes and is sung in a way that is closer to Punjabi devotional music than to anything European.
It is the least known body of Punjabi religious music and it is sung by two million people.
The mission press at Ludhiana, set up in the mid 1830s, was among the first in the region and it printed in Punjabi, Urdu, Hindi and Persian.
The Bible translations into Punjabi in both scripts were the first substantial prose printed in the language, and the missionaries produced the first grammars and dictionaries alongside them.
That work was done for conversion and it built the tools the language then used for everything else. The first Punjabi printing types and the first dictionary came out of it.