This article demonstrates the influence of the Bible on the formation of the Russian literary language. This process unites the Russian language with the literary languages of many other nations that are attached to Christian culture. The author analyses biblical terms of different types that have correspondences in other European languages, including Slavonic ones. Despite the common source, bibles in languages influenced by Christian culture differ. In Russian, great differences are found both in the number and in the qualitative composition of biblical terms. The specificity of the adaptation of biblical terms in the Russian language is manifested in the combination of Old-Church and colloquial (inspired in many ways by tracing from European languages) language, which greatly enriched the stock of Russian biblical terms. The article examines examples illustrating the European background of the assimilation and activation of biblical terms in the Russian literary language.