Most languages in history have never been written down. To translate the Bible into such a language, a translator first has to decide how to write it, and sometimes that means inventing an alphabet.

This has happened again and again. In late antiquity, three peoples on the edges of the Roman world, the Goths, the Armenians and the Georgians, received alphabets that are bound up with the translation of scripture. Two of these alphabets are still in daily use. The pattern continued with the Slavonic alphabets in the ninth century and with many scripts devised by missionaries in modern times.

Wulfila and the Goths

The Goths were a Germanic people who, in the fourth century, lived north of the Danube, on the frontier of the Roman Empire. Among them lived descendants of Christian captives taken from Roman territory in earlier raids. One of these was Wulfila, also known by the Greek form of his name, Ulfilas, born around 311. His name means “little wolf.”

According to the church historian Philostorgius, Wulfila was consecrated bishop for the Christians among the Goths around 341 by Eusebius of Nicomedia. A letter by his pupil Auxentius says that he preached and wrote in Gothic, Latin and Greek. Persecution of Christians among the Goths drove Wulfila and his followers across the Danube into Roman territory, where they settled in what is now northern Bulgaria. He died around 383.

Philostorgius also says that Wulfila invented an alphabet for the Goths and translated the scriptures into their language (Church History 2.5). The Gothic alphabet he devised has around twenty-seven letters, based mainly on Greek capital letters, with some borrowed from Latin and perhaps from the older Germanic runes. The translation was made from Greek and is generally quite literal, following the Greek word order closely while respecting Gothic grammar.

Wulfila’s theology was what later writers called Arian: he held that the Son was like the Father but subordinate to him, the view favoured at the imperial court in his time. When the Goths later moved into western Europe, they took this form of Christianity with them, which set them apart from the Catholic populations they ruled.

The books he left out

Philostorgius tells one more story. Wulfila translated all the scriptures, he says, except the books of Kings, because they were full of wars and the Goths were already too fond of fighting. The books of Kings in Greek included what are now called 1 and 2 Samuel as well as 1 and 2 Kings.

Whether this is true is hard to know. Philostorgius wrote some forty or fifty years after Wulfila’s death, and his explanation sounds like the kind of story told about a famous man. Very little of the Gothic Old Testament survives at all, only a few fragments of Nehemiah, so the evidence cannot confirm or refute it. But it is an early and memorable example of a translator, or at least a translator’s reputation, weighing what scripture might do to its new readers.

The Silver Bible

Most of what survives of the Gothic Bible comes from the New Testament: substantial parts of the Gospels and of Paul’s letters. The most famous manuscript is the Codex Argenteus, the “Silver Book.” It was copied in the early sixth century, probably in Italy for the court of the Ostrogothic king Theoderic, on purple-dyed parchment in silver and gold ink.

The codex contained the four Gospels in the order Matthew, John, Luke and Mark, an order also found in some early Latin manuscripts. Of its original 336 or so leaves, 188 survive. It resurfaced in the sixteenth century at the abbey of Werden in Germany, later reached Prague, and was taken by Swedish troops at the end of the Thirty Years’ War in 1648 and has been in the library of Uppsala University since 1669. In 1970 a single further leaf was found in a chapel of Speyer Cathedral.

The Lord’s Prayer in Gothic, transliterated into Latin letters, begins Atta unsar þu in himinam, “Our Father, you in the heavens.” It is one of the oldest substantial texts in any Germanic language, and scholars of English, German and the Scandinavian languages study the Gothic Bible for what it reveals about their own languages’ ancestry.

Mesrop Mashtots and the Armenian alphabet

Armenia was one of the first states to adopt Christianity officially, under King Trdat III and through the preaching of Gregory the Illuminator. The traditional date is 301; many historians prefer a date around 314. For about a century, however, the Armenian church had no scripture in Armenian. The Bible and liturgy were read in Greek or Syriac and explained orally.

Around 405, a former royal secretary turned monk and preacher, Mesrop Mashtots, set out to change this, with the support of the head of the church, the Catholicos Sahak, and King Vramshapuh. We know the story from a Life of Mashtots written by his pupil Koriun a generation later. An alphabet attributed to a Syrian bishop named Daniel was tried first but proved inadequate for Armenian sounds. Mashtots then travelled with students to Syrian cities such as Edessa and Samosata. According to Koriun, after prayer and study he devised a new alphabet, and a Greek calligrapher named Rufanos helped give the letters their final shape. The alphabet had thirty-six letters, carefully matched to the sounds of Armenian; two more were added in the Middle Ages.

Koriun records the first sentence translated into the new script, from the opening of Proverbs:

to know wisdom and instruction; to discern the words of understanding; (Proverbs 1:2)

It was a fitting choice for a people about to read in their own language for the first time.

The “queen of versions”

The Armenian Bible was first translated largely from Syriac. After the Council of Ephesus in 431, Mashtots’s pupils brought accurate Greek manuscripts from Constantinople, and the translation was revised against the Greek. The Old Testament follows the Septuagint.

The result was admired for its accuracy and its elegance. The eighteenth-century French scholar Mathurin Veyssière de La Croze is usually credited with calling it the “queen of versions,” a phrase that has been repeated ever since. Armenian scholars translated much other Christian and classical literature in the same period, and some Greek works now survive only in Armenian.

The oldest dated Armenian Gospel manuscript was copied in 887. The first printed Armenian Bible appeared in Amsterdam in 1666, prepared by Bishop Voskan of Yerevan. The alphabet of Mashtots is still the alphabet of Armenian, and he is honoured as a saint and national hero.

The Georgian alphabet

The kingdom of Kartli, or Iberia, in what is now eastern Georgia, became Christian in the fourth century, under King Mirian III, through the work of a woman remembered as St Nino. As in Armenia, a script for the local language soon followed.

The origin of the Georgian alphabet is disputed. Koriun says that Mashtots created the Georgian alphabet, and also one for the Caucasian Albanians, a people living in what is now Azerbaijan. Georgian historians generally reject the claim that Mashtots invented their script, and a medieval Georgian chronicle attributes it to a pre-Christian king, Parnavaz, in the third century BCE, a tradition most historians regard as legendary. Many scholars think the script was created in the fourth or fifth century, in connection with Christianity, perhaps under Armenian influence but by Georgians themselves. The earliest securely dated Georgian inscriptions come from the fifth century, in a church in Georgia and a Georgian monastery near Bethlehem.

The Georgian Bible was translated in the fifth century, probably at first from Armenian or Syriac, and later revised against Greek. In the tenth and eleventh centuries, Georgian monks at the Iviron monastery on Mount Athos, notably Euthymius and George the Athonite, produced revised versions that became standard. The oldest form of the script, asomtavruli, later gave rise to the nuskhuri used in church books and to the mkhedruli script used for modern Georgian.

The Caucasian Albanian alphabet was thought to be almost lost until palimpsests turned up among a cache of manuscripts rediscovered at St Catherine’s Monastery on Sinai in 1975. Beneath later Georgian writing, scholars identified Caucasian Albanian texts, including Gospel readings. They were deciphered in the 1990s and 2000s and published in 2008, and they are almost the only substantial texts in that language.

Scripts and scripture

These stories have a common pattern. A people becomes Christian; the church reads its scriptures in a foreign language; someone creates a way to write the local language so that the Bible, the liturgy and preaching can be heard in it. The first books in the new script are biblical, and a written literature grows from them.

The pattern did not end in late antiquity. In the ninth century, Cyril and Methodius created the Glagolitic alphabet for the Slavs (see Cyril and Methodius and the Slavonic Bible). In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, missionaries and local Christians devised or adapted scripts for hundreds of languages, from Cree syllabics in Canada to many African and Pacific languages. The historian Lamin Sanneh argued that this commitment to translation gave many peoples their first written literature and strengthened, rather than erased, their languages. Others have pointed out that missionary scripts and spelling systems were sometimes imposed from outside. Both observations can be true at once.

Open Word Bible works in languages that already have long written traditions, so it does not need new alphabets. But it inherits the same conviction that scripture should be read in one’s own language, and it shares a concern with the scribes of these early versions for getting each letter of the source right. On this site, Hebrew and Greek are never typed by hand but always copied from pinned source data (see Why we never type Greek or Hebrew by hand). That is why this article has given every Gothic, Armenian and Georgian word in Latin letters.

Sources

  • Philostorgius. Church History 2.5. Translated by Philip R. Amidon. Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2007.
  • Koriun. The Life of Mashtots. Translated by Bedros Norehad. New York: Armenian General Benevolent Union of America, 1964.
  • Heather, Peter, and John Matthews. The Goths in the Fourth Century. Translated Texts for Historians 11. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1991.
  • Metzger, Bruce M. The Early Versions of the New Testament: Their Origin, Transmission, and Limitations. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977.
  • Gippert, Jost, Wolfgang Schulze, Zaza Aleksidze, and Jean-Pierre Mahé. The Caucasian Albanian Palimpsests of Mount Sinai. 2 vols. Turnhout: Brepols, 2008.
  • Paget, James Carleton, and Joachim Schaper, eds. The New Cambridge History of the Bible. Vol. 1, From the Beginnings to 600. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013.
  • Daniels, Peter T., and William Bright, eds. The World’s Writing Systems. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996.
  • Sanneh, Lamin. Translating the Message: The Missionary Impact on Culture. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1989.
  • Streitberg, Wilhelm, ed. Die gotische Bibel. Heidelberg: Carl Winter, 1908–1910.
  • Bible quotations are from the World English Bible (public domain), except where the article quotes a historic translation or gives its own literal rendering.