Hundreds of millions of people today write Russian, Ukrainian, Bulgarian, Serbian, Macedonian and other languages in the Cyrillic alphabet. Its name honours a ninth-century Byzantine scholar and missionary, Constantine, better known by the monastic name he took shortly before his death: Cyril. Yet Cyril almost certainly did not invent Cyrillic. He invented a different alphabet, called Glagolitic, so that the Slavs could hear the Bible and the liturgy in their own language.

The story of Cyril and his brother Methodius is one of the great episodes in the history of Bible translation. It is also a story of rivalry between churches and empires, and of a basic question every translator eventually faces: is God worshipped properly in any language, or only in a few?

Two brothers from Thessalonica

Constantine (about 827–869) and Methodius (about 815–885) were born in Thessalonica, the Byzantine city in northern Greece. The region around it had many Slavic settlers, and the brothers probably grew up hearing a Slavic dialect spoken. Methodius served for a time as a provincial governor before becoming a monk. Constantine was a brilliant scholar in Constantinople, known as “the Philosopher,” who taught at the capital and took part in diplomatic missions, including one to the Khazars north of the Black Sea.

Most of what we know about them comes from two works written in Old Church Slavonic soon after their deaths, the Life of Constantine and the Life of Methodius, probably by their disciples. These are precious sources, but they are written to honour saints, and historians read them with care, especially where they report miracles or quote long speeches.

The call to Moravia

Around 862, Rastislav, ruler of Great Moravia (a Slavic state roughly in today’s Czech Republic and Slovakia), sent a request to the Byzantine emperor Michael III. Moravia had already received Christianity, mostly through missionaries from the Frankish kingdom to the west, who used Latin. According to the Life of Constantine, Rastislav asked for a teacher who could explain the faith to his people in their own language. Historians also see a political motive: Rastislav wanted a counterweight to Frankish influence.

The emperor chose Constantine and Methodius. The Life says that before setting out Constantine composed letters for the Slavic language and began translating, starting with the opening words of John’s Gospel:

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. (John 1:1)

Whether or not that detail is exact, it fits what scholars think the brothers translated first: the Gospel readings used in church services, arranged in the order of the church year, rather than a continuous text of the whole Bible.

An alphabet made for scripture

The alphabet Constantine devised is Glagolitic, from a Slavonic word meaning “to speak.” It is a carefully designed script, with letters for sounds that Greek could not represent well. Its shapes are distinctive, with loops, circles and crosses, and scholars still debate which older scripts, if any, inspired them.

Glagolitic was built for one purpose: to write the Slavic language of the time accurately enough to carry scripture and worship. The language of the brothers’ translations is now called Old Church Slavonic. It was based on the South Slavic dialect around Thessalonica, but in the ninth century the Slavic languages were still close enough for it to be understood widely. It became the first literary language of the Slavs.

The brothers did not invent a new script on a whim. Writing the sounds of Slavic in Greek or Latin letters would have been clumsy, and a separate alphabet also marked the new church literature as belonging to the Slavs themselves. The same thing had happened before with the Gothic, Armenian and Georgian alphabets (see Alphabets invented for the Bible).

Opposition and approval

The mission arrived in Moravia in 863. The brothers trained disciples and worked on translating the services and scripture readings. They soon met opposition from Frankish clergy, who were used to Latin worship and saw the Byzantines as intruders. Some held what the Life of Constantine calls the “three-language” view: that God should be praised only in Hebrew, Greek and Latin, the three languages of the inscription on the cross. The Life describes Constantine arguing against this in Venice, citing Paul’s words to the Corinthians about speaking with understanding.

Around 867 the brothers travelled to Rome. Pope Adrian II received them warmly, partly because they brought what were believed to be the relics of Pope Clement I. According to the Lives, the pope approved the Slavonic books and had them placed on the altar of a Roman church. In Rome Constantine fell ill, became a monk under the name Cyril, and died in February 869. He was buried in the church of San Clemente.

Methodius returned north as archbishop, with papal backing. But the conflict with the Frankish bishops grew worse. Around 870 he was tried by Bavarian bishops and held prisoner for more than two years, until Pope John VIII secured his release. In 880 John VIII again approved the use of Slavonic in worship, with the condition that the Gospel be read first in Latin. The Life of Methodius says that late in his life Methodius, with two priests, translated nearly all the books of the Bible except Maccabees in a few months. Scholars treat that claim cautiously. It is uncertain how much of the Old Testament was really completed, and little of it survives in a form that can be traced directly to him.

The disciples and the birth of Cyrillic

Methodius died in 885. His successor in Moravia was a Latin-rite opponent, and Pope Stephen V forbade the Slavonic liturgy. The brothers’ disciples were expelled, some reportedly sold into slavery. Several, including Clement, Naum and Angelarius, found refuge in Bulgaria, whose ruler Boris I had accepted Christianity and wanted a church that did not depend on Greek clergy.

In Bulgaria the work flourished. Clement taught thousands of students at Ohrid, and another centre grew at the royal capital, Preslav. It was probably there, around the end of the ninth century or early in the tenth, that a new alphabet was developed, based on Greek capital letters with extra letters, some borrowed from Glagolitic, for Slavic sounds. It was easier to learn for anyone who knew Greek, and it gradually replaced Glagolitic in most places. It came to be called Cyrillic, in honour of Cyril, not because he designed it. Glagolitic survived for centuries among Croatian Catholics, who were allowed to keep a Slavonic liturgy.

From Bulgaria, Slavonic books and Christianity spread to the Serbs and, after the conversion of Kyiv in 988, to the Eastern Slavs. Some of the oldest surviving Slavonic Gospel manuscripts, such as the Glagolitic Codex Zographensis and Codex Marianus, date from the tenth or eleventh century. The Ostromir Gospels of 1056–57, a Cyrillic lectionary made in Novgorod, is the oldest dated book from the Eastern Slavs.

The first complete Slavonic Bibles

For centuries, Slavic churches had scripture mainly in the form of service books: Gospel and Epistle lectionaries, the Psalter, and Old Testament readings. A complete Bible in one set of volumes came surprisingly late.

The first was the Gennadius Bible of 1499, compiled in Novgorod under Archbishop Gennadius. His team gathered existing Slavonic translations, but some books had never been translated from Greek or could not be found. These were translated from the Latin Vulgate, with help from a Dominican monk named Veniamin, who is usually thought to have come from the South Slavic lands. The Gennadius Bible is therefore a mixed text, partly from Greek and partly from Latin.

The first printed complete Slavonic Bible was the Ostrog Bible of 1581, produced in Ostroh (in today’s Ukraine) under the patronage of Prince Konstantin Ostrozky, and printed by Ivan Fedorov. Its editors compared Slavonic manuscripts with Greek sources and with the Gennadius Bible. A later revision, the Elizabeth Bible of 1751, became the standard Church Slavonic Bible, and remains in liturgical use in the Russian Orthodox Church. Translations into modern Russian, Bulgarian, Serbian and other languages followed in the nineteenth century and after.

A legacy across Europe

Cyril and Methodius are honoured as saints by both Orthodox and Catholic Christians. In 1980 Pope John Paul II named them co-patrons of Europe, alongside Benedict. In Bulgaria and other Slavic countries, 24 May is celebrated as a day of Slavonic letters and culture.

Their legacy is mixed with later conflict between Rome and Constantinople, and historians disagree about how far the brothers saw themselves as Byzantine agents, papal missionaries, or simply translators. But on one point their position is clear: they rejected the idea that only a few sacred languages are fit for scripture.

Why it matters for Open Word Bible

Open Word Bible stands in that tradition in a modest way. It is translating into Spanish, French and Swahili as well as English, and each language is translated from the Hebrew and Greek rather than from another translation, so that a speaker of Swahili is not reading a copy of an English Bible. The Gennadius Bible shows what happens when translators must fill gaps from a secondary source; Open Word Bible tries to avoid that by working from the original-language texts throughout.

Cyril and Methodius had to argue for the right to translate at all. Today that argument is mostly won, but permission is still a barrier in another way: most modern translations are copyrighted. Open Word Bible’s translation and its reasoning are released under a CC0 licence, so anyone may copy, adapt or build on them. It is a young, AI-assisted project, and none of its text has yet been approved by named human reviewers. See Why another Bible translation?.

Sources

  • Dvornik, Francis. Byzantine Missions among the Slavs: SS. Constantine-Cyril and Methodius. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1970.
  • Kantor, Marvin. Medieval Slavic Lives of Saints and Princes. Ann Arbor: Michigan Slavic Publications, 1983. Includes translations of the Life of Constantine and the Life of Methodius.
  • Vlasto, A. P. The Entry of the Slavs into Christendom: An Introduction to the Medieval History of the Slavs. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970.
  • Obolensky, Dimitri. The Byzantine Commonwealth: Eastern Europe, 500–1453. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1971.
  • Metzger, Bruce M. The Early Versions of the New Testament: Their Origin, Transmission, and Limitations. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977.
  • Lunt, Horace G. Old Church Slavonic Grammar. 7th ed. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 2001.
  • Thomson, Francis J. “The Slavonic Translation of the Old Testament.” In Interpretation of the Bible, edited by Jože Krašovec. Ljubljana: Slovenska akademija znanosti in umetnosti; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1998.
  • Bible quotations are from the World English Bible (public domain), except where the article quotes a historic translation or gives its own literal rendering.