Ukrainian Bibles

Ukrainian is an East Slavic language of the Indo‐European language family. It is the native language of about 40 million people and the official state language of Ukraine. Written Ukrainian uses the Ukrainian alphabet, a variant of the Cyrillic script. It is nearly twenty‐five years since the Society first published the Ukrainian Bible in the translation prepared by Panteleimon Kulish; the original publication of this edition was made in 1903 by the British and Foreign Bible Society. Kulish published his work in a dialectical form of the Ukrainian language which is not that easy for today’s Ukrainian speakers to read; nevertheless, the Society has continued to see demand for this edition. In the light of the war in Ukraine, TBS prepared a new setting of the Kulish text of the Gospel according to John.

We rejoice that the Scriptures in Ukrainian are going forth. However, the Society does recognise that the Kulish version is not in standard literary Ukrainian, and so the Editorial Department (with the help of a native Ukrainian speaker) is examining two other translations of the Ukrainian Scriptures in which there are New Testaments available.