Old Persian Version

The Old Persian Version, known in Persian as ترجمه قدیم (“the old translation”), has a long history. In the early nineteenth century the Anglican missionary Henry Martyn translated the New Testament in Shiraz with the help of Mirza Seyed Ali Khan. William Glen, working with Mirza Mohammad Jafar Shirazi, then completed the Old Testament from the Hebrew. Robert Bruce, connected to the British and Foreign Bible Society, spent some twenty years revising the whole, which was published in 1895.

The method is that of the great nineteenth-century missionary versions: translation from Hebrew and Greek, close to the form of the original, in the educated Persian of the day. The result carries the weight of a classic Bible, with solemn sentences and a vocabulary heavily indebted to Arabic, as Persian prose of that era commonly was.

This is the Bible that shaped generations of Persian-speaking Christians, and it is called “old” only because newer translations came after it. That is also its honest limit: the Persian of 1895 is not today's Persian, and a modern reader will stumble over archaic words and constructions. For everyday reading, keep it beside a modern translation.

Being well over a century old, the text is in the public domain. No one needs permission to read, copy or share it, and that is why it is here in full, at no cost.