Biblia Cornilescu

The Biblia Cornilescu, published in 1924, is the Protestant standard translation of the Scriptures into the Romanian language. It was the solitary work of Dumitru Cornilescu (1891-1975), a young Romanian Orthodox theologian who, in the course of his translation work, experienced a personal evangelical conversion. The project was sponsored by Princess Ralu Callimachi and later published by the British and Foreign Bible Society.

Cornilescu adopted a methodology that prioritized clarity and intelligibility for the ordinary Romanian reader, in contrast to traditional Orthodox translations, which retained Church Slavonic language and complex liturgical structure. He worked from the Masoretic Hebrew, the Greek Textus Receptus, and authorized French and German translations, producing a fluent, expressive, and modern Romanian. His style was tailored to the early twentieth-century evangelical reader, without sacrificing fidelity to the originals.

The publication coincided with the growth of evangelical movements in Romania — Baptists, Pentecostals, Christian Brethren, and Adventists — who adopted the Cornilescu as their official Bible. Although initially rejected and later officially disapproved by the Romanian Orthodox Church, the translation withstood persecution under the communist regime and became a symbol of Romanian evangelical Christian identity. It remains, to this day, the most widely read Protestant translation in Romania and among the Romanian diaspora.

The text is in the public domain and is freely distributed by Bible societies, churches, and digital platforms. Several modern revisions based on the Cornilescu have been published, but the original 1924 text remains widely accessible and in liturgical use.