Person of Interest: Why Jesus Still Matters in a World that Rejects the Bible

by J. Warner Wallace

Jesus followers took seriously the command to “go therefore and make disciples” (Matthew 28:19 ESV). They branched out into the world and immediately encountered a significant obstacle: discipleship was dependent on the Book, but not every new people group could read. Some groups didn’t even possess an alphabet of their own. This didn’t stop Christian missionaries. Ulfilas (c. 311–c. 383 CE), for example, was born into captivity in a region that the Goths controlled (now known as Ukraine, Moldova, and Romania), but he eventually became a Christian bishop and missionary to the region.4 He evangelized the Goths and invented an alphabet that would allow him to translate the Bible into the Gothic language. This invention made it possible for Goths to read, a foundational skill that laid the groundwork for higher education in the region. Saint Cyril (826–869 CE) and Saint Methodius (815–885 CE) followed in Ulfilas’s footsteps as they made disciples of the Slavic people in Eastern Europe. The Slavs possessed an unwritten language (just like the Goths), so Cyril invented an alphabet to translate the Bible into this language. More than two hundred million people, representing more than one hundred languages spoken around the world, still use the Cyrillic alphabet.5 The invention of an alphabet such as this (for the purpose of translating the Bible) opened the doors for education on a global level.