Bibles

Czech (Český)

Czech, (Ceský jazyk) formerly called Bohemian, is spoken by about twelve million people in the central European provinces of Bohemia and Moravia in the Czech Republic, formerly part of Czechoslovakia. It is a Slavonic language similar to Polish and Slovak and written in Latin (Roman) letters.

The Scriptures were first translated from the Vulgate into Czech in 1360. The first translation from Hebrew and Greek was the Bible kralická produced at Kralice in 1613 by the Unity of Brethren, which included an Apocrypha of deuterocanonical books. This is still the classic Czech translation.

The main modern Bible (Bible Svatá) is the Ekumenický preklad (CEP, Czech Ecumenical Translation) published in 1985 and used by all denominations. Czech speaking Christians are mainly Catholic with a large historic evangelical Protestant minority, dating back to the Hussites of the fifteenth century, and some Orthodox believers.

Bible work is done by the Czech Bible Society (Ceská biblická spolecnost). The Slovo na cestu was completed in 1988.