Cherokee New Testament Online



This project was initiated by Timothy Legg in 2006 to compare English and Cherokee versions of the New Testament for the purpose of self education of the language and grammer of the Cherokee Language. The New Testament was chosen as it was the largest single book written in Cherokee at the time of this project's beginning.

Ryan Mackey gave me a copy of the New Testament when I was staying in Dawni's trailor in Kenwood, OK. An acquaintance, the late George Pumpkin, suggested that I compare the documents. I thought about ways to compare the verses until one day I left the book in the car and the heat melted the glue; all the pages fell out. The pages were placed on a flatbed scanner and were digitized.

At first the intention was to have a comparison of the English and Cherokee versions. The choice of English text was very limited. The University of Virginia was the only site in which each verse was parsed into one line, regardless of length. This formatting made the encoding of the web page much, much eaiser.

It was almost a year before I transscribed the first verse. I never intended to finish the entire book, but just chose individual verses. The entire book was transcribed using the text editor vi running on Ubuntu Linux over the course of three years. Two seperate proofreadings followed.

At one time there was a project to create an audio version of the Cherokee New Testament. I offered a stipend of $1 per verse read, but could not find enough speakers willing to be recorded. The was ony a single recording session featuring Louise Lacey and Betty Sixkiller. Until there are speakers that know how to read syllabary, the project is on hold.

In November 2014, Michael Joyner has created a PDF e-book of the Cherokee New Testament. As the book is stabilizing into a static document, I am now putting a $5 reward out for each verse with misread/mistyped syllables.

Download the Cherokee New Testament as a regular print PDF
Download the Cherokee New Testament as a large print PDF

Matthew
Mark
Luke
John
The Acts
Romans
1 Corinthians
2 Corinthians
Galatians
Ephesians
Philippians
Colossians
1 Thessalonians
2 Thessalonians
1 Timothy
2 Timothy
Titus
Philemon
Hebrews
James
1 Peter
2 Peter
1 John
2 John
3 John
Jude
Revelation


Online since 9/13/2006