Bahá’u’lláh and the (Un)Translatability of Scripture

The writings of Bahá’u’lláh (d. 1892) open many new vistas for students of religion. Scholars have observed that a phenomenon common to the world’s religions is the dogma that scripture cannot be translated from its original language, which alone, it has been believed, carries the exact meaning and sound of the sacred. This paper will explicate how Bahá’u’lláh challenged and ultimately rejected both the notion that scripture cannot be translated and the belief that knowledge of a particular language is a prerequisite of true faith. Special attention will be given to the history of the earliest attempts to translate the central book of the Bahá’í canon, Bahá’u’lláh’s Kitáb-i-Aqdas, from its original Arabic into Persian, Russian, and English, foreshadowing thereby its official translation into nearly forty languages, to date.