True, the Bible was in Slavonic, a language that was the forerunner of modern-day Russian. However, by the mid-19th century, the Slavonic language had long since fallen into disuse except in religious services, where it was used by the clergy. A similar situation had existed in the West, where the Roman Catholic Church tried to keep the Bible exclusively in Latin long after Latin had become a dead language.

The ancient Greek Septuagint had been the basis for translations of the Hebrew Scriptures into Slavonic.

Some church leaders further claimed that Slavonic—the language of liturgy—expressed the Bible’s message better than did Russian.