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Leviticus may seem like an odd Bible book to use in evangelism. But not in West Africa, where in April 2005 the first ten chapters were read to the Lobi—a people of subsistence farmers, animistic mask-makers, and poison-arrow warriors in Burkina Faso—in their own language.

Many in the listening crowd were struck by the similarities between the sacrifices mentioned in Leviticus and those of the Lobi religion. This infuriated the son of a Lobi priest, who forbade the reading to continue, because it is taboo to speak of Lobi religious practices in public. But another listener shouted, "Well, it means that we, too, are descendants of this High Priest. Aren't we?"

Such comments gave the Lobi translators an open door to share the gospel. They also validated the growing trend among Bible translators to bring the Old Testament to more of the world's nearly 7,000 language groups.

Doming Lucasi, a native Balangao translator from the rice-terraced slopes of the northern Philippines, worked on the New Testament as a young man. He has now launched an OT translation project. In a culture that contains similarities to the Old Testament's sacrificial and legal systems, he said, "Having the New Testament without the Old is like having a sword without the handle."

The Old and New Testaments, separated by a chronological gap of about 400 years, have in modern times also developed a translation gap. Of the 2,400 language groups with portions of the Bible, roughly 1,115 have the New Testament. Only 426 have a full Bible, including the Old Testament.

Christians have long upheld the value and interconnectedness of both testaments, at least since Marcion's denial of the Hebrew Scriptures was rejected as heresy in the second century. Yet the missionary translation boom of the 20th century largely ignored the Old Testament.

"The assumption was that the New Testament alone was adequate, because it held the gospel message and would be sufficient for evangelization," said Ralph Hill, international translation coordinator for Wycliffe Bible Translators. The focus on evangelism over church growth, coupled with shortages of personnel and resources and the Old Testament's sheer, intimidating size, created today's gap between the testaments.

Take Papua New Guinea, for example, the world's most linguistically diverse nation with more than 820 indigenous languages. A surge of translation work in recent decades has put the New Testament into nearly half of those languages. Yet the 13 New Testaments scheduled to be dedicated during this year or next outnumber the estimated total number of complete Bibles, 12.

"Effective evangelism among unreached people groups needs to start with Genesis," said Don Pederson, director of field ministry for New Tribes Mission (NTM). "It's through the story of God's interactions with man that his character is fully understood and people understand their dilemma, that they need a Savior."

NTM, which focuses on planting churches among the unreached, began each of its 120 current translation projects in Genesis, translating key OT passages en route to the Gospels. These "chronological" translations will provide a framework of salvation history that Pederson believes is crucial for successful evangelism.

NTM missionaries found that groups coming out of animism or polytheism with only the New Testament had deficient understandings of God and sin. "Churches were being planted, but something was missing," said Pederson. "The gospel was being presented, but people did not seem to be understanding it."

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September 2006, Vol. 50, No. 9