God Passes By was written by Shoghi Effendi in 1944 to mark the first centenary of the Báb's declaration, and it is an unusual document: the head of a religion writing a narrative history of that religion's first hundred years, an account which is simultaneously chronicle, interpretation and authoritative statement, and whose subject matter includes his own great-grandfather, his grandfather and himself. Its prose is deliberately elaborate — long periodic sentences, an archaising vocabulary, a rhythm modelled on the Authorised Version — and this is the same register Shoghi Effendi used for his translations of Bahá'u'lláh from Persian and Arabic. That decision has a large downstream effect: because his translations became the authoritative English versions and the model for translation into other languages, the sound of Bahá'í scripture in English is a mid-twentieth-century Oxford-educated Persian's imitation of seventeenth-century English, and readers regularly assume the originals are archaic when they are not.