Christianity has no liturgical language it insists on, and that is unusual on this tree. Its scriptures were already a translation when Christians received them — the Septuagint, Greek Jewish scripture from Alexandria, is what the New Testament writers quote — and the church has translated relentlessly ever since. Ulfilas made a Gothic Bible in the fourth century and invented an alphabet to do it; Mesrop Mashtots did the same for Armenian around 405; Cyril and Methodius for Slavonic in the ninth century. Jerome's Vulgate, commissioned in 382, was the West's Bible for a thousand years and was declared authentic at Trent in 1546. The vernacular translations of the Reformation era were capital offences: Wycliffe's bones were dug up and burned, Tyndale was executed near Brussels in 1536, and Luther's German, produced partly in hiding, standardised the language. The modern consequence is the enormous machinery of Bible translation, which has also made it the largest single force for writing down previously unwritten languages, with everything that implies for those cultures both ways.