The initiator of Esperanto, L. L. Zamenhof, translated the entire Hebrew Bible into Esperanto. His translation has been much admired by Esperantists and is widely held up as a model or exemplar for other Esperanto authors and translators. Other translators have also edited and published Esperanto versions of the New Testament and Apocrypha. Historical development New Testament A committee led by British clergy and scholars (J.C. Rust, B.J. Beveridge and C.G. Wilkinson) was formed to translate the New Testament and to review L. L. Zamenhof's translation of the Hebrew Bible for eventual publication by the British and Foreign Bible Society. The New Testament was completed in 1910 and published in 1912. The translation of the New Testament is influenced by the English King James Bible, so it closely follows the Textus Receptus rather than the more modern accepted text based on the most ancient Greek manuscripts. Old Testament Zamenhof translated the entire Masoretic Bible (known to Christians as the Old Testament) into Esperanto, completing the work in March 1915. However, Zamenhof was prevented from sending the completed manuscript to the Bible committee in Great Britain, informing the committee's president, Esperantist Rev. John Cyprian Rust, of the major obstacle which had arisen. Writing in French, which was permitted by postal censorship rules, Zamenhof wrote: "Unfortunately I cannot at the present time send you the translation, because our postal service does not forward anything which is written in Esperanto; therefore, I must wait until the end of the war." Only after the First World War — and two years after the death of Zamenhof — did the translation arrive in Britain. According to Arieh ben Guni, in preparing his Esperanto version, Zamenhof appears to have relied primarily on the 1783 German Pentateuch translation and commentary by Moses Mendelssohn, ספר נתיבות השלום והוא חבור כולל חמשה חומשי תורה עם תרגום אשכנזי ובאור (Sefer Netivot ha-shalom - ṿe-hu ḥibur kolel ḥamishah ḥumshe torah ʻim targum askhenazi u-veʼur — in which the German was written in Hebrew characters; and the Russian Synodal Bible (Синодальный перевод) — a work characterized by considerable archaic vocabulary and the use of grammar which is essentially that of Old Church Slavonic. Londona Biblio From 1919 until 1926 the Bible committee read through and corrected the text, harmonizing the language of the New Testament to the Old (according to a Protestant Christian point of view), then typesetting and proofreading. Two Quakers,