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DonateA short film on the story of the Bible in Afghanistan, published in 2024, before the Afghan Pashto Old Testament was completed.
Long before the modern era, Afghanistan’s mountains and valleys already knew the name of Christ. There are credible accounts of the Apostle Thomas passing through today’s Afghanistan and Pakistan in the late 1st century. From the 3rd century onward, the Church of the East — sometimes called the “Nestorian” church — spread along the Silk Road, increasingly using Persian alongside Syriac, and planting congregations as far east as China and India. By the 9th century, portions of Scripture were translated into Sogdian, a language related to Persian that was spoken in the region.
Herat became the seat of several metropolitan bishops, while dioceses stretched across much of what is now Afghanistan. Syriac church records still preserve evidence of Christian communities that endured for centuries in places such as Balkh and Kandahar. That ancient presence faded after the Mongol conquests and Timur’s campaigns in the 14th century — not gone forever, but into a very long winter.
The long winter was not empty. Armenian Christians are recorded in Kabul from at least the 17th century. By the 18th century, Armenian families were living openly in the city — brought to Kabul as gunners and craftsmen — worshipping in a church in or near the Bala Hissar, the royal citadel. They were served by priests sent from the Armenian community of Julfa in Iran. Travellers in the following century still recorded the small congregation gathering there.
In 1880, the church building was destroyed when British-Indian forces demolished the Bala Hissar. Most of the Armenian families were expelled from Kabul around 1897. It was a foreign community maintaining a foreign tradition — not yet anything Afghan believers could call their own — but for well over a century, a church stood in Kabul, and its bell would not be the last to fall silent.
In 1970, after 10 years of international fundraising, a church building was dedicated in Kabul — built for the international community, with the king’s own permission, on the condition that it was not to be used by the Afghan people themselves. The pastor was J. Christy Wilson.
On 14 July 1973, authorities and workmen arrived, digging down 12 feet below the building’s foundation in search of the “underground church” they had been told existed! A congregant warned Kabul’s mayor that if the government touched the church, God would overthrow that government, and letters were written to King Zahir Shah begging for his intervention.
On 17 July 1973, government bulldozers finished tearing the church building down. That same night, a coup ended 227 years of monarchy while the king was abroad. He never returned to the throne, and Afghanistan entered decades of upheaval, invasions, and war.
One life from this same period still speaks today: Zia Nodrat, a blind Afghan believer.
Zia’s life still resounds today. Pamir Ministries and their partners have carried the same calling forward: staff devoted to sharing the gospel over the radio waves, while engaging deeply with Bible translation and publishing. Such pioneering efforts are one of the foundation stones that eventually led to the formation of the BSA in 2025.
Pashto has had some Scripture since 1818, when the first Pashto New Testament was printed in Serampore, India — decades before Pakistan even existed. That shared root shaped an attempt to produce one Pashto New Testament for everyone, published in 1991 in cooperation with the Pakistan Bible Society. It proved a difficult balancing act: Pakistani readers found it too Afghan, and Afghan readers found it too Pakistani.
By 2001, the decision had been made that Pashto speakers on each side of the border needed their own Bible — one for Pakistan, and one for Afghanistan. Pakistan got its full YousafZai Pashto Bible in 2019, but Afghanistan’s own dedicated Afghan Pashto Bible would not arrive until 2026.
In 2001, the world changed. The United States and its allies entered Afghanistan, and “nation-building” became a stated aim: new institutions, new laws, new freedoms, shaped in large part by Western ideals of human dignity, conscience, and the rule of law.
These were ideals that themselves grew out of centuries of Biblical thought, yet in 2001, no complete Bible existed in any Afghan language; the first, in Dari, was still seven years away. A nation was being asked to build on principles whose deepest roots had never actually been translated for it, and there was no sense of the Biblical story.
The 2010s brought significant technological change. The 2008 Dari Bible, adapted from an established Farsi translation, had arrived just as internet access was beginning to spread across Afghanistan. Early internet cafés gave people access to Dari and Pashto Scriptures online for the first time, while bazaars filled with affordable mobile phones. Afghanistan largely bypassed landlines and personal computers and went straight to mobile technology.
With mobile phones came apps, videos, and audio Scriptures, distributed through SD cards, downloads, app stores and bluetooth. For the first time, many Afghans could carry Christian Scriptures with them wherever they went. They also used their phones to ask questions and seek spiritual guidance. Discipleship teams staffed by Afghan believers in Canada and elsewhere were frequently inundated by calls and messages.
Just as the printing press transformed Europe by making ideas and literature widely accessible, so mobile phones opened new doors for Afghans to explore faith, ask questions, and engage with Scripture for themselves. By the late 2010s, a new generation of Afghan believers had taken root, both within Afghanistan and throughout the growing diaspora.
In 2021, the country changed again. As foreign forces withdrew and the government collapsed, many Afghan Christians — already worshipping in private — fled the renewed threat of persecution, joining a growing diaspora across the West. Out of that scattering came a wave of new ministries, founded and led by Afghan believers now able to work, translate, and broadcast openly for the first time. Yet the cost has fallen unevenly: those who remain inside Afghanistan live with less safety than at almost any point in living memory, their faith more hidden — and more dangerous to profess — than ever.
The years 2023, 2024, and 2025 brought a pace of Bible translation Afghanistan had never seen before — so much so that partnering ministries declared 2024 the Year of the Afghan Bible. Modern New Testaments were completed in Dari and Afghan Pashto, closely followed by a Hazaragi New Testament, with the complete Bible in Afghan Pashto following in 2026.
The work continues: a revision of the Dari Bible, and a range of other activities are underway, planned, or envisaged in other languages. After so long a winter, it feels like the coming of spring. It is in the light of that hope that the Bible Society of Afghanistan takes up the work today — continuing the partnership, and continuing the task, until Scripture is in the hands of every Afghan, in every language of its peoples.
A thought worth sitting with: when Magi came from the East to worship the infant Christ, “the East” they travelled from was the Persian world of their day — a world whose reach touched the very mountains and valleys now called Afghanistan. Some of the first people on earth to recognise Jesus may well have come from, or through, this land. Two thousand years later, this same land is one of the least-reached on earth, and following Christ here can still cost everything. How is it that a people who could have been amongst the first to welcome Jesus, can now be among the last to hear of Him?
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