This New Testament was translated into Choctaw by Alfred Wright and Cyrus Byington, who worked in collaboration with several Choctaw converts. Wright and Byington were Presbyterian missionaries, linguists, and educators who began working among the Choctaw people in the 1820s. Until that time, Choctaw did not have a writing system for its language. Wright and Byington helped develop an alphabet and soon began printing educational and religious texts. In the 1830s, they remained with the tribe as thousands of men, women, and children were forcibly relocated to what would become the state of Oklahoma. They published the first Choctaw New Testament in 1848. This copy is a revised version published by the American Bible Society in 1854.