In 1823 the Faroese priest Johan Henrich Schrøter (1771–1851) published the Evangelium Sankta Matthæussa, aa Førisk o Dansk (“Gospel of Matthew in Faroese and in Danish”) with the Danish Bible Society. Since there was no official Faroese orthography, Schrøter devised his own. Schrøter’s predecessor, the Faroese Enlightenment scholar Jens Christian Svabo (1746–1824), had also made his own orthography.

The Faroese Gospel of Matthew, with its straightforward and phonetic spelling, was rejected by all leading, more etymologically-minded philologists. Peter Andreas Munch, Ivar Aasen, Svend Grundtvig, and Venceslaus Ulricus Hammershaimb all opposed Schrøter’s orthography; Hammershaimb was to propose his own spelling in 1846. The book was printed in 1500 copies, and 1300 of them were distributed among Faroese households, but the common man felt uneasy with the translation’s use of everyday language and homely idioms. Used as they were to the Danish version, they considered a vernacularization, also in stylistic register, close to a sacrilegeous disrespect for Holy Writ.

Schrøter was inspired by a sense of practicality that belonged to the prior, Enlightenment era. Strong-minded and uncowed by criticism, he proposed the possibility of further translations to the Danish Bible Society, and took issue with Rasmus Rask’s Færøsk Sproglære (“Faroese grammar”, 1811) for arguing that Faroese was an Icelandic dialect.

A complete translation of the New Testament from the Greek was undertaken by the clergyman Jákup Dahl (1878–1944). Instalments appeared as pamphlets between 1923 and 1936; a full version came out in 1937. Dahl had earlier translated the book of Psalms (1921), Luther’s Catechism (1922), and some books of sermons for the use of parish clerks. The priest and travel writer Kristian Osvald Viderø (1906–1991) continued Dahl’s work after his death, and finished the translation of the Bible. It was published by the established Church in 1961.

The missionary Victor Danielsen also translated the New Testament into Faroese. This translation was published in March 1937, a few weeks before Dahl’s officially endorsed version. Danielsen proceeded to translate the Old Testament, which he completed by 1939; but his version (based as it was on other translations) never received the same standing and endorsement as the Dahl/Viderø one.