A portion of the Bible, Matthew's gospel, was first translated into Tlingit of Alaska by Ivan Nadezhdin of the Russian Orthodox Church in 1859. Although used in Churches, this was never published. According to Dr. Michael Krauss it is "a hardly readable, slavishly literal translation, and with a writing system so faulty that the spread of literacy would have been severely impeded even if there had been good translations". Nadezhdin also translated the sections from John's gospel that were used for Orthodox Easter liturgy.