When Norwegian missionary Hans Egede (1686–1758) brought Christianity to Greenland in 1721, it was mandated by law that everybody in the Danish-Norwegian empire (existing 1380–1814) should learn to read from catechism primers containing the main parts of Martin Luther’s Small Catechism. This is why Luther’s catechism was crucial in Hans Egede’s efforts to create and teach a written Greenlandic language. In this essay, the earliest Greenlandic writings are reviewed and contrasted with the eighteenth-century pre-Christian oral tradition in West Greenland as we know it from fragments recorded by contemporary writers, primarily missionaries. In the light of the ensuing catechetical tradition, examples are given of how key concepts in the Ten Commandments and the Apostolic Creed were rendered in Greenlandic. In less than a century, a hunter-gatherer people with a purely oral culture and an imagined world dominated by immanent divine forces was transformed into a Christian people.