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Scottish Bible Society (SBS), founded in 1809 as the Edinburgh Bible Society, amalgamated in 1861 with the Glasgow Bible Society to form the National Bible Society of Scotland, is a Scottish Christian charity that exists to make the Bible available throughout the world.
Bible translations into Chinese include translations of the whole or parts of the Bible into any of the levels and varieties of the Chinese language. The first translations may have been made as early as the 7th century AD, but the first printed translations appeared only in the nineteenth century. Progress on a modern translation was encumbered by denominational rivalries, theological clashes, linguistic disputes, and practical challenges at least until the publication of the Protestant Chinese Union Version in 1919, which became the basis of standard versions in use today.
Johannes Avetaranian, born Muhammad Shukri, was, according to his autobiography, a Turkish descendant of the Islamic prophet Muhammad. Avetaranian was originally a mullah in Turkey who converted from Islam to Christianity, and later became a missionary for the Swedish Mission Covenant Church in Southern Xinjiang (1892–1938). He translated the New Testament into the Uyghur language. He preached Christianity in Xinjiang and at a Swedish Protestant mission. He died in 1919, aged 58, in Wiesbaden.
The Ili Rebellion was a Uyghur separatist movement backed by the Soviet Union against the Kuomintang government of the Republic of China in 1944. After the start of the rebellion, the rebels established the Provisional Government of the Second East Turkestan Republic in 1944. The Ili Rebellion was the start of the East Turkistan National Liberation Revolution also known as the Three Districts Revolution, which lasted from 1944 to 1949.
The complete Bible has been translated into three of the dialects of Inupiat language, the New Testament in two more and portions in another.
The royal Tetraevangelia of Ivan Alexander is an illuminated manuscript Gospel Book in middle Bulgarian, prepared and illustrated in 1355–1356 for Tsar Ivan Alexander of the Second Bulgarian Empire. The manuscript is regarded as one of the most important manuscripts of medieval Bulgarian culture. The manuscript, now in the British Library, contains the text of the Four Gospels illustrated with 366 miniatures and consists of 286 parchment folios, 33 by 24.3 cm in size.
The earliest preserved translation of the Bible into the Mongolian language dates to 1827, but there is a written record of what may perhaps have been a translation existing as early as 1305. Since 1827, numerous other translations have been made.
Work on translation of the Bible into the Kazakh language began with the work of Charles Fraser of the Scottish Missionary Society. Fraser's translation of Matthew was published in 1818, and the New Testament in 1820 by the Russian Bible Society. J. M. E. Gottwald, a professor at Kazan University, revised it, and this was published in 1880 by the British and Foreign Bible Society in Kazan, and it was republished in 1887, and 1910. George W. Hunter, of the China Inland Mission in Ürümqi, considered this translation to be "a good translation, into Astrahan-Turki", he does not seem to have considered it to be Kazakh. Darlow and Moule say that it was intended for Kyrgyz in the neighbourhood of Orenburg, and the language was sometimes called "Orenburg Tatar". According to Rev. W. Nicholson of the Royal Asiatic Society in St Petersburg this translation was intended for "The Kirghese hordes—Great, Little, and Middle, as they are called—[who] occupy various regions in Southern Siberia, Central Asia, and west of the Caspian Sea." George A. King says Fraser's translation was into the language of the "Western Kirghiz or Kirghiz-Kazak, though they disown the name Kirghiz".
Bible translations into Persian have been made since the fourth or fifth century, although few early manuscripts survive. There are both Jewish and Christian translations from the Middle Ages. Complete translations of the Hebrew Bible and Greek New Testament from original languages were first made in the 19th century by Protestant missionaries.
Bible translations in Norway date back to the late 13th century. Since the first spread of Christianity in Norway, numerous translations of the Bible have been published. Translations have appeared in several of the official languages that Norway has had throughout its history, including editions in Old Norse, Danish, and both current standard forms Nynorsk and Bokmål.
Biblical translations into the indigenous languages of North and South America have been produced since the 16th century.
The Bible, or portions of it, have been translated into over 1,000 languages of Africa. Many of these are indexed by the Forum of Bible Agencies, Find.Bible site and available online in text and audio form, as print on demand versions, or through churches and book sellers. This effort continues. Not all are (yet) listed below.
The Bible has been translated into many of the languages of China besides Chinese. These include major minority languages with their own literary history, including Korean, Mongolian, Tibetan, Kazakh, Kyrgyz, Russian and Uyghur. The other languages of China are mainly tribal languages, mainly spoken in Yunnan in Southwest China.
Traditionally Russia used the Old Church Slavonic language and Slavonic Bible, and in the modern era Bible translations into Russian. The minority languages of Russia usually have a much more recent history, many of them having been commissioned or updated by the Institute for Bible Translation.
The New Testament was first published in Scottish Gaelic in 1767 and the whole Bible was first published in 1801. Prior to these, Gaels in Scotland had used translations into Irish.
The Hakka Bible: Today's Taiwan Hakka Version (TTHV), is the most recent revised Hakka language translation of the Bible used by Hakka Protestants in Taiwan and overseas Hakka communities. Work on the translation commenced in 1984 with the TTHV New Testament & Psalms completed in 1993, Proverbs was published separately in 1995. The entire Bible was made available on April 11, 2012 at the Presbyterian Church in Taiwan's annual General Assembly meeting. An ecumenical dedication and thanksgiving ceremony was held on April 22, 2012 at the National Chiao Tung University in Hsinchu with over 1,200 Hakka Christians in attendance.
Christianity is a minority religion in the Xinjiang region of the People's Republic of China. The dominant ethnic group, the Uyghur, are predominantly Muslim and very few are known to be Christian. Christianity in Xinjiang is the religion of 1% of the population according to the Chinese General Social Survey of 2009.
Portions of the Bible were translated into the Sogdian language in the 9th and 10th centuries. All surviving manuscripts are incomplete Christian liturgical texts, intended for reading on Sundays and holy days. It is unknown if a whole translation of any single book of the Bible was made, although the text known as C13 may be a fragment of a complete Gospel of Matthew. All but one text are written in Syriac script; only a few pages of the Book of Psalms written in Sogdian script are extant.
The Delegates' Version was a significant translation of the Bible into Chinese produced by a committee of Protestant missionaries in classical, literary Chinese. The New Testament was completed in 1850, and published by the British and Foreign Bible Society in 1852. Two separate Old Testament translations were produced, one published by the British and Foreign Bible Society in 1854 and in a single volume in 1858, whereas another was published by the American Bible Society in 1863.
References
- ↑ The American Asian Review -1987 Volume 5 p.17 "As an example of Nestorian Uyghur writing I will give a translation of a Uyghur fragment of the Bible. It consists of two pages in the Old Uyghur script, found in Bulayiq by the Second Prussian Turfan Expedition in 1905 and published by F.W. K. ..."
- ↑ Dickens, M., 2009, “Multilingual Christian manuscripts from Turfan”, Journal of the Canadian Society for Syriac Studies 9, 22-42.
- ↑ Witek, John. “Christianity in China: Universal Teaching from the West.” In China and Christianity: Burdened Past, Hopeful Future, ed. Stephen Uhalley, Jr. and Xiaoxin Wu, 2001, p. 16.
- ↑ Sutin, Lawrence. All is change: the two-thousand-year journey of buddhism to the west, 2006, pp. 56-7.
- ↑ Yu, Suee Yan (2021-03-10), Yeo, K. K (ed.), "Bible Translations for Ethnic Minority Groups in China", The Oxford Handbook of the Bible in China, Oxford University Press, pp. 128–146, doi:10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190909796.013.32, ISBN 978-0-19-090979-6 , retrieved 2021-10-23
- ↑ Book of a Thousand Tongues