New Testament translation restarted after 100 years

KAZAN, Russia — A Bible translation begun in the 19th century and left undeveloped for more than a hundred years has now resumed progress with the help of the Bible Society in Russia (BSR).

The language of the translation is Kreshen, a dialect of Tatar. A volume containing the first books to be translated into Kreshen since before the Russian Revolution – the Letters from James, Peter, John and Jude – was given an official presentation in December at the Kreshen parish church in Kazan, the capital of Tatarstan.

The city was the base of the translation and mission work of the 19th-century Russian Orthodox Church and the parish church is still, in effect, the spiritual centre for the Kreshens of the Volga and Urals regions.

Churches closed

The current group of seven translators includes Father Michael, a rural village priest whose work of translating the Letters of Paul into Kreshen was previously intended for his local community, and a schoolteacher called Maria Nikolaevna, whose extraordinary feeling for her mother tongue makes her a key person in the team.

Their work is co-ordinated by Archpriest Pavel Pavlov, an energetic visionary who is the priest-in-charge of the Kreshen parishes in the city of Kazan. The Institute for Bible Translation, based in Russia but having its headquarters in Sweden, provided a specialist exegete whose role is to compare the translation made into Kreshen from the Russian with the original Greek New Testament.

Training

In his role of Translation Consultant to the project, Dr Simon Crisp, who has recently become the UBS Regional Translations Coordinator for the Europe and Middle East Region, has provided the team with training and technical support.

In view of the persecution the Kreshens have suffered over the past hundred years, participation in the project has a special significance for the BSR and the UBS, according to Dr Crisp.

“Anti-religious propaganda over three generations has taken its toll. Their cultural and religious institutions were all destroyed by the Soviets and then the people came under ethnic pressure from the Tatars.

“At the moment they are really trying to find their way as a community, and having a whole translation of the Scriptures is important to them – both spiritually and also for their sense of being a people. So it is a great honour to support this small Orthodox minority, and to give them the Holy Scriptures in their mother tongue.”

Conference

The presentation of the new volume of Epistles took place during a conference in Kazan on The Ethnic and Confessional Traditions of the Kreshens.

During the conference, Anatoli Rudenko, the Executive Director of the BSR, expressed appreciation that Archbishop Anastasii had informed the Society about the spiritual needs of the Kreshen people. He promised that the four Gospels and the Psalms in Ilminsky’s translation would be reprinted this year.

When the translation of the remaining books has been completed, the BSR will then issue the complete New Testament, which will combine a revised version of the Ilminsky translation with the contemporary work done under the supervision of the BSR.

Meanwhile, the first of many purposes the new translations will serve is in Orthodox Church services. For Dr Crisp this made the project something of a voyage of discovery, because as a UBS consultant he had not been trained to deal with liturgical, church-based projects.

The expression “Coming down from the Father of Lights”, which occurs in the Letter of James, highlighted this. This could be hard to understand but, in the opinion of the translators, it could not be changed because the same expression was fixed in the liturgy.

Rethinking

“This ran counter to UBS philosophy,” he says, “but the Orthodox liturgy is full of quotes from the Scripture – it is profoundly biblical – and if they don’t match it’s going to be confusing. It shows that if we are really serious about serving churches, as our charter says we are, we may have to do some rethinking.”