Bible translations into Mongolian

In a letter dated from 8 January 1305, Giovanni da Montecorvino wrote that "I have got a competent knowledge of the language and character which is most generally used by the Tartars.

And I have already translated into that language and character the New Testament and the Psalter, and have caused them to be written out in the fairest penmanship they have.

One difficulty with this is that there is scholarly uncertainty whether this translation was into Mongolian or into another language Mongols used in order to relate with other peoples.

Isaak Jakob Schmidt, as a Moravian missionary, is renowned still today as a scholar of Mongolian and Tibetan.

Mongolians have been using this term for Buddha from at least the time of Marco Polo, who mentions it, to today.

Moravian missionaries found it: very mournful and discouraging when the Kalmyk Prince Dschalzen read the Gospel of Matthew in Kalmyk seeing Jesus as their own Buddhist concept saying: This Jesus seems to me to be a Burchan, [Burhan] such as we have likewise in our religion […] In reality, we have but one Burchan (1818: 302).

Missionaries said Kalmyks continually quoted: their Burchans, believing Buddhism showed how a person could become Burhan after death (1797: 197).

The second translation that still exists today of the Bible into Mongolian was the work of Edward Stallybrass and William Swan (missionary) (1791–1866) both of the London Missionary Society (LMS), who translated the Old and then the New Testament into the literary Mongolian language.

The New Testament of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ : translated out of the original Greek into the Mongolian language.

In 1899 the British and Foreign Bible Society agreed to bring out a revised gospel, by David Stenberg (of the Scandinavian Mission) and Mr. Netsegaard (of Urga, today called Ulaanbaatar), based on Swan and Stallybrass, which he found too classical in style to be understood by the common person.

It seems that Stenberg managed to revise into colloquial Urga Mongolian at least Matthew's gospel.

The New Testament of Swan and Stallybrass was revised by Stuart Gunzel together with four Mongolians and 8,000 copies were printed in 1953 by the Hong Kong Bible Society (HKBS).

In 1994 Living Stream Ministry reprinted this, using the Cyrillic script instead of the classical Mongolian, but changing nothing else.

The biggest revision that was done was the substitution of the words "Yehovah Tenger" for the term Burhan.

Another is a dynamic equivalence translation, using the word Deed Tenger, instead of the term Burhan, for God.

The scriptures produced by Bible Society of Mongolia have an important difference from other versions, in that they avoid using Mongolian key terms for God which derive from Buddhism or shamanism.

The New Testament in Mongolian was published on 11 August 1990 by the United Bible Societies in Hong Kong.

There were no books about the Bible or any form of reader helps or commentaries, and no Mongolian Old Testament available.

UBS is in the historic tradition of the British and Foreign Bible Society (BFBS), which had published the nineteenth century work of Swan and Stallybrass.

The products of MUBS have consistently identified God using the widely used and understood term Burhan.

This started work in the late 1970s, and in 1993 published Matthew, Mark and Luke, 1998 the New Testament and whole Bible in 2016, which is from the Biblical languages.

The products of Mongolian Bible Translators Group have consistently identified God using the term Burhan.