Tyvan Gospel

(Religious buildings in Tyva, from Новые Исследованые Тувы)

This only tangentially related to Mongolian things, but it caught my eye and I had a free moment: The Holy Bible has been translated into Tyvan!

That only took a few hundred years.

Personally, as a Christian, I think this is great. However, I'm worried by a few things in that article.

Firstly, this translation exists under the auspices of the Russian Academy of Sciences and the Tyvan Ministry of Culture. I'm a bit uneasy about state institutions taking part in religious endeavors. Thomas Jefferson agrees with me on that one. Why should the State be doing the Church's work for them? It's really easy to make mistakes this way. This can only fuel speculation that the Russian Church and State are too close. I don't have a solid opinion on that point, but church-state collaboration on a Bible translation makes me nervous.

Secondly, the article quotes the Moscow Patriarchate website as saying "of the languages of the peoples of Russia, other than Russian [the Bible exists] only in Chuvash and Tyvan. I'm think the Patriarchate and I have a very different understanding of "the peoples of Russia." Of the many peoples of Russia, at least Ukrainians, Armenians, Germans (famously), Belarusians, and many others have had complete Bible translations for ages. Even the Ossetians have one, though that one was done by Jehova's witnesses, so I guess the Patriarchate won't acknowledge it. The Buryat-Mongols got one in 1840, though it may have disappeared. Still, that the Patriarchate chooses to ignore these other complete Bible translations could be significant. I'll decline to speculate on how, for now.