Within the framework of the Altaic Studies Doctoral program, I examine interactions and influences among people, languages, and religions. During its history, different nations and religions were present in the territory of Mongolia, resulting in a very colorful and vivid cultural life. The religious tolerance of the nomads has a long tradition. The Mongol Empire was characterized by the peaceful co-existence of religions. Christianity has been present there since the 6th–7th centuries, as Nestorian Christians sent missionaries to Inner Asia.

In my paper, I intend to give an overview of the comparison of early Mongolian Bible translations in terms of Christian terminology. First, I examine the Gospel of Matthew translated by Isaak Jacob Schmidt in 1815. The translation shows many irregularities that are not conform to the orthographical rules of the Oirat writing system, also called Tod Bichig.

The missionaries had to deal with countless difficulties during Bible translation. It is not negligible that the target audience for whom the translation was made had a completely different cultural and religious background. The greatest difficulty was making the meaning of the original text understandable to people with shamanistic roots who later converted to Buddhism. Later, in the Bible translations of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, they tried to use as few foreign words as possible and to translate the given circumscribed term.

In relation to Christian terminology, some factors cannot be ignored: the translator’s Mongolian knowledge, the native language of the lector, and the language of the source Bible, since the Bible was translated from Hebrew, Greek, Latin, Dutch, English, Chinese, or even Japanese into Mongolian. 

My aim is to collect translations of the Gospel of Matthew in Mongolian published from the 19th century to the present day and compare the terminological changes in these editions. I prioritize the Kalmyk, Buryat, and Halha Mongolian languages.