Perhaps we should recognize that the first chapters of Genesis describe "the childhood of mankind" not in the language of modern textbooks, but in the language of poetic tales, which were the only words used to talk about such things thousands of years ago? This does not mean that all these tales are fiction, they are simply arranged somewhat differently than our textbooks. And let science remain science, and faith remains faith, they are not really enemies of each other.

16. The First Tuvan Bible

The Republic of Tuva, or Tuva, as we are more accustomed to say, is also part of Russia, although it is hard to believe when you cross its border from the Krasnoyarsk Territory. Immediately after the Sayan Mountains, the Siberian taiga gradually recedes, the traveler is surrounded by low hills, behind which lies the steppe, as if descended from the Mongolian canvases of Roerich. Although the language of the Tuvans belongs to the Turkic group, Tuva historically belonged to the Mongol civilization. Until the beginning of the 20th century, it was part of the Manchu Empire, but after the Chinese revolution, in 1914, it became a protectorate of Russia, and became part of the USSR only in 1944. Their traditional religion combines Lamaist Buddhism and shamanism, while the Tibetan variety of Buddhism came to these parts from Mongolia only a few centuries ago. In the center of the capital of Tuva, the city of Kyzyl (founded in 1914 as Belotsarsk), there are a Buddhist sanctuary-khure, a shamanic yurt for conducting appropriate rituals and... a monument to the Red partisans of the Civil War. A very eloquent combination, but all these religions and ideologies coexist quite peacefully, because they, in fact, have nothing to share on the banks of the Yenisei.

Christianity came to Tuva quite recently. The Orthodox mission in these parts existed at the beginning of the 20th century, but, unfortunately, it did not last long for obvious reasons. However, since 1929 and to this day, the Trinity Church, built by Russian colonists of the "self-governing labor colony", has been operating continuously in Kyzyl. There are several other churches in the republic, but still there are very few of them, although at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries Russian settlers appeared here, among whom there were many Old Believers. But they came to the Uriankhai region, as these lands were then called, in search of freedom and a better life, and not at all to educate the local population, with whom the Russians did not mix much. To this day, they are a minority even in the capital of the republic, and in rural areas they are practically non-existent, except in Old Believer villages...

Christian missionaries came to these lands again in the early 1990s: they were Protestants from Russia, Ukraine, America and Korea, who founded several communities. There are also Orthodox Christians among the Tuvans, but they are few and are, for the most part, people who have adopted Russian culture or, at least, are well acquainted with it. Fellow tribesmen, as a rule, look askance at them: they abandoned paternal customs, began to worship the "Russian God", although in general the Tuvans are quite tolerant, there are practically no obvious conflicts on religious grounds here.

It is difficult for us to imagine to what extent the world of the Tuvans is different from ours: a generation or two ago, these people led a nomadic life in yurts, as in the days of Genghis Khan, and some of today's townspeople had just such a childhood, for example, Nikolai Kuular, whom we will talk about later. These people, in fact, face a choice: to keep their traditional culture intact by living in yurts, or to join the world civilization in cities. And the choice, as a rule, has already been made for each of them: a child brought up in a boarding school will not live in tents, as in the time of Abraham, will not make sacrifices to the spirits of mountains and streams... Will he lose his self-identity? This is the main question for many.

This summer, the first complete translation of the Bible into the Tuvan language will be published. It is impossible to overestimate its importance for Christian mission: now any Tuvan, taking this text in his hands, will see how unfair the words about the "Russian God" are. Moreover, reading about the same Abraham, he will be able to make sure that he had much more in common with the Tuvans than with the Russians, which means that it is not shameful for the Tuvans to follow the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. But it's not just about the mission. One of the questions that Tuvan society faces now sounds something like this: is Tuvan Christianity possible? Not Russian Christianity, adopted by the Russified Tuvans, but its local version?

Different people answered this question in different ways. When in 1990 an employee of the Institute for Bible Translation in Moscow (IBT) came to the city of Kyzyl, he suggested that a well-known ethnographer and writer in the republic begin translating the Bible. He refused. The fact is that he was also a practicing shaman, and one of the main ones, but the Institute simply did not know about this side of his activities. At the same time, the shaman did not object to the very idea of such a translation and recommended his distant relative (and everyone in Tuva remembers who belongs to which family) Nikolai Kuular. He was a writer and translator of classical Russian literature into the Tuvan language, while he was a non-believer.

Nikolai agreed to this work. It was very important for him that the Tuvan reader had access to the great treasure of world culture in his native language. And this is a fairly common picture for such translation projects: not everyone who participates in them is Christian, and it would be difficult to find Christians who have the proper qualifications. In the same 1990s, a group of believers published a translation of several Bible books into the Tuvan language, but it did not pass practically any serious verification and therefore looked simply like a literal version of the Russian Synodal text. At first, Nicholas did not even imagine how difficult and long the path ahead of him was, he was then going to translate the Bible alone in a few years...

The work took almost two decades, and Nikolai was not the only one who participated in it. Other translators were Eduard Mizhit, Maria Kuzhuget and Sailykmaa Kombu; the translation was checked by Vitaly Voynov, Lyudmila Mizhit, Tatyana Kandaurova, Elena Samba and Sergey Sychev. These are Tuvans and Russians; Buddhists, Protestants and Orthodox. It is worth talking in detail about Vitaly Voynov, an American of Russian origin. He was born in Leningrad but grew up in New York. While still in America, he began to study the Tuvan language, felt called to work among this people, and as a result, he spent eight years, beginning in 1999, in Kyzyl, where he not only completed a theological examination of most of the Tuvan Bible, but also met his wife, Oksana. Four of their five (at the moment) children were born there.

After all, the world of biblical translation is an amazing world. Where else could Vitaly, who grew up among skyscrapers, and Nikolai, who grew up in a yurt, meet and not just meet, but successfully work for ten years in the same team?

The final verification of the New Testament was carried out by David Clark, an Englishman consultant to the United Bible Societies, an older colleague and friend of mine, from whom I learned a great deal. And the Old Testament fell to my lot. By the end of the work, I had a strong feeling that the team had reached a level where they might need my hint in some controversial case, which they themselves would point out, but a complete check, simply necessary in many other projects, is completely unnecessary.

It should be noted separately that the Tuvan group sometimes invited representatives of local Christians to their working meetings. Ultimately, they will be the main readership, and it was very important for the translators to explain and demonstrate in practice the principles of their work. Local Christians often argued among themselves, for example, about how to say "Holy Spirit" or "prayer" in Tuvan, and were surprised to see that in translation it is not always possible to find a single, the most correct solution: each option has strengths and weaknesses and may not suit someone. I think that such meetings and discussions were a wise and important decision for the future of the Tuvan Bible.

The Tuvan New Testament was printed in 2001, and at the same time a translation of the "Bible for Children" into Tuvan was published. Some books (but by no means all) from the Old Testament were published in trial editions in the 2000s, and by 2008 the draft of the last Old Testament book was completed. But the work did not end there: it was necessary to check the entire translation for the consistency of the use of key terms and proper names, to make corrections to the translation of the New Testament in accordance with the decisions made on the Old Testament, and other procedures for preparing the book for publication, for example, the preparation of cross-references to parallel passages.