'musei || ejen Isus Heristos-i tutabuha ice hese. || jai debtelin'
[our] || [Lord] [Jesus Christ]['s] [left behind] [new] [testament] || [second] [chapter]
The New Testament of Our Lord Jesus Christ

published serially in 1822, and completed whole NT in 1835

translated into the Manchu language by Stepan Vaciliyevich Lipovtsov

A pdf scan of the original Manchu copy of the Holy Gospel according to St Mark [enduringge evanggelium Marha-i ulaha songqui] located at the state library in Irkustk diocese has been contributed by Fr Dionisy Pozdnyaev and converted into jpeg format.

Note that in the pdf scan, the extra page that is at the head of the pdf file is p.39 (right leaf) and so belongs between p.79 and p.80 of the pdf. The Manchu New Testament was published in brief portions from 1822 and as a complete book from 1835 and again in Shanghai in 1929. Two copies of this work are kept in the Library of Congress (B-a18, B-a19) as well as six copies of the 1835 edition (B-a12 to B-a17).

The pdf also does not contain any publication date. Most Manchu, Mongolian and Chinese works place the date of publication on the very last pages before the end cover. The page numbers run sequentially from 1 to 39, but numbered in the Manchu style where a page is taken to mean two open pages thus every page has a left and a right leaf. The manuscript is textually complete as the last word on the last page (39/80) is 'ameng', but a small tear appears at the bottom-right of p.39/80 which suggests that the back cover is missing. This may be an original 1822 serial or a later offprint of one gospel from the complete NT that appeared in 1835.

As to the author, this is the translation by Липовцов Степан Васильевич [Stepan Vaciliyevich Lipovtsov] (1770-1841) who learned Manchu after journeying to Beijing in 1794 as a member of the eighth Russian Ecclesiastical Mission. He was commissioned by the London based British and Foreign Bible Society to produce a translation of the New Testament in Manchu and it was his translation that was published from 1822 onwards, first as serials and then (when the work was finished) as a complete New Testament. A Jesuit scholar named P. Louis de Poirot translated the Old Testament into Manchu around the same time but it was never published (however, a copy of this work is still kept at the library of the British and Foreign Bible Society in London).

The English translation and much of the information provided is courtesy of Emyr R. E. Pugh of Lingua Mongolia, coming mostly from the following sources:

  1. Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, Vol. 45, №3. (1982), p. 608
  2. Journal of the American Oriental Society, Vol. 60, №4. (Dec., 1940), pp. 559
  3. manju gisun-i suwaliyata sarasu, xue-yuan chu-ban-shi (2004), p.211
  4. A Profile of The Manchu Language in Ch'ing History, Pamela Kyle Crossley; Evelyn S. Rawski, Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies, Vol. 53, №1. (Jun., 1993), p.89

Volunteers are need to transcribed or OCR the images into electronic text which allows it to be searchable. If you are interested in helping with this initiative or sponsoring other scanning projects from the Irkutsk State Library, please see recent announcement on the OFASC website (http://orthodoxchina.info/ofasc).

with prayers for the health of
Cyprian and Andreea as they grow in Christ together