Bible translations into Sanskrit

Bible in Sanskrit language is among the first wave of Bible translations into Indian languages.

History

Translation work of Bible in Sanskrit language was undertaken by Mr.William Carey soon after his arrival in India as a missionary. He had the conviction that a Sanskrit Bible would be an ideal medium to communicate with the intellectual mass of India. He also believed that Sanskrit Bible would serve as a basis for translating Bible into other Indian vernacular languages. He was greatly helped by the Indian Sanskrit scholars in this endeavour. The texts were translated into Sanskrit from the Greek and Hebrew texts in which Bible was originally written. In 1808, the New Testament in Sanskrit was published and in 1818 the Old Testament in Sanskrit got published as four volumes. These books were published by The Calcutta Baptist Missionaries, Bengal.

John 3:16 ईश्वर इत्थं जगददयत यत् स्वमद्वितीयं तनयं प्राददात् ततो यः कश्चित् तस्मिन् विश्वसिष्यति सोऽविनाश्यः सन् अनन्तायुः प्राप्स्यति।^[1]

Current Status

Though The Calcutta Baptist Missionaries brought our Bible in Sanskrit language with great enthusiasm and expectation, their efforts didn’t pick up much from there. One of the reasons could be influx of Bible Translations in Vernacular languages used by common mass. Even though there were some revisions to the text, the Sanskrit Bible currently remains as a pure academic endeavour and is not in active circulation anymore. There were hardly any major revisions to these Bibles and the hard copy of the originally published Sanskrit Bibles are currently only available in some old western libraries as archives. A copy of Bible in Sanskrit is also reported to be the procession of Kayamkulam palace in Kerala. The Bible Society of India still publishes a version of the New Testament in Sanskrit. The digitized copies of Sanskrit Bible (both The New Testament and four volumes of The Old Testament) are available in archives.org^{[2][3][4][5][6][7]}

Online Versions

With an objective to review the Sanskrit Bible and make it a freely available online Bible, a wiki project by the name SanskritBible.in SanskritBible.in is live. They rely on volunteers to encode the Sanskrit text into Devanagari script based on the digitized copies of the Sanskrit Bible published by The Calcutta Baptist Missionaries. The site has also mentioned revision of the Sanskrit Bible texts as one of its objectives. The Transliteration Works of Gospel of John & Acts of the Apostles are currently being undertaken.

References