Translation Landscape

Existing Persian Bible translations

The Tarjome Ghadeem (Old Persian Version, 1895) and Mojdeh (Today’s Persian Version, later 20th century) are the dominant Persian Bible translations in circulation among Persian-speaking Christians and house-church believers. This Language Package follows their precedent for established terms (عیسی، خداوند، مسیح، پسر خدا) rather than introducing new renderings.

Where existing translations fall short for this curriculum

• The Hezare No controversy: the Hezare No (New Millennium) Persian New Testament, published to make the text more approachable for Muslim-background readers, softened several theologically loaded phrases — most notably rendering “Son of God” closer to “God’s Chosen One” — and provoked significant, well-documented backlash within Iranian Protestant and house-church circles, many of which continued using Tarjome Ghadeem/Mojdeh specifically to avoid this dilution. This Language Package takes a clear position in that live debate: it follows the unsoftened precedent.
• No settled glossary bridging Shia-specific categories: existing Persian Bible translations render individual terms but do not systematically address how Shia-specific categories (Imamate, Karbala intercession, the Mahdi) interact with NT doctrine. This Language Package’s translation_memory.json and doctrine_risk_registry.json fill that gap for this curriculum.
• Doctrinal precision vs. readability trade-offs: Bible translations optimized for devotional reading do not explain, for example, why فیض (grace) must be corrected away from its Illuminationist-philosophical “emanation” sense — a Bible study curriculum needs to be more explicit than a Bible translation can be.

Readiness assessment

Persian occupies a middle position in this pipeline’s readiness spectrum: unlike Hindi or Arabic, it lacks a continuous centuries-old native Christian theological tradition (Persia’s ancient Church of the East heritage did not persist into the modern era), but unlike newer-translation-tradition languages it does have two established, broadly accepted 19th-20th century Bible translations (Tarjome Ghadeem, Mojdeh) and a real, live, and instructive translation controversy (Hezare No) to learn from. The translation task here is disciplined adherence to the pre-Hezare-No precedent, informed by explicit awareness of Shia-specific doctrinal risk.