தமிழ் வேதாகமத்தின் வரலாறு
A short history of how the Holy Bible was translated into Tamil.
Who translated the Bible into Tamil?
The Tamil Bible has one of the oldest translation histories of any Indian language. The first complete New Testament in Tamil was published in 1715 by the German Lutheran missionary Bartholomaeus Ziegenbalg, working from Tranquebar (Tharangambadi) on the Coromandel Coast. Ziegenbalg arrived in South India in 1706 as part of the Danish-Halle Mission and learned Tamil deeply enough to translate the Greek New Testament directly into the language.
From Ziegenbalg to Fabricius
Ziegenbalg's work on the Old Testament was continued after his death in 1719 by Benjamin Schultze, who completed the first full Tamil Bible in 1727. Over the next decades the translation was revised by Lutheran and Anglican missionaries, most notably Johann Philipp Fabricius, whose 1777 edition became the standard Tamil Bible for nearly a century and shaped Tamil Christian vocabulary that is still in use today.
The Union Version
In the nineteenth century, scholars including Peter Percival and Henry Bower revised the Tamil Scriptures in cooperation with the Bible societies. Their work was consolidated into the Tamil Union Version, first published in 1871 and revised in 1957 by the Bible Society of India. The Union Version remains the most widely read Tamil Bible among Protestant churches today, and is the translation served on this site.
Modern translations
- Tamil OV (Old Version / Union) — The classical literary translation traceable to Fabricius and the 1871 revision.
- Tamil New Translation (TNT) — A modern dynamic translation published by the Bible Society of India in 1995.
- Tamil Common Bible (TOV / RCL) — An ecumenical edition jointly used by Catholic and Protestant readers.
Why this matters
Few languages outside Europe have continuous Bible translation work stretching back more than three hundred years. The Tamil Bible has shaped Tamil prose, education, and Christian worship across Tamil Nadu, Sri Lanka, Malaysia, Singapore, and the wider diaspora. Every chapter on this site is part of that long and living tradition.