The Gospel of John in Nenets with audio CD
January 15, 2015

At the end of 2014, IBT published the Nenets translation of the Gospel of John. The Nenets are an indigenous people of the far north of Russia on the Arctic Ocean who number about 45,000 and speak a Samoyedic language.

John's Gospel was originally intended to be published as part of the upcoming Nenets edition of the Four Gospels. However, at the Festival of Northern Peoples in March 2014, our translators received many requests for its earlier publication , and local believers began collecting funds to publish it as a separate edition. IBT readily agreed to support their initiative.The new book comes with an audio recording of the text read by a native speaker of Nenets, as did the previously published IBT editions – Mark (2010) and Stories about Jesus Christ (2011). Larisa Okotetto, a well-known Nenets author and television announcer, recorded the Gospel of John in Salekhard, the capital city of the Nenets district. Nenets speakers recognize and esteem her as one who combines a high level of professionalism with a tremendous love and respect for her native culture and language.

The text of John was translated by IBT workers Tatyana Lar, an internationally renowned Nenets singer, Maria Barmich, a professor of the Nenets language, and Eunsub Song, a South Korean national who has devoted the past 15 years to studying the Nenets language and culture and assisting in the Bible translation project. Field testing of the translated text has shown  that the translation is well understood by native speakers of Nenets.