Adoniram Judson, America’s first foreign missionary
Adoniram Judson Jr. was born to a Congregational minister
in Massachusetts in 1788. As a young
man, while in attendance at Brown University, he met a friend named Jacob Eames
who introduced him to the writings of the new atheistic French philosophies. Breaking his parents’ hearts, he abandoned the
faith he was raised with and embraced his newfound atheism. He made his home in New York where he taught
at a school and wrote math and grammar textbooks for girls’ schools.
Eventually tiring of New York, he decided to set off for
the West. While traveling he came,
utterly exhausted, late one evening to an inn.
Inquiring about a room, Adoniram was told there were none
available. When he pressed the
innkeeper, he was told that they could make room if he was willing to share a
room with a man who was deathly ill. He
readily agreed and the innkeeper hung a sheet to allow for some privacy for
both parties. Tired as he was, Adoniram
was kept up most of the night by the wails of the sick man and the constant rushing
footsteps of his caregivers. It was only
early in the morning that Judson dropped to sleep, in sheer exhaustion.
While settling his debt with the innkeeper the next
morning, Adoniram inquired about his roommate.
The innkeeper replied that the man had sadly died during the night. Judson asked his name and received the reply,
“Jacob Eames.” Hearing the name of his
former friend, the man who had led him away from his faith, shook Adoniram to
the core. If his friend, who supposedly
had all the answers, had died so miserably, what hope was there for him? Judson returned to his faith, enrolled in Andover
Theological Seminary, and decided on a missionary career.
In 1812, two weeks after marriage to Ann Hasseltine,
Judson was commissioned by the Congregational Church and set off for India,
hoping to parallel the missions work of William Carey among the natives there. While en route, though, he did a study on
baptism and came to the conclusion that his denomination’s views on baptism
were incorrect. He came to the conclusion
that a part of the Great Commission (Matthew 28:19-20) included believer’s baptism
(as opposed to the infant baptism of the Congregationalists). When he arrived in Calcutta, both he and Ann
were baptized by immersion.
This new belief would certainly cause an issue with his
sending denomination. The ship,
returning to the United States, carried two letters from Judson. The first was a letter to the Congregational
sending board, resigning his position.
The second was a letter to the newly-formed American Baptist
association, informing them he was available for support. His letter was the impetus for American
Baptists to form their own missions organization and they replied in the
affirmative.
Political upheaval caused by the war of 1812 resulted in
the Judsons’ being forced out of India.
In July of 1813 they moved to Burma, and Ann miscarried her first child en
route on board the ship. Judson knew
Greek, Hebrew, and Latin, in addition to English, but spent a full three years,
twelve hours a day, learning the Burmese language before he was comfortable preaching
to the people – time they spent with minimal contact with the outside world. During this time, their second child also
died at eight months of age.
Judson’s goal was “to preach the Gospel, not anti-Buddhism.” By 1819, five years after arrival, Adoniram
had his first convert. By 1823 there
were 18 believers – after a full ten years of missions labor. He had completed by this time a Burmese Grammar
and had begun to translate the Bible into Burmese. Adoniram requested and was eventually sent a
printing press, with which he printed copies of the Gospel of Matthew and
Christian tracts. Ann had picked up the
language as well as her husband, perhaps better, and had developed loving
friendships with many of the local women.
There was a race of people in Burma called the Karen. They were animistic peasants and were
considered to be an inferior people by other Burmese. It was said, “You can teach a buffalo, but
not a Karen.” Adoniram took a young
Karen with a criminal record under his wing and, after nearly a year of
teaching and gentle instruction, this young man named Ko Tha Byu came to faith. As Adoniram preached in different areas, Ko
Tha Byu would speak to the peasant Karen. As a result of the young man’s preaching,
entire families and villages of Karen came to faith, and they later became a
dynamic source of missionaries reaching other Burmese. The number of Karen Christians today number
in the hundreds of thousands.
The British went to war with the Burmese in 1826. As a Westerner, Adoniram was imprisoned with
other Western men in brutal conditions.
Often not fed, constantly shackled in irons, and sometimes suspended by
his feet in chains with only his head and shoulders touching the ground, he suffered
miserably for 21 months. Ann was the
model of supreme courage during this time.
As a Western woman, alone in a country at war with the West, she gave
birth to her third child and went from official to official pleading for her husband’s
release, and visiting him when she was able.
Unfortunately, soon after his release, Ann died from her exertions, and
their child died six months later. Several
months later, the Burmese government compelled him to serve as translator for
them with the victorious British to negotiate terms of their defeat.
For a year after Ann’s death, Adoniram suffered from a
crippling depression. Fellow
missionaries, George and Sarah Boardman, lifted his spirits and he continued and
eventually completed his translation work of the Bible into Burmese – a translation
still in use today. He first published
it in 1835, after 24 years of work.
That same year, 1835, Adoniram married Sarah Boardman,
who had become widowed. They had eight
children, five of whom survived to adulthood.
In 1845, Sarah took ill and doctors prescribed rest and a trip
home. She died in route.
Upon his return to America, Adoniram Judson was
unexpectedly treated as a celebrity. He toured
the Eastern United States, speaking and raising money for foreign
missions. His own illness kept him from
speaking loudly, so he needed an “Aaron” to speak for him. He found he had difficulty conversing in
English, since so much of his life was invested in the Burmese language.
While in the United States, he married for the third
time, to a poet named Emily Chubbuck, 29 years his junior. They returned to the mission field in 1846,
where Adoniram died in 1861.
Judson’s legacy is multi-faceted. His impetus led to the creation of the
American Baptist Missionary Society, the predecessor of our own Southern Baptist
International Missions Board (IMB). He
published the first Burmese Bible, which remains the most widely read Bible in
that language today. Ann wrote many
letters about missions life which inspired many generations of women to go into
missions themselves.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adoniram_Judson
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emily_Chubbuck
Bailey, Faith, Adoniram Judson, Moody Press, 1955.
McGavran, Donald A., The Bridges of God, in Perspectives
on the World Christian Movement, A Reader, 2009.
