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.
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