Canon Theologian the Reverend Dr John Holdsworth writes: October 19th, the lectionary tells us, is a day that we celebrate Henry Martyn. I suspect that the day went unremarked for the most part, but he has a special connection with our Province and points us to an important role within the history of Christian evangelism that we rarely recognise.
Martyn was born in Truro, Cornwall. His father was a merchant and so they could afford to send him to Truro Grammar School where he showed the academic prowess that took him to St John’s College Cambridge. There he was greatly influenced by one of the great evangelical clergy of the day, Charles Simeon, and he decided as a result that he would abandon his ambition of becoming a lawyer in favour of being a missionary. And so he became ordained with that in mind in 1803. However, a family financial crisis meant that he had to adjust his plans, and relinquishing the independence he had anticipated, took a job as Chaplain in the East India Company.
The voyage there took ten months and there are many accounts of his exercise of ministry on board. He appears to have been a particularly fiery preacher. One sailor is said to have remarked, “Mr Martyn send us to Hell every Sunday.” Having arrived in India, he found himself ministering primarily to European expats. Martyn was drawn to the native population and included them in his services and ministry in a way that alarmed some of his English members. There was a constant fear of insurrection, and it was forbidden, when Indians were present, to say the Magnificat which was thought to encourage revolutionary aspirations with its talk of bringing down the mighty from their thrones.
But Martyn served the Indian population in a way that his intellect allowed—by translating the New Testament into the version of Hindustani we know as Urdu, as well as into Arabic and Persian (aka Farsi). Following advice from his mentor, Charles Simeon, he wanted to be able to reach the leaders and thinkers of Indian society in their own language. He set up schools for the children and in his journals he wrote, “I learned that the power of gentleness is irresistible and also that these men are not fools. Clearness of reasoning is not confined to Europe.”
Frustrated by the constraints of the East India Company, he decided to move to Persia, i.e. modern-day Iran, so that he could check his translation into Farsi against usage there; hence our interest in him in the Province, which includes the Diocese of Iran. He arrived in Persia in 1811 and spent the better part of a year in Isfahan, reportedly the first Protestant missionary to live in Persia. Unfortunately, he had only a year to live, and he died at the age of 31 of TB, but with a fabulous legacy of translation behind him.
Most biographical accounts of Martyn’s life make reference to his love for a woman named Lydia whom he wanted to marry. She had turned him down before he left for India, but he had hopes of reviving the relationship and apparently intended to return to England with that in mind, from Persia via Arabia, where he wanted to check his translation into that language as well. He wrote many letters to her which are extant. His death thus seems doubly sad.
His story points us not only to a pioneer of evangelism through making the scriptures accessible to many more people in their own language, but also to the more general craft of translation. And so the day gives us a shout-out for translators.
The story of the translation of the Bible is a fascinating one and one that we normally take for granted. From the earliest times missionaries translated the Bible into other languages and some even had to invent an alphabet to do so, with languages that were completely aural up to that point. St Cyril is one example, and Cyrillic script is still the alphabet in use by millions of people.
When it comes to translations of the Greek text into English, early translations into other languages are one of the sources that translators use to ascertain what the original Greek text looked like. A student once asked me where the originals of the New Testament were kept. Of course, there are no such originals available to us. Modern translators rely for a translatable Greek text on a whole variety of sources, including some much later Greek texts, scraps of text on ancient papyri, reports of early sermons and academic works that quote scripture, and early translations. Notable among them are the Syriac translation (The Peshitta) and the Armenian translation, sometimes known as the ‘Queen of the Translations.’ There were translations into Persian dating from the 4th and 5th centuries, but only fragments of them remained.
It is good to remember pioneer translators. It is good also to recall the place of the Bible in mission and evangelism. Missionaries like Henry Martyn believed that bringing the Christian faith involved bringing the book, the record, the rationale. Nowadays that can often be at least partially replaced by a spirituality uninformed by the Bible. However, that in turn reminds us that the Bible does not speak for itself and those who think it does are more of a problem than an asset. The Bible also needs commentators and interpreters, but they need translators to be able to start that task. They may not necessarily take us to Hell every Sunday, but they are also part of the Christian economy.
Almighty God
Who by your Holy Spirit gave Henry Martyn a longing to tell the good news of Christ,
and skill to translate the scriptures;
By the same Spirit give us grace to offer you our gifts, wherever you may lead, at whatever the cost.
Through Jesus Christ our Lord who is alive and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit; one God now and for ever.
Amen.
(Image credit: Wikipedia)
