Thursday, October 16, 2025

It is the 16th of October 2025. Welcome to the Christian History Almanac, brought to you by 1517 at 1517.org; I’m Dan van Voorhis.

There is something like a Mount Rushmore of modern missionaries- Carey and Judson to the East, Brainerd amongst Native Americans, and we could add the likes of Hudson Taylor and David Livingston, whose stories inspired the coming century of world missions that would change the face of global Christianity.  

But today we remember a less heralded, but important, missionary whose impressive output of Bible translations belies his relatively short life.

He was Henry Martyn (with a ‘y’… well, two ‘y’s- one at the end of Henry and the other in ‘Martyn’ where you might expect an I).

He was born in 1781 in Truro, in Cornwall, in the deep south west of England. His mother died when he was still a newborn, and he was raised, along with his sister (or sisters), by his father, who carved out a decently comfortable life as a clerk for a mine agent. Henry attempted to attend Oxford but was rebuffed; he settled for Cambridge and there showed himself to be something of a prodigy. He earned the top prize in Mathematics and considered studying law. Despite what he considered something of a prodigal season, he was struck at Cambridge, in 1802, listening to a sermon from Charles Simeon, one of the preeminent evangelicals in the Anglican Church. From Simeon’s piety and hearing about the tales of Carey and Brainerd, Martyn decided to devote his life to ministry.

By 1803, Henry was ordained and served under Simeon in Cambridge as he worked out his plan to go into the service of the Church Mission Society- a new missions group developed with help from Simeon and William Wilberforce.

Tragedy struck soon after, and Henry’s father died suddenly without having secured an inheritance. Knowing that he could not support his sister as a missionary, he resolved to find adjacent work by which he could support his sister and work in missions. He found himself as a chaplain for the British East India Company. In 1805, he set out on a nearly year-long trip to Calcutta and on the trip studied Urdu and Bengali. He would serve as a chaplain in India through 1810.

In this new age of confrontation between Christianity and both Hinduism and Islam, Martyn was reticent to engage in wholly apologetic or polemic approaches to evangelism. That is, he was less interested in debating than in providing resources by which one could discover Biblical truths in one's own language. As he was related to the Clapham Sect- the “low church” Evangelical Anglicans, he had a faith in the power of the Scriptures alone to convert and made it his life’s work to translate the Scriptures into three foreign, but related languages: Urdu, Persian, and Arabic.

His time as a chaplain afforded him the time for study and translation as well as access to others across the Middle East with whom he worked in committee. One of his biographers noted that his home was a constant hive of activity from translators and scholars, Christian and otherwise. He was called the “black clergyman” because he had native Indians into his home as well.

His diligence in working with native speakers and other scholars led to one of the more remarkable three-year runs in modern translation history. Unfortunately, this three-year span would be posthumous. Even before his first trip East, his friends were concerned about his frail health. Even the life of a scholar (albeit in India in the early 19th century) took its toll, and by 1810, Henry’s doctors required him to move to a different climate. He decided he would take the occasion to travel by sea to Persia for help on a Persian New Testament and then on horseback into Arabia for work on an Arabic New Testament.

It was while on horseback on his way to Istanbul, on this the 16th of October in 1812, that Martyn would die of Tuberculosis. He would be buried by the Armenian Christians in a foreign land, leading to Thomas Babington Macaulay’s Epitaph for him:

Here Martyn lies. In Manhood's early bloom
The Christian Hero finds a Pagan tomb.

Religion, sorrowing o'er her favourite son,

Points to the glorious trophies that he won.

Eternal trophies! not with carnage red,

Not stained with tears by hapless captives shed,

But trophies of the Cross! for that dear name,

Through every form of danger, death, and shame,

Onward he journeyed to a happier shore,

Where danger, death, and shame assault no more.

His Urdu New Testament was published in 1814, his Persian New Testament in 1815, and his Arabic New Testament was published in 1816. A truly remarkable output for a life cut short- Henry Martyn, born in 1781, died on this day in 1812- he was 31 years old.

The Last word for today comes from the daily lectionary and another appropriate text- from Acts 17

22 Paul then stood up in the meeting of the Areopagus and said: “People of Athens! I see that in every way you are very religious. 23 For as I walked around and looked carefully at your objects of worship, I even found an altar with this inscription: to an unknown god. So you are ignorant of the very thing you worship—and this is what I am going to proclaim to you.

24 “The God who made the world and everything in it is the Lord of heaven and earth and does not live in temples built by human hands. 25 And he is not served by human hands, as if he needed anything. Rather, he himself gives everyone life and breath and everything else. 26 From one man he made all the nations, that they should inhabit the whole earth; and he marked out their appointed times in history and the boundaries of their lands. 27 God did this so that they would seek him and perhaps reach out for him and find him, though he is not far from any one of us. 28 ‘For in him we live and move and have our being.’ As some of your own poets have said, ‘We are his offspring.’

This has been the Christian History Almanac for the 16th of October 2025, brought to you by 1517 at 1517.org.

The show is produced by a man with three eyes.. he is Christopher Gillespie.

The show is written and read by a man with two a’s, two o’s, and an I- I’m Dan van Voorhis.

You can catch us here every day- and remember that the rumors of grace, forgiveness, and the redemption of all things are true…. Everything is going to be ok.