Henry Martyn

Life and Ministry

Henry Martyn was born at Truro in Cornwall in 1781, the son of a copper-mine clerk who pushed him toward Cambridge. He took Senior Wrangler at St John's College in 1801 — first place in the mathematics tripos, the highest academic distinction available to an undergraduate in England. Converted under the influence of Charles Simeon, he turned away from the academic career that lay open to him and was ordained an Anglican priest in 1803. He sailed for India in 1805 as a chaplain to the East India Company, with the wider intention — privately encouraged by Simeon and William Wilberforce — of using his linguistic gifts to translate the Scriptures into the languages of the Mughal world that Company India had inherited. He completed the New Testament in Hindustani, Persian, and Arabic in seven years, working twelve hours a day in a climate that was destroying his lungs.

Circumstances of Death

By the spring of 1812 Martyn was tubercular and had been told by Company doctors that he must leave India for England or die. He could not face a sea voyage in his condition. He decided instead to travel overland through Persia and the Ottoman empire — partly to revise his Persian New Testament with the scholars of Shiraz, partly because he believed the journey itself might restore him. He left Bombay in March 1812, completed the Shiraz revision by June, and rode westward across central Persia and into Anatolia in the unrelenting summer. By October he was being carried in a horse-litter by Tatar guides who refused to slow down. They reached Tokat in eastern Anatolia on October 6 with Martyn delirious from typhus fever. He died there in a Turkish wayside han ten days later, on October 16, 1812, attended only by his Tatar drivers and an Armenian guide. He was thirty-one years old. The grave was marked by an Armenian Christian who chanced to recognize him.

Legacy

Martyn's Persian New Testament — finished six months before his death — became the standard Persian translation used by Bible societies throughout the nineteenth century and was the New Testament from which the Persian-speaking churches of Iran were planted. His Hindustani New Testament played the same role for north India. His journals, published in 1837, became one of the most widely read missionary memoirs of the Victorian period and shaped the call of an entire generation of British university men into missionary work — including David Livingstone. He died of fever, not of violence, and he is included in the Witnesses series in the older sense of the word: one who gave his life for the faith and the work, in a place where the violence done to him was the climate and the road.