Robert Jermain Thomas

Life

Robert Jermain Thomas was a Protestant missionary born in Wales. Sources differ on his year of birth, giving either 1839 or 1840. In Korea he is known by the name Choe Nan-heon (崔蘭軒). His father, Robert Thomas (1810–1884), was the pastor of Hanover Church in Britain, which was founded in 1644 as a Congregational church (a denomination in which the assembly of members in each local congregation governs its own affairs). With Hanover Church as his home church, Thomas was sent to Shanghai, China, as a missionary of the London Missionary Society.

Ministry and Work

Thomas is reported to have visited Joseon Korea once before 1866. In 1866, after French priests were executed during the Byeongin Persecution (the Joseon government's suppression of Catholicism), he sought to join, as an interpreter, a French fleet that was preparing to sail to Korea in protest. The fleet did not set out, however, and the plan reportedly came to nothing.

Instead, on August 9, 1866, Thomas sailed for Korea as an interpreter aboard the American merchant ship General Sherman. The ship entered the Taedong River and demanded trade. Joseon officials refused, stating that commerce with Western nations was forbidden by law, and ordered the ship to leave. The ship disregarded the order and continued upriver. As tensions mounted, the river level fell and the ship ran aground on a sandbar near Yanggak Island. Those who left the ship were seized by the soldiers and people of Pyongyang, and none survived. Thomas was twenty-seven years old at the time. Sources give the date of his death as either September 2 or September 5.

Church historians relate that before his death Thomas handed Chinese-language Bibles to several people, including Choe Chi-ryang. A number of other anecdotes are also told. According to one eyewitness account, a white man amid the smoke of the burning deck cried out "Jesus" and threw Bibles to the people on the riverbank. Another story holds that a man who received a Bible from him later sought out the missionary Samuel Moffett. Most of these accounts, however, rest on later testimony and tradition.

Influence on the Korean Church

In Korean Protestantism, Thomas is commonly called the first Protestant missionary to shed his blood on the Korean Peninsula—that is, the "first martyr." The story that the Bibles he left behind at his death became the seed of the Korean church is frequently cited in sermons and in the teaching of church history. Some 3,000 Koreans are reported to visit his home church, Hanover Church, each year, and 148 years after his martyrdom a Korean pastor became its minister. At the same time, those who have worked to honor his memory observe that, because he was neither a Presbyterian nor a Methodist minister, the Korean church has given him comparatively little attention when assessing the achievements of missionaries.

Assessment

Assessments of Thomas are divided. Those who honor him as a martyr emphasize his willingness to risk danger to spread the gospel, as well as his distribution of the Scriptures. Critical or more cautious observers, by contrast, point to the General Sherman, the ship on which he sailed, which ignored Joseon's refusal and provoked a clash by pressing its demand for trade. This raises the question of whether his death can be regarded purely as a martyrdom for the faith. Recent scholarship argues that Thomas has been portrayed and used differently according to the political circumstances of the United States, Japan, China, and North Korea, and that in the process his image as a martyr has been distorted, exaggerated, or obscured. This research proposes that any evaluation of Thomas should consider not only the brief period of the General Sherman incident but also his life as a whole and the international situation of the time.