Adoniram Judson

Life

Judson was born in 1788 in Malden, Massachusetts, the son of a Congregational minister. He graduated first in his class from Brown University and in 1808 entered Andover Theological Seminary, where he resolved to become a foreign missionary. In February 1812, shortly after marrying Ann Hasseltine, he sailed for India as a missionary of a Congregational mission agency. During the voyage he studied the question of baptism and concluded that the baptism by immersion of those who have professed faith is biblical. In September of that year he was baptized in Calcutta (Kolkata) by the English Baptist missionary William Ward and joined the Baptists.

When the East India Company prevented him from remaining in India, he went in 1813 to Rangoon (Yangon) in Burma (present-day Myanmar). He was imprisoned during the First Anglo-Burmese War (1824–1826); sources differ on the length of his imprisonment, giving figures from seventeen to twenty months. After his release he served as an interpreter in the peace negotiations. His wife Ann died in 1826. In 1834 he married Sarah Boardman, who died in 1845, and in 1846 he married Emily Chubbuck. On April 12, 1850, while traveling by ship to seek medical treatment, he died in the Bay of Bengal and was buried at sea.

Ministry and Achievements

• Catalyst for American Baptist mission organization: Luther Rice, who had become a Baptist along with Judson, returned to the United States to appeal for support. As a result, the General Missionary Convention (commonly known as the "Triennial Convention"), the first national organization of American Baptists, was established in 1814, and it adopted Judson as its first missionary.
• Bible translation: In January 1834 he completed the first full translation of the Old and New Testaments from the original languages into Burmese, which was published in 1835. His wife Ann is said to have safeguarded the translation manuscript while he was imprisoned. This Bible is reportedly still used as the standard Bible among Protestants in Myanmar. He also compiled an English-Burmese dictionary (1849) and a Burmese-English dictionary (published posthumously in 1852).
• Evangelism: In 1819 he baptized his first convert, Maung Naw. Evangelism among the Buddhist Burmans progressed slowly, but from the late 1820s onward the work bore greater fruit among the Karen people. Today Baptists constitute the largest Protestant denomination in Myanmar.

Assessment

Judson is known as "the father of American foreign missions." However, Congregational missionaries sailed with him that same year, and other Protestant missionaries had entered Burma before him. For this reason, some point out that describing him as "America's first foreign missionary" or "the first missionary to Burma" is inaccurate. Some also note that his reputation among American Protestants was briefly clouded when he showed interest for a time in Catholic ascetic mysticism.