Commontide
Anglican Commemoration
Missionary to Burma
April 12 · d. 1850
also known as Adoniram Judson, D.D.
Adoniram Judson (1788-1850) was among the first American Protestant foreign missionaries, sent from Massachusetts in 1812 and driven by the East India Company to Burma, where he spent the rest of his life. He translated the whole Bible from Hebrew and Greek into Burmese, waited six years for his first convert, and survived twenty-one months of captivity at Ava and Oung-pen-la during the First Anglo-Burmese War. He was buried at sea, and no grave was ever recovered.
Adoniram Judson was a minister's son from Malden, Massachusetts, who went to college at sixteen, graduated first in his class at nineteen, and lost his faith along the way. In August 1808 he set out on a northern tour, and at an inn where he lodged a college friend died in the next room. Francis Wayland, who printed the story forty-five years later, names the young man only by an initial, a student from Providence College. Judson entered the theological school at Andover that October. By November he had begun, in his own careful phrase, to entertain a hope; on the second of December he dedicated himself to God.
The next year he read a printed sermon by Claudius Buchanan called The Star in the East, and the missionary vocation took hold before any American board existed to send him anywhere. On 28 June 1810 he and three friends, Samuel Nott, Samuel Newell and Samuel J. Mills, petitioned the Congregational ministers at Bradford, and the petition brought the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions into being. On New Year's Day 1811 he wrote to Ann Hasseltine, whom he hoped to marry, and told her exactly what he was asking. May this be the year, he wrote, in which she would take a final leave of her relatives and native land, cross the wide ocean, and dwell on the other side of the world. They would see dreary, disconsolate hours. One of them might not survive the climate, and the other would stand over the grave alone. "At least, either of us will be certain of one mourner." He wrote to her father in the same spirit, asking whether he could consent to his daughter's exposure to want, distress, degradation, insult, persecution, and perhaps a violent death.
They married on 5 February 1812 and sailed on the nineteenth. Aboard ship Judson studied the question of baptism, meaning to arm himself against the Baptist missionaries at Serampore, and lost the argument to himself. On 6 September 1812 William Ward baptized him and Ann at Calcutta, which cost him his board and his salary. He did not choose Burma; the East India Company expelled him from Bengal, and after some seven months of flight by way of Mauritius and Madras he landed at Rangoon on 13 July 1813 and joined the mission Felix Carey was conducting there.
Then nothing happened, for years. A son, Roger, was born in 1815 and died at seven months. Writing to Luther Rice in August 1816, four years out and with no convert, Judson pointed to Tahiti, where the missionaries had labored nearly twenty years without the slightest success, and to Bengal, where Dr. Thomas had labored seventeen years before the first convert was baptized, and answered the question everyone was asking him. What prospect of ultimate success is there? "As much as that there is an almighty and faithful God, who will perform his promises, and no more." If the societies would not risk their bread on a hope with nothing but the Word of God to sustain it, he asked at least to be left alone to try it; and if he lived twenty or thirty years, they might hear from him again.
On 5 May 1819 he wrote in his journal that Moung Nau had been with him several hours, and that he began to think the grace of God had reached his heart. He baptized him on 27 June, six years after landing.
The war came in 1824. When the British fleet bombarded Rangoon, the court at Ava arrested Judson as a spy and put him in irons in the death prison on 8 June. His daughter Maria was born inside that captivity, in January 1825. Ann carried food to the prison, argued with the jailer for shelter from the sun, and kept him alive; the imprisonment was hers as much as his. He was moved to the country prison at Oung-pen-la in May, taken out of irons in November, and then sent under guard to Maloon, the headquarters of the Burmese army, to act as interpreter, still a prisoner. He was recommitted at Ava on 29 December and released the next day, and left Ava with Ann and Maria at the end of February, closing a captivity he afterwards called twenty-one months. Ann died of remittent fever at Amherst in October 1826, ten months later, and was buried near the spot where she first landed. His father died a month after that. Maria died the following April, aged two years and three months.
He went back to the work, which was words. On 31 January 1834, twenty-two years after sailing, he finished the Old Testament and with it the whole Bible in Burmese, translated from the original languages. Popular accounts say he laid down his pen. What he wrote is better: "I have knelt down before him, with the last leaf in my hand," asking forgiveness for the sins that had polluted his labors, and dedicating the finished book to God's glory. Revisions followed for six more years, and a dictionary after that, finished in January 1849.
Asked once, long after, whether the prospects were bright for the conversion of the heathen, he answered: "As bright as the promises of God."
His third wife, Emily, sat with him through the last illness, a month at Amherst for the sea air and then back at Maulmain, and wrote down what he said. He was not tired of his work and not tired of the world; but when Christ called him home he would go, he said, with the gladness of a boy bounding away from his school. In April they carried him aboard the French bark Aristide Marie, hoping the sea air would save him. It did not. On 12 April, at three in the afternoon, he said in Burmese to the servant beside him, "It is done; I am going," and then to the one missionary aboard, "Brother Ranney, will you bury me? bury me? quick! quick!" and then, when Ranney had been called away, to the servant again, of his wife, "take care of poor mistress." He died at a quarter past four. At eight that evening they weighted a plank coffin with sand, opened the larboard port, and committed him to the deep in perfect silence, broken only by the voice of the captain, three days out of sight of the mountains of Burma. There is no grave. What he left was the book, which Burmese Christians are still reading.
Judson spent six years in Rangoon before one man was baptized, and twenty-two years passed between his sailing and the finished Bible, and he did not know while he waited that either would come. Asked whether the prospects were bright, he did not answer with results at all; he pointed to a promise, and said his hope was exactly as bright as that. Most of what you are asked to be faithful in will not report back to you on your schedule, and some of it never will. Where are you keeping score by what you can see, and what would change in your work this week if your hope rested instead on the character of the one who promised?
Judson is unusually well documented, and the difficulty with him is abundance rather than scarcity. Three period books carry nearly everything: Francis Wayland's two-volume Memoir of 1853, written three years after the death by a friend with access to the papers and printing the letters and journals at length; Edward Judson's Life of 1883, written by his son from family papers Wayland had not used; and, printed as an appendix to that Life, the "Autobiographical Record of Dates and Events," a dated chronology in Judson's own hand that opens with his father's birth in 1752 and runs to January 1849. The Record settles most of what the popular retellings garble. His personal papers survive at the American Baptist Historical Society, now at Mercer University in Atlanta, some 6.8 linear feet of correspondence, subject files, photographs, book proofs and printed material. There is no modern critical edition of the letters or journals.
The real critical problem is a thick layer of twentieth- and twenty-first-century devotional retelling sitting on those three books, and the retellings have added material that is not in the sources. The name "Jacob Eames" for the friend who died at the inn appears in neither Wayland nor Edward Judson. The famous answer "as bright as the promises of God" is genuine (Edward Judson, p. 92) but is universally staged as a defiant retort from inside the death prison; the source gives no prison, no mocking fellow prisoner, and no defiance, only a question asked "many years after" and an answer given. The phrase "laid down his pen" was never his. The words most often printed as his last were spoken at Maulmain in the weeks before he sailed, and were recorded by Emily, who was not aboard the ship. Wayland's Memoir is reported to have sold twenty-six thousand copies in its first year, and it largely fixed the public image, which makes it at once the best source and the origin of the reception.
The translation is where recent scholarship has moved, in two articles by John de Jong. "Adoniram Judson's Burmese Bible: Dependency and Development," Church History 92, no. 4 (2023), argues that his Burmese Christian vocabulary drew on nearly three centuries of prior Catholic missionary work, setting the Burmese Lord's Prayer of the Barnabite Giovanni Maria Percoto (1776) beside that of the British Baptist James Chater (1812) and Judson's own. A companion piece, "'Scripture Extracts': An Early Catholic Burmese Translation," Journal of Ecclesiastical History 75, no. 4 (2024), identifies the Scripture extracts of the Italian Barnabite Giuseppe d'Amato, printed at Serampore in 1811 by Felix Carey and James Chater, and passed to Judson, as an important resource for his translation. This complicates the sole-pioneer framing that popular biography gives him, and it is unresolved rather than settled. It is also, quietly, the more interesting story.
Two other things a reader should know. The captivity at Ava is solidly attested, and its stages can be dated from Judson's own hand; the vivid sensory detail reaches us chiefly through Wayland's 1853 sections of "Reminiscences of Conversations with Dr. Judson," together with Ann's letters and Dr. Price's prison journal, rather than from any narrative Judson wrote himself. And the racial register of the period's missionary literature, which modern readers will hear as paternalistic and racially coded, is not only in the secondary sources: it is in Judson's own hand before he ever sailed, in the 1811 letter to Ann, with its "swarthy countenances" and "the jargon of an unknown tongue." Jay Riley Case's An Unpredictable Gospel (2012) is the scholarly treatment of that register as it bears on the Karen mission in particular. Scholars have also traced part of modern Karen national consciousness to missionary-era work, though the connection is asserted more often than it is demonstrated, and nothing suggests Judson intended or foresaw it.
There was never a canonization process, and there is no relic, because there is no body: he was committed to the deep at latitude thirteen degrees north, longitude ninety-three degrees east, and nothing was ever recoverable. A cenotaph stands on Burial Hill in Plymouth, Massachusetts, among his family's graves, a monument over no one. Ann lies at Kyaikkhami, the town that was Amherst, reportedly still visible under its tree, and their daughter Maria beside her; his second wife Sarah lies on St Helena, where the ship put in and she was buried ashore the same evening in 1845.
The devotion that grew up around him is Baptist and it is large. In December 2013 the Myanmar Baptist Convention gathered at Yangon for the bicentennial of his arrival; more than twenty-five thousand registered, in a country where meetings of more than five people had been restricted through decades of military rule. Burmese Baptists are also reported to keep a "Judson Day" in July. His name is carried by Judson Church at the University of Yangon, Judson Memorial Baptist Church in Mandalay, Judson University in Elgin, Illinois, Judson College at Southeastern in North Carolina, and Judson Memorial Church on Washington Square in New York, which his son Edward built as a memorial to him with a copy of the Burmese Bible in the cornerstone. The Episcopal Church commemorates him on 12 April in A Great Cloud of Witnesses (2016).
Judson's own words reach us almost entirely through two nineteenth-century editors. Francis Wayland's A Memoir of the Life and Labors of the Rev. Adoniram Judson (Boston, 1853) is in two volumes: volume 1 carries the pre-mission letters to Ann Hasseltine (pp. 33-34), the letter to the Third Church, Plymouth, on baptism (pp. 95-96), the letter to Luther Rice of 3 August 1816 (pp. 178-179), the journal on Moung Nau (pp. 216-217), and Judson's letter naming his wife's cause of death (p. 415). Volume 2 carries the "devoted for life" letter of 12 January 1833 (pp. 62-63), the dedication of the finished Bible dated 31 January 1834 (pp. 75-76), Wayland's own narrative of the last illness and the 3 April embarkation (pp. 331-332), and Thomas Ranney's eyewitness account of the death, the last words, and the burial (pp. 348-352, the death and burial at 351-352). Edward Judson's The Life of Adoniram Judson (New York, 1883) supplies the New Year letter to Ann Hasseltine and the letter to her father John (pp. 20-21), the answer "as bright as the promises of God" (p. 92), Emily Judson's record of the Maulmain sick-room conversations of early 1850 (pp. 538-540), and, as Appendix A, Judson's autograph "Autobiographical Record of Dates and Events" (pp. 561-567). Both are public domain and freely readable at the Internet Archive. For the modern scholarship named above, see Jay Riley Case, An Unpredictable Gospel: American Evangelicals and World Christianity, 1812-1920 (Oxford, 2012), chapter 1, and John de Jong, "Adoniram Judson's Burmese Bible: Dependency and Development," Church History 92, no. 4 (2023): 822-44, with its companion, "'Scripture Extracts': An Early Catholic Burmese Translation," Journal of Ecclesiastical History 75, no. 4 (2024): 747-57. The papers themselves are at the American Baptist Historical Society, Mercer University, as RG-1114.
Almighty and everlasting God, you called your servant Adoniram Judson to preach the Gospel to the people of Burma: Raise up in this and every land evangelists and heralds of your kingdom, that your Church may proclaim the unsearchable riches of our Savior Jesus Christ; who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.
Readings for a Missionary
Isaiah 49:1–7Psalm 98Romans 10:11–18Luke 5:1–11