Commontide
Anglican Commemoration
Priest & Missionary to India & Persia
October 19 · d. 1812
also known as Henry Martyn of Cambridge, Henry Martyn the Translator, Saint Henry Martyn
Henry Martyn (1781-1812) was an English priest, Cambridge mathematician, and missionary who gave his brief life to translating the New Testament into the languages of Muslim Asia. Senior Wrangler at Cambridge in 1801, he set aside a scholar's career at the urging of Charles Simeon and sailed for India as a chaplain of the East India Company, where he preached, disputed with Muslim scholars, and completed New Testament translations into Urdu and Persian before dying at thirty-one in Tokat, in the Ottoman Empire, on 16 October 1812. His feast is October 19.
Henry Martyn was the son of a Cornish mine clerk, and by every worldly measure he was marked for a brilliant future. At St John's College, Cambridge, his gift for mathematics carried him in 1801 to the highest honor the university could give, Senior Wrangler, first among the whole year in the most demanding examination in England. He had wanted the honor badly, and when it came he was startled to find how little it satisfied him. He said afterward that he had grasped a shadow.
What changed him was not the prize but a voice at Cambridge. Charles Simeon, vicar of Holy Trinity Church, had spent years telling anyone who would listen about a shoemaker turned missionary named William Carey, laboring to bring the Bible to India. Martyn had already been shaken by reading of David Brainerd, a missionary to the American Indians who had burned through a short life in ceaseless prayer and labor. Between Simeon's talk of Carey and Brainerd's example, the shape of a different future began to form in him. He was ordained deacon in 1803 and became Simeon's own curate, but the pull eastward did not let him go. In 1805 he sailed for India as a chaplain of the East India Company, the only door open to him after a family financial disaster made the unpaid road of a missionary society impossible.
Before he left England, Martyn had given his heart to a Cornishwoman named Lydia Grenfell. He asked her to come to India as his wife. She could not give him an answer, held back by an old entanglement of her own and by a mother who could not bear to send a daughter to die at a lonely mission station. Martyn sailed without her, still hoping, and for the rest of his life the two of them wrote to each other, a correspondence that only ended with his death. She never came.
In India, Martyn threw himself into the work Carey and Brainerd had set alight in him. Posted first to Dinapore in the Ganges valley, he preached, opened schools, and began the labor that would occupy the rest of his life: translating the New Testament into the languages of the people around him. He worked from the Greek and Hebrew directly, first into Hindustani, the common tongue of northern India, then into Persian, the language of learning across the Muslim world, and finally into Arabic. Fever and dysentery attacked him almost from the day he landed, and never fully let go. He kept on regardless, moving in 1809 to Cawnpore, where he built a church and kept translating.
The Persian New Testament was his consuming labor. In Shiraz, in Persia, he found a gifted collaborator in Mirza Seid Ali, a Persian scholar who worked alongside him for months at a time, and together they finished a Persian New Testament that scholars would use for generations after. Shiraz put Martyn within reach of the Muslim scholars he most wanted to speak with, and he sought them out rather than avoiding them: he sat with mullahs and a leading professor of Islamic law, arguing the claims of Christ in their own language and on their own ground, refusing to soften what he believed and refusing to despise the men who opposed him. At the vizier's court he once declared plainly that Jesus is the Son of God, and was answered with a threat of violence; he did not take it back.
By 1810 the fever that had dogged him for years had worn him down past what his body could sustain in India's heat, and doctors ordered him home. He chose the hard road, overland through Persia and Turkey toward Constantinople, working as he traveled. He never reached it. Struck again and again by fever as he crossed Anatolia, driven on by a guide who showed him no mercy, he grew too weak to go on and stopped at the town of Tokat, in the Ottoman Empire, in what is now north-central Turkey. There, far from Lydia, far from Cambridge, with no English voice or English hand near him, he died on 16 October 1812, thirty-one years old. The Armenian Christians of the town buried him with the honors they would have given one of their own archbishops.
He wrote in his journal to the very end. His last entry, six days before he died, was written sitting in an orchard, and it does not read like a man giving up. He set his eyes past his own suffering to what Scripture calls the new heaven and the new earth, where dwells righteousness, where nothing that defiles can enter and every corruption that has made this life such misery is done away. He had burned out, just as he had once written that he wanted to, in a place no Englishman had reason to be, for people who had not asked him to come. But the two New Testaments he left behind, in Hindustani and in Persian, went on doing what he had given his life to make possible, carrying the words of Christ into languages that had never held them before, long after the young scholar who made them was laid in Armenian ground.
How we know Henry Martyn is unusually well documented for a life so short: he kept a private journal for most of his adult years, and he wrote a great many letters, both of which survived him and were published within decades of his death, edited first by his friend and biographer John Sargent and later, in full, by Samuel Wilberforce. The journal is candid to the point of self-accusation. Martyn recorded his doubts, his loneliness, his flashes of spiritual pride, and his recurring despair over his own health and usefulness alongside his moments of conviction, so that the source base for his life is not a polished hagiography but the working diary of a man thinking on paper.
Martyn was born on 18 February 1781 in Truro, Cornwall, son of John Martyn, a mine accountant. He was educated at Truro Grammar School and entered St John's College, Cambridge, where in 1801 he graduated Senior Wrangler and first Smith's Prizeman, the two highest distinctions the Cambridge mathematical course could award. He was elected a fellow of St John's. Under the influence of Charles Simeon, the evangelical vicar of Holy Trinity Church, and his own reading of Jonathan Edwards's life of the missionary David Brainerd, Martyn turned from an academic career toward missions. He was ordained deacon at Ely in 1803 and served briefly as Simeon's curate. A financial collapse in his family's affairs left him without independent means to serve as an unsalaried missionary, so in 1805 he accepted a chaplaincy with the East India Company, sailing for India that year.
He served first at Dinapore, on the Ganges near Patna, from late 1806, and later at Cawnpore from 1809, where he built a church that opened in 1810. Throughout, tropical fever and dysentery troubled him severely and did not relent. His central labor in India was translation: a Hindustani New Testament, completed with the assistance of native scholars, and two successive Persian translations, the second and more polished of which he completed in Shiraz between 1809 and February 1811 with the close collaboration of the Persian scholar Mirza Seid Ali. An earlier collaborator in the translation work, an Arabic-speaking convert named Sabat, proved a difficult and ultimately unreliable partner whose faith did not hold; Martyn's patience with him is recorded at length in the journals. In Shiraz, Martyn also engaged repeatedly and directly with Muslim clergy and scholars, a Mojtahed among them, debating the claims of Christianity in Persian; these conversations, recorded in his own hand, are the source for what is known of his approach to interfaith debate; he pressed his case without concealment and was met at times with open hostility.
By 1810 his health required him to leave India, and he chose to travel overland through Persia and the Ottoman Empire toward Constantinople and England, continuing his work as he went. He left Tabriz, where the British minister Sir Gore Ouseley had nursed him through an earlier bout of fever, on 2 September 1812. The journey west was punishing: repeated attacks of ague, forced marches under an unsympathetic guide, and worsening illness are recorded in his final journal entries through early October. He wrote his last entry on 6 October 1812, seated in an orchard, and stopped at Tokat, a town in Ottoman Anatolia (in modern Turkey, east of Ankara), where he died on 16 October 1812 at the age of thirty-one. The exact cause, whether the fever that had pursued him for years or the plague then reported at Constantinople, is not established with certainty in the sources. The local Armenian Christian community buried him with funeral honors ordinarily reserved for their own archbishops, a mark of the respect a stranger's evident holiness had earned in a short time.
Henry Martyn is kept on October 19 in the calendar of the Church of England and other provinces of the Anglican Communion, and is remembered chiefly as a missionary-scholar: the man who set aside a Cambridge fellowship and the honors of Senior Wrangler for the harder and shorter road of translation and evangelism in Asia. His name became, within a generation of his death, a byword in the evangelical movement for total consecration to missionary service; Charles Simeon kept a portrait of his former curate in his study for the rest of his own life, and is said to have looked to it as a spur: be earnest, don't trifle. The Henry Martyn Centre for the study of world Christianity at Cambridge carries his name today, as does a hall at his old college.
His enduring legacy is textual: the Hindustani and Persian New Testaments he completed, revised by later scholars, served Bible societies and readers across South Asia and the Persian-speaking world for generations, and the Persian translation in particular was long regarded as a landmark of the language. His journals, published in the decades after his death, were read for two centuries as an unusually honest record of a missionary's inner life, doubts and all, and helped shape the missionary movement of the nineteenth century that followed him.
Journals and Letters of the Rev. Henry Martyn, B.D.(English, 1837)
Martyn's own journal and correspondence, kept from his Cambridge years until six days before his death, the primary record for every episode of his life.
Public domain: Anglican History
The New Testament... translated from the original Greek into Persian, at Sheeraz(Persian, 1811)
The Persian New Testament, Martyn's major translation labor, completed at Shiraz in 1811 with the close collaboration of the Persian scholar Mirza Seid Ali; long used as a standard Persian text by Bible societies.
Public domain: Internet Archive
Memoir of the Rev. Henry Martyn, B.D.(English, 1819)
The first full biography, written by a friend of Martyn's within a few years of his death; the account that fixed his memory for the nineteenth century. Still in print from the Banner of Truth Trust.
Public domain: Internet Archive
Henry Martyn, Saint and Scholar: First Modern Missionary to the Mohammedans, 1781-1812(English, 1892)
A fuller later biography with particular strength on the Shiraz years, the Persian translation, and Martyn's disputations with Muslim scholars.
Public domain: Project Gutenberg
Primary sources. Martyn's own journals and letters, edited by Samuel Wilberforce as Journals and Letters of the Rev. Henry Martyn, B.D. (2 vols., 1837), are the primary record of his life in his own words and are free to read at Anglican History (anglicanhistory.org) and the Internet Archive.
Principal hagiography. John Sargent's Memoir of the Rev. Henry Martyn (1819), later expanded as The Life and Letters of Henry Martyn, was the first full biography, written by a friend within a few years of Martyn's death, and set the shape in which the nineteenth century remembered him. It remains in print from the Banner of Truth Trust and is free at the Internet Archive and Project Gutenberg.
Recommended modern biography. No recent lay-accessible biography of Martyn alone remains reliably in print; Sargent's own account, still in print and still the standard telling, serves that purpose for a reader who wants Martyn's life in full.
Further reading. George Smith's Henry Martyn, Saint and Scholar: First Modern Missionary to the Mohammedans, 1781-1812 (1892) is a full later biography, free at Project Gutenberg, useful for its detail on the Persian translation and the Shiraz disputations.
Online resources. The complete journals and letters are hosted at anglicanhistory.org/india/martyn/ and archive.org; Sargent's Memoir and Smith's Henry Martyn are both free at Project Gutenberg.
Almighty and everlasting God, you called your servant Henry Martyn to preach the Gospel to the people of India and Persia: 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