A Modern Missionary Before the Areopagus: Jonas King
JONAS KING was the son of a Massachusetts farmer who was noted for his love of the Bible even in a community where the Bible was loved by most. Under that influence and instruction Jonas grew up loving the Bible. Between the ages of four and six he read the Bible through from Genesis to Revelation. After that he read the Bible through once a year until he was sixteen. Then he wanted to prepare for the ministry. Lacking the means for an education, he learned English grammar while he was hoeing corn. He read the twelve books of Virgil’s .neid in fifty days, and the New Testament in Greek in six weeks. He was graduated at Williams College in 1816, and at Andover Theological Seminary in 1819.
At first he engaged in home missions in Massachusetts, for there were, and are, always needy corners that demand missionary work in the best cultivated fields of the older states in America. Then he was for a time a city missionary in Charleston, South Carolina. But all the time he was strongly drawn to the foreign missionary field, and he purposed to go to Europe and learn Arabic, and after that decide on his special missionary field. He decided to go to Paris and study with the famous De Salcy. He was meantime appointed Professor of Oriental Languages in Amherst College; and of course his friends urged him to accept the position. But while at his studies in Paris he received a pressing invitation from Phny Fisk to join him in Palestine as his associate, Levi Parsons, had just died, and Fisk needed another helper in the mission field. This decided him as to his course. Friends then raised funds to sustain him for three years in the Holy Land, and he set out on his mission in 1823.
With PUny Fisk, Jonas King visited Damascus and Mt. Lebanon and Antioch and Baalbek, in the one direction, and he went up the Nile in another direction. Such tours were then less common than now, and Dr. King’s published reports of his observations were of exceptional value. Yet his main purpose was of finding missionary needs and possibilities.
After the three years were over, he left Beyroot for Smyrna, journeying thence through Europe overland. On his way he spent several months in the study of modern Greek. When again in the United States he gave some time to pleading the cause of the American Board in the North and the South. Then God opened the way for him to go to Greece, and he determined to go, declining proffered professorships in Amherst and in Yale.
Persons of the present generation can hardly realize the enthusiastic interest manifested by Americans in the struggle of Greece for independence at the close of the first quarter of the nineteenth century. So many traditions clustered about Greece from the days of Homer and Xenophon and Plato and Xerxes and Alexander, and of Marathon and Thermopylae, that scholars and thinkers could hardly count Greece as a foreign nation. And when such a people as the Greeks rose up to struggle for independence, the citizens of the new American republic felt that the struggle was, in a sense, their own struggle. Daniel Webster and Henry Clay pleaded eloquently in the halls of our national Congress for a recognition by our government of the Greek patriots and insurgents. Dr. Samuel G. Howe, the Massachusetts philanthropist, volunteered as a surgeon in the insurgent army, and Fitz-Greene Halleck voiced and led the sympathies of young Americans in his poem of “Marco Bozzaris.”
“The Ladies’ Greek Committee” of New York, stirred by the stories of Turkish atrocities and of Greek sufferings, loaded a ship with food and clothing for the insurgents, and invited Jonas King to be the almoner of their charities, as he was already so familiar with Greece and the Greeks. He accepted the trust, which would the better enable him to preach Christ to those whom he would aid. He reached Poros on this mission in July, 1829.
Sympathy and aid from America were peculiarly welcome in Greece. The people flocked in great numbers to receive food, including the Bread of life. Mr. King was welcomed by all. Priests as well as people were grateful for his loving ministry. The president of the young republic gave him glad greeting. As he went from point to point in Greece he preached the gospel and established schools, while relieving bodily needs. He felt at home among this people. In 1829 he married a Greek lady who proved a most elificient helper in his Christian work. In 1830 his mission in Greece was transferred to the American Board, to be carried on as an integral part of its great work. Athens became his home and permanent centre of Christian work. There he built a schoolhouse in which was conducted a service in Greek every Lord’s Day from 1831 for a series of years. In all the schools which he estabUshed he gave religious instruction and made it a condition that the Scriptures should be studied.
He founded a school of a higher grade, in which he gave theological instruction, and before long young workers who had been taught by him were in prominent positions as teachers, or in various offices under the Greek government. By and by the hierarchy of the Greek Catholic Church became alarmed at the growing influence of Dr. King’s preaching, and of the circulation of the Bible. A Greek bishop denounced Dr. King and his schools, and excommunication was threatened to parents who permitted their children to attend his school.
At the instigation of the Greek Synod Dr. King, like St. Paul, was brought before the Areopagus in Athens. There he was condemned to be tried before the felons’ court in Syria. As in the case of St. Paul, again there was a conspiracy of fifty men against his life. Finally, in 1847, there was such popular excitement against him in view of false charges and of seditionary pamphlets against him that the king advised him, for his own safety, to leave the country for a time.
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Accordingly he visited Switzerland and several other European countries. In 185 1 Dr. King was appointed Consular Agent of the United States at Athens. An American flag was sent him which would secure his safety under its folds. The next year he was again brought to trial on a charge of blaspheming God and the religion of the Greek Church. He was found guilty and was incarcerated in a loathsome prison; and at the expiration of his sentence of confinement he was to be expelled from Greece.
It will be believed that the trial and sufferings of Dr. Jonas Ejng in Greece excited special interest and sympathy among American Christians. In my young manhood Jonas King of Greece occupied much the place in my thoughts that Adoniram Judson of Burmah had in my boyhood days. I read about him, I longed to see him. His courage, his faithful endurance, his heroism, his faithfulness, and his faith, appealed to me. When at last I saw and heard him, he was all that I had looked for, and yet more. His enfeebled frame and his barely audible voice, owing to his long service and his severe sufferings, only increased ray interest in him. They were the soldier scars in a veteran of holy wars. They were the evidences of his martyr spirit, and I looked and listened with added interest as he recited incidents of his missionary service with which I was already in a measure familiar by hearsay.
His appearance at an anniversary of the American Board in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, will not be forgotten by those who were there. Dr. King was the hero of the occasion. So much had been said of hi§ sufferings and of his service that when it was known that he was to be at the Pittsfield meeting there was a general desire to see him. Expectation and longing were at their height as the hours passed on, after the opening of the meeting. Finally, just before the close of the forenoon session, the president spoke of Dr. King and his field and experiences, and said that he would now address the meeting. Then everybody looked and listened.
Dr. King came forward on the platform. He was, however, very feeble and infirm, and his voice was low and indistinct from weakness. He began to speak, but he could be heard only by those near the platform. Persons in the rear seats bent their heads forward, and cries of “Louder,” “Louder,” came up from all parts of the house. Dr. King vainly tried to raise his voice so as to be heard. A gentleman in the back part of the room rose and said, “Mr. President, cannot Dr. King raise his voice? We greatly desire to hear him, but it is impossible, with the tone in which he is speaking.” Dr. King made an extra effort to speak louder, but he lacked the strength. Realizing this he sat down in evident discouragement.
At this a Massachusetts clergyman, with a voice like a fog-horn, took the platform, and with an air that seemed to say, “I think lean be heard,” he made a speech that might have been heard in North Adams. That was the last speech of the morning. The benediction was pronounced, and the morning session closed. As the gentlemen on the platform passed out. Dr. King, who had not been heard, and the Massachusetts clergyman who had been, went down the steps together, the one with a sad look and the other with a triumphant one. Dr. John Todd, in whose church was the meeting, perceived the situation. He was always mercilessly outspoken in an emergency, and now stepping up behind the two speakers, he threw an arm over the shoulder of each, and said, “I couldn’t but think this morning how our good Father divides his gifts, to one he gives lungs, and to another brains,” and he bore down with his arm, in fitting emphasis, at either gift of which he told. And Dr. Jonas King did have brains as well as grace. His original works in Arabic, French, and Greek, were ten in number, some of these being widely read and translated into other languages. He revised and carried through the press eleven other volumes. He was a fine linguist, having studied eleven languages, and speaking fluently in five.
It has been well said by a historian, as to the important work done by this missionary’s incidental and yet invaluable service rendered to Greece: “Dr. Jonas King’s greatest philological service, perhaps, arose from his influence in promoting the introduction of the modern Greek Scriptures into the schools of Greece, and securing their extensive circulation among the people.... He, in this way, did much to restore the modern language to the purity and beauty of the ancient, and fixed it permanently for the future; for the history of the English and German Bibles shows that nothing so much elevates and settles the language of a people as a good version of the Bible.”
And, again, the good missionary did much, by his writings in the line of religious liberty, to arouse the people of Greece to a right spirit and to noble endeavor. The same historian says: “Perhaps no man ever stirred a nation more intensely than Dr. King did Greece by his writings. It is owing to him that ’ the Word of God is not bound ’ in that kingdom. His power lay in his Luther-like courage, his pure doctrine, consistent life, and steadfastness under hierarchical oppression.” Good Dr. Rufus Anderson, the wise and experienced secretary of the board, who well knew both Dr. King and his Greek field, said of him: “Dr. King has left his impress on the Greek nation. To him preeminently is it due that the Scriptures since 1831 have been so extensively used in the schools, and that in Greece the Word of God is not bound; also under God the visible decline there of prejudice against evangelical truth and religious liberty.” His abiding influence over the Greek nation was indicated by the popular outbreak there, in the early years of the twentieth century, over a revision of the translation of the Scriptures that he had taught them to revere and love. Dr. King entered into rest at Athens in 1869, in his seventy-seventh year.