Bartholomäus Ziegenbalg was a member of the Lutheran

Lutheranism

Lutheranism is a major branch of Western Christianity that identifies with the theology of Martin Luther, a German reformer. Luther's efforts to reform the theology and practice of the church launched the Protestant Reformation...

 clergy

Clergy

Clergy is the generic term used to describe the formal religious leadership within a given religion. A clergyman, churchman or cleric is a member of the clergy, especially one who is a priest, preacher, pastor, or other religious professional....

 and the first Pietist missionary

Missionary

A missionary is a member of a religious group sent into an area to do evangelism or ministries of service, such as education, literacy, social justice, health care and economic development. The word "mission" originates from 1598 when the Jesuits sent members abroad, derived from the Latin...

 to India

India

India , officially the Republic of India , is a country in South Asia. It is the seventh-largest country by geographical area, the second-most populous country with over 1.2 billion people, and the most populous democracy in the world...

.

Early life

Ziegenbalg was born in Pulsnitz

Pulsnitz

Pulsnitz is a town in the district of Bautzen, in the Free State of Saxony, Germany. It is situated 11 km southwest of Kamenz, and 24 km northeast of the centre of Dresden....

, Saxony

Saxony

The Free State of Saxony is a landlocked state of Germany, contingent with Brandenburg, Saxony Anhalt, Thuringia, Bavaria, the Czech Republic and Poland. It is the tenth-largest German state in area, with of Germany's sixteen states....

 on July 10, 1682 to poor but devout Christian parents - Bartholomäus Ziegenbalg Sr.(1640-1694), a grain merchant and Maria née Brückner (1646-1692). Through his father he was related to the sculptor Ernst Friedrich August Rietschel, and through his mother's side to the philosopher Johann Gottlieb Fichte. He showed an aptitude for music at an early age. He studied at the University of Halle under the teaching of A. H. Francke, then the center of Pietistic

Pietism

Pietism was a movement within Lutheranism, lasting from the late 17th century to the mid-18th century and later. It proved to be very influential throughout Protestantism and Anabaptism, inspiring not only Anglican priest John Wesley to begin the Methodist movement, but also Alexander Mack to...

 Lutheranism. Under the patronage of Frederick IV of Denmark

Frederick IV of Denmark

Frederick IV was the king of Denmark and Norway from 1699 until his death. Frederick was the son of King Christian V of Denmark and Norway and Charlotte Amalie of Hesse-Kassel .-Foreign affairs:...

, Ziegenbalg, along with his fellow student, Heinrich Plütschau, became the first Protestant missionaries to India. They arrived at the Danish colony of Tranquebar

Tranquebar

Tharangambadi is a panchayat town in Nagapattinam district in the Indian state of Tamil Nadu, 15 km north of Karaikal, near the mouth of a distributary of the Kaveri River. Its name means "place of the singing waves"...

 on July 9 1706.

Missionary work

“At times Devanandan seems to imply a universalism that considers all people to be actual sharers in the new humanity (formed in Christ as created by God), but in other places he seems to mean only that the scope or intention of the Christian message is universal (…) but he also believes that the observer cannot resist the impulse of the faith that believes in a God who is also the Lord of history, and in a creative spirit who is ever at work in the world, redeeming it even in its present involvements and directing its course to the ultimate fulfilment of His purpose (…)”, Bob Robinson paraphrases the enigmatic ideas of “South India Churchman” and the first director of the Christian Institute for the Study of Religion and Society (CISRS, founded in Bangalore in 1957) Paul David Devanandan .

A church of the Syrian tradition was probably born in South India as long back in history as the third century, at least . KP Kesava Menon in his forward to Christianity in India (Prakam, 1972) described a church typical of that tradition as “Hindu in culture, Christian in religion, and oriental in worship.”

Robinsons laments the failure of the further forward moment of this potential dialogue between the two religions. He notes that even superlatively supportive sympathisers of the European missionary’s endorsement of Hinduism as Roberto Nobili and Ziegenbalg despite their enthusiasm for this foreign faith could never shake their conviction of the superiority of their doctrines .

The propagation of the Gospel, despite Danish zeal remained inchoate till at the dawn of the eighteenth century, Frederick IV of Denmark

Frederick IV of Denmark

Frederick IV was the king of Denmark and Norway from 1699 until his death. Frederick was the son of King Christian V of Denmark and Norway and Charlotte Amalie of Hesse-Kassel .-Foreign affairs:...

 under the influence of Dr. AH Francke

August Hermann Francke

August Hermann Francke was a German Lutheran churchman.-Biography:Born at the German city Lübeck, Francke was educated at the gymnasium in Gotha before he studied at the universities of Erfurt and Kiel - where he came under the influence of the pietist Christian Kortholt - and finally Leipzig...

 (1663–1727), a professor of divinity in the University of Halle (in Saxony), proposed that one of the professor’s eminently skilled and religiously enthusiastic pupils, Bartholomäus Ziegenbalg be appointed to kindle in “the heathen at Tranquebar” the desired holy spark.

Tranquebar

Tranquebar

Tharangambadi is a panchayat town in Nagapattinam district in the Indian state of Tamil Nadu, 15 km north of Karaikal, near the mouth of a distributary of the Kaveri River. Its name means "place of the singing waves"...

 mission

“Though the piety and zeal of Protestants had often excited an anxious desire to propagate the pure and reformed faith of the gospel in heathen countries, it establishment and defence against the Polish adversaries at home, together with the want of suitable opportunities and facilities for so great a work, combined during the first century after the Reformation, to prevent them from making any direct or vigorous efforts for this purpose.”

Ziegenbalg brought Lutheranism

Lutheranism

Lutheranism is a major branch of Western Christianity that identifies with the theology of Martin Luther, a German reformer. Luther's efforts to reform the theology and practice of the church launched the Protestant Reformation...

 and a printing-press to Tanjore court by ship. But what were the Danes already doing there? After an abortive excursion to Sri Lanka, where there was no room left to be conquered and seized, they made their way to Tranquebar circa 1620. Ove Gjedde

Ove Gjedde

Ove Gjedde , born in Tommarp in Scania, Denmark , was a Danish admiral and member of the interim government, following the death of Christian IV and the harsh restrictions imposed on Frederick III due to his close ties to Germany.In 1618 he commanded an expedition to Ceylon and India by Christian...

 who, in 1618, had commandeered the expedition to Lanka, initiated a treaty with the king of Tanjore to rent an area no more than “five miles by three in extent”, resulting in the setting up of a fort, which still stands, though the Danes relinquished control of Tranquebar in 1845 to the British.

Printing and India found each other serendipitously. In 1556, a Portuguese ship came courting victuals for Goa (the rest of the cargo constituted a printing press and 14 Jesuits (one an Anonymous Indian avowed a wow his brother, that dab-hand artist Joao De Bustamante

Joao De Bustamante

Brother Joao De Bustamante also known as the Indian Gutenberg, was a Spanish Coadjutor who was influential in pioneering the art of printing in India, specifically in Goa.-Contribution to the beginning of Printing in India:...

, the “Indian Gutenberg”. The clergy in Goa hungered for the printing press far more vehemently than Abyssinia's and, so, ultimately, the press was taken over, and Bustamante was to stay to set up the press with the Indian who assists, at the College of St. Paul

Saint Paul's College, Goa

St. Paul's College was a Jesuit college founded circa 1542 at Old Goa. It was once the main Jesuit institution in India. It housed the first printing press in India, having published the first books in 1556...

, a seminary that still exists.

The arrival of the first press in Goa was rejoiced by St. Francis Xavier whose insight’s perception of the precepts of the Bible had been in Tranquebar around 1542. Then inexplicably, and, significantly, all the presses died out in India. Tamil printing seems to have stopped after 1612. Records show that the last books in Latin and Portuguese were printed in Goa in 1674.

Ziegenbalg responded to the King of Denmark’s request for the bequest of a Christian mission to spread the vision of the Gospel

Gospel

A gospel is an account, often written, that describes the life of Jesus of Nazareth. In a more general sense the term "gospel" may refer to the good news message of the New Testament. It is primarily used in reference to the four canonical gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John...

 in India, and, in 1706, Ziegenbalg and colleague Heinrich Plütschau reached the region of Tranquebar, thus becoming the first Protestant missionaries to arrive on the Indian sub-continent and began their revisionary project. The two established the Danish-Halle Mission. The two laboured intensively, despite opposition from the local Hindu and Danish authorities in Tranquebar, baptizing their first Indian converts on May 12, 1707.

Education has always been an integral component of missionary work. And Ziegenbalg recognized from the start the imperative of learning the local languages in the progress of their mission. Stephen Neill notes this curious serendipity (one among the host of others which actively play creator of reality), “The original plan was that Ziegenbalg should concentrate on Portuguese and Plütschau on Tamil. For no explicit reason, but to the great advantage of the work, this arrangement was changed, and mastery of Tamil became the primary objective of Ziegenbalg.
He had little to help him. No grammar was available. The Jesuits in the sixteenth century had printed a number of books in Tamil, but the work had been discontinued, and the Lutheran missionaries seem never even to have heard that such printed books existed.”

Ziegenbalg, quite possibly, spent more time picking up the local tongue than set his own wagging incomprehensibly and in vain to a folk who would then call him insane. He went on to write in 1709, "I choose such books as I should wish to imitate both in speaking and writing ... Their tongue ...(now) is as easy to me as my mother tongue, and in the last two years I have been enabled to write several books in Tamil...”

In a manner of mention, he was practising a well-intentioned form of cultural imperialism

Cultural imperialism

Cultural imperialism is the domination of one culture over another. Cultural imperialism can take the form of a general attitude or an active, formal and deliberate policy, including military action. Economic or technological factors may also play a role...

. But due to the circumstances in which European culture was established and promoted, in the midst of indigenous, alien people, the bridge estranging the cultural differences (amid Christianity and other cultures, the will to power

Will to power

The will to power is widely seen as a prominent concept in the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche. The will to power describes what Nietzsche may have believed to be the main driving force in man; achievement, ambition, the striving to reach the highest possible position in life; these are all...

 promoted by a multiplicity of western nation-states, and also the friction between the fractions of the umbrageous faction of Christianity) posed many obstacles. This resistance circles our consideration back to the conflicting attitudes of the missionaries and the Hindus they sought to convert.

Classical Hindu views regarding religious and other pluralisms during this point in history are kind to our comprehension, though over times this abandoned dialogue between the two faiths has been revived spuriously by the likes of Ram Mohan Roy

Ram Mohan Roy

Raja Ram Mohan Roy was an Indian religious, social, and educational reformer who challenged traditional Hindu culture and indicated the lines of progress for Indian society under British rule. He is sometimes called the father of modern India...

 to Ramakrishna

Ramakrishna

Ramakrishna , born Gadadhar Chattopadhyay , was a famous mystic of 19th-century India. His religious school of thought led to the formation of the Ramakrishna Mission by his chief disciple Swami Vivekananda – both were influential figures in the Bengali Renaissance as well as the Hindu...

 and Vivekananda to Gandhi.

Ziegenbalg was publicly critical of some members of the Brahmin

Brahmin

Brahmin Brahman, Brahma and Brahmin.Brahman, Brahmin and Brahma have different meanings. Brahman refers to the Supreme Self...

 caste

Caste

Caste is an elaborate and complex social system that combines elements of endogamy, occupation, culture, social class, tribal affiliation and political power. It should not be confused with race or social class, e.g. members of different castes in one society may belong to the same race, as in India...

, accusing them of disregard for lower castes in Hindu

Hindu

Hindu refers to an identity associated with the philosophical, religious and cultural systems that are indigenous to the Indian subcontinent. As used in the Constitution of India, the word "Hindu" is also attributed to all persons professing any Indian religion...

 society. For that reason, at least one group plotted to kill him. This reaction by native Indians was unusual and Ziegenbalg's work did not generally encounter unfriendly crowds; his lectures and classes drawing considerable interest from locals.
In 1708, a dispute over whether the illegitimate child of a Danish soldier and a non-Christian woman should be baptized and brought up as a Roman Catholic or a Protestant resulted in Heinrich Plütschau being brought before a court. Although Plütschau was released, Ziegenbalg wrote that "the Catholics rejoiced, that we were persecuted and they were authorized."

He connected this incident, which he took to have emboldened the Catholics, directly with a second nearly two weeks later, which resulted in his imprisonment. This incident arose from Ziegenbalg’s intervention on behalf of the widow of a Tamil barber over a debt between her late husband and a Catholic who was employed by the Company as a translator. The commander of the Danish fort in Tranquebar, Hassius, regarded Ziegenbalg's repeated intervention in the case, including his advice that the widow kneel before him in the Danish church, as inappropriate and sent for Ziegenbalg to appear before him. When Ziegenbalg demurred, requesting a written summons, he was arrested and, because he refused to answer questions, imprisoned.

Although released after a little more than four months, Ziegenbalg still had a difficult relationship with Hassius and that was one reason for Ziegenbalg's return to Europe in 1714-1716. Ziegenbalg was also married in 1716. He was also active in cooperation with the Anglican Society for the Propagation of Christian Knowledge

SPCK

The Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge is the oldest Anglican mission organisation. It was founded in 1698 by Thomas Bray , and a small group of friends. The most important early leaders were Anton Wilhelm Boehm and court preacher Friedrich Michael Ziegenhagen...

, making his work one of the first ecumenical ventures in the history of Protestant missionary work.

Stephen Neill

Stephen Neill

Stephen Charles Neill was a Anglican missionary, bishop, and scholar from Scotland. He was proficient in a number of languages including Greek, Latin and Tamil. He was educated and later worked in Trinity College, Cambridge...

 suggests, “As a missionary of the Danish crown, ordained in Denmark, Ziegenbalg felt himself bound by the liturgy and customs of the Danish church (…) Only in one respect does (he) seem to have made a concession to the fact that this new church was growing up in India; he made use of the presence in the Christian community of a measure of literary and musical talent to introduce the singing of Tamil lyrics to Indian melodies, in addition to using in church the growing collection of hymns which had been translated from German but in which the original metres and tunes had been preserved.”

Literary work

1) Translations: The 16th century saw the rise of Protestantism

Protestantism

Protestantism is one of the three major groupings within Christianity. It is a movement that began in Germany in the early 16th century as a reaction against medieval Roman Catholic doctrines and practices, especially in regards to salvation, justification, and ecclesiology.The doctrines of the...

 and an explosion of translations of the New (and Old) Testament into the vernacular

Vernacular

A vernacular is the native language or native dialect of a specific population, as opposed to a language of wider communication that is not native to the population, such as a national language or lingua franca.- Etymology :The term is not a recent one...

.
After all this time spent in blood-wrenching and sweat-drenching scholarship, Ziegenbalg wrote numerous texts in Tamil, for dissemination among Hindus. He was fully conscious of the importance of print in the history of the Protestant Church.

He commenced his undertaking of translating the New Testament

New Testament

The New Testament is the second major division of the Christian biblical canon, the first such division being the much longer Old Testament....

, in 1708, and completed it in 1711, though printing was delayed till 1714, because of Ziegenbalg’s insistent, perfectionist revisions. Stephen Neill comments, “Only rarely has the first translation of Scripture in a new language been found acceptable. Ziegenbalg’s achievement was considerable; for the first time the entire New Testament had been made available in an Indian language. But from the start Ziegenbalg’s work was exposed to criticism on a variety of grounds” and that Johann Fabricius’ update on the pioneering text was so clearly superior, “before long the older version ceased to be used.”

It was obvious to Ziegenbalg that without a printing press

Printing press

A printing press is a device for applying pressure to an inked surface resting upon a print medium , thereby transferring the ink...

 all his effort would come to nought. Possibly as early as 1709 he requested a printing press from Denmark. The Danes forwarded the appeal to London to the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge. The SPCK, not allowed a foothold in India by John Company's merchants, was only too eager to help and in 1712 shipped out to the Tranquebar mission a printing press with type, paper, ink, and a printer. He was also hindered by delays in the construction of a suitable Tamil typeface for his purposes.

In a letter dated 7/4/1713 to George Lewis, the Anglican chaplain at Madras, and first printed, in Portuguese, on the press the mission had recently received from the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, Ziegenbalg writes:
“We may remember on this Occasion, how much the Art of Printing contributed to the Manifestation of divine Truths, and the spreading of Books for that End, at the Time of the happy Reformation, which we read of in History, with Thanksgiving to Almighty God.”

Following this, he began translating the Old Testament

Old Testament

The Old Testament, of which Christians hold different views, is a Christian term for the religious writings of ancient Israel held sacred and inspired by Christians which overlaps with the 24-book canon of the Masoretic Text of Judaism...

, building “himself a little house in a quiet area away from the centre of the town, where he could pursue tranquilly what he regarded as the most important work of all. On 28 September 1714 he reports to Francke that the book Exodus has now been completed. At the time of his death he had continued the work up to the Book of Ruth.”

2) S. Muthiah in his fond remembrance (“The Legacy that Ziegenbalg left”) ends with an inventory of the man’s lesser-known works: “Apart from the numerous Tamil translations of Christian publications he made, he wrote several books and booklets that could be described as being Indological in nature.
He also had the press printing educational material of a more general nature.
As early as 1708 he had compiled his Bibliothece Malabarke, listing the 161 Tamil books he had read and describing their content.
In 1713, in Biblia Tamulica he expanded this bibliography. Also in 1713 the press produced what was perhaps the first Almanac to be printed in India. Then, in 1716, there appeared what was probably the first book printed in Asia in English, A Guide to the English Tongue, by Thomas Dyche

Thomas Dyche

Reverend Thomas Dyche , schoolmaster and lexicographer from Ashbourne, Derbyshire. He published a number of books on the English language including one thought to be the first English book published in Asia...

.
The next year the press printed an A.B.C. (in Portuguese) for schools in the English territories.
What did not get printed in Tranquebar were Ziegenbalg's Indological writings. In fact, his works like Nidiwunpa (Malabari moral philosophy), Kondei Wenden (Malabari morals) Ulaga Nidi (Malabari civil justice), and his books on Hindusim and Islam were printed only 150-250 years later in Europe and Madras.”

Death and legacy

1. Ziegenbalg was troubled by ill health his entire life, a condition aggravated by his work in the mission field. He died on February 23, 1719 at the age of thirty-six in Tranquebar. His last 13 years were spent laying the foundations for German scholarship in Tamil that continues to this day.

He faced many obstacles through his life’s work. In a letter to one Dr. Lutkens, Ziegenbalg sketches out humbly the zeal and diligence of his daily pursuits. On any given day, he could be engaged in more (if not as many) and as varied tasks as the study of Tamil to perchance conversation with a native poet to repose and contemplation to catechizing children of Lutheran catechisms, to maybe more study or exercises in piety. George Thos, Jr. asks, “Can it be surprising that a man thus piously and ardently engaged should be eminently successful? Or that he should too soon be exhausted by such incessant exertions?”

The blessings of God for their selfless tireless labours were mingled congruously with various circumstances testing their faith. Their work was opposed both by militant Hindus and by the local Danish authorities. In 1707/08, Ziegenbalg spent four months in prison on a charge that by converting the natives, he was encouraging rebellion. More than the opposition, he had to cope with the climatic conditions in India. Ziegenbalg wrote: “My skin was like a red cloth. The heat here is very great, especially during April, May and June, in which season the wind blows from the inland so strongly that it seems as if the heat comes straight out of the oven”.

For an account of his death, see Death-bed scenes: or, Dying with and without religion, designed to illustrate the truth and power of Christianity, Volume 43; Volume 651, Part I, Section II, chapter 28.

Johann Phillip Fabricius, picked up where Ziegenbalg left off on Bible translation, particularly Tamil Christian hymnody. He also felt that the previous translation by Ziegenbalg urgently needed emendations. “The four qualities which Fabricius found in the originals were lucidity, strength, brevity and appropriateness; these were sadly lacking in the existing Tamil translation, but he hoped that by the help of God he had been able to restore them.” Both scholars can also be referred to as proto-linguists, both worked arduously on dictionaries and grammars in Tamil. Interesting semiotic and linguistic questions arise, when taking into consideration both gentlemen’s translations of the Bible.

Stephen Neill summarises Ziegenbalg’s failures and the cause of tragedy in his life, thus: “He was little too pleased with his position as a royal missionary, and too readily inclined to call on the help of the civil power in Denmark. In his controversies with the authorities at Tranquebar he was generally in the right, but a less impetuous and more temperate approach might in the end have been more beneficial to the mission. He was too ready to open the coffers of the mission to those who claimed to be needy Christians, though he was right that those who had lost all their property through becoming Christians could not be allowed to starve.”

External links

• http://www.lamppostmedia.net/ziegenbalg/index.html
• "Written sources on the Danish-Halle mission (in English and German)"
• "Conversations in Tarangambadi: Caring for the Self in Early Eighteenth Century South India" by Eugene F. Irschick
• "The prehistory of Orientalism: colonialism and the textual basis for Bartholomäus Ziegenbalg's account of Hinduism" by Will Sweetman
• "Heathenism, idolatry and rational monotheism among the Hindus: Bartholomäus Ziegenbalg's "Akkiyanam" (1713) and other works addressed to Tamil Hindus" by Will Sweetman
• "Tranquebabar – Pictures from the first hundred years of Lutheran mission in India" by Roland Sckerl

Further reading

• Genealogy of the South-Indian gods: a manual of the mythology and religion of the people of southern India, including a description of popular Hinduism (by) Bartholomaeus Ziegenbalg, Wilhelm Germann, G. J. Metzger (1713)
• http://books.google.co.in/books?id=C-VbAAAAQAAJ&source=gbs_navlinks_sPropagation of the Gospel in the east: being an account of the success of the Danish missionaries, sent to the East-Indies, for the conversion of the heathen in Malabar. Extracted from the accounts of the said missionaries formerly publish'd, and brought down to the beginning of the year MDCCXIII. Wherein besides a narrative of the progress of the Christian religion in those parts, which the helps and impediments which hitherto have occurr'd; several hints are inserted concerning the religion of the Malabarians, their priests, poets, and other literati; and what may be expected from the printing-press] (by) Bartholomaeus Ziegenbalg, Heinrich Plütscho (1714)
• New Testament (by) Bartholomaeus Ziegenbalg, Johann Ernst Gründler (1714)
• Urs App
  Urs App
  Urs App is a historian of ideas, religions, and philosophies with a special interest in the history and modes of interaction between East and West.- Biography :...
  
  . The Birth of Orientalism. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010 (ISBN 978-0-8122-4261-4) contains a 55-page chapter (pp. 77–132) on Ziegenbalg and Mathurin Veyssière de La Croze and their role in the European discovery of Hinduism and Buddhism.
• The Tamil New Testament and Bartholomäus Ziegenbalg: a short study of some Tamil translations of the New Testament : the imprisonment of Ziegenbalg, 19.11.1708 - 26.3.1709 (by) Ulla Sandgren (Swedish Institute of Missionary Research, 1991)
• A German exploration of Indian society: Ziegenbalg's "Malabarian Heathenism : an annonated English translation with an introduction and a glossary (edited by) Daniel Jeyaraj (Mylapore Institute for Indigenous Studies, 2006)
• A History of Christianity in India (1707–1858) (by) Stephen Neill
• Christians meeting Hindus: an analysis and theological critique of the Hindu-Christian encounter in India (by) Bob Robinson (OCMS, 2004)
• The Christian library, Volumes 5-6 (by) Thos. George, Jr. (1835)
• Serendipities: Language and Lunacy (by) Umberto Eco

See also

• Calendar of Saints (Lutheran)
  Calendar of Saints (Lutheran)
  The Lutheran Calendar of Saints is a listing which details the primary annual festivals and events that are celebrated liturgically by some Lutheran Churches in the United States. The calendars of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America and the Lutheran Church - Missouri Synod are from the...
  
  
• Missionaries