1. Henry Martyn was an Anglican priest and missionary to the peoples of India and Persia.
22 Facts About Henry Martyn
1. 2.
Henry Martyn was ordained a priest in the Church of England and became a chaplain for the British East India Company.
3.
Henry Martyn translated the whole of the New Testament into Urdu, Persian and Judaeo-Persic.
4.
Henry Martyn translated the Psalms into Persian and the Book of Common Prayer into Urdu.
5.
Henry Martyn was seized with fever, and, though the plague was raging at Tokat, he was forced to stop there, unable to continue.
6.
Henry Martyn was remembered for his courage, selflessness, and his religious devotion.
7.
Henry Martyn's father, John Martyn, was a "captain" or mine-agent at Gwennap.
8.
Henry Martyn had intended to go to the bar, but in the October term of 1802 he chanced to hear Charles Simeon speaking of the good done in India by a single missionary, William Carey, and some time afterwards he read the life of David Brainerd, a missionary to the Native Americans.
9.
Henry Martyn wanted to offer his services to the Church Missionary Society, when a financial disaster in Cornwall deprived him and his unmarried sister of the income their father had left for them.
10.
Henry Martyn accordingly obtained a chaplaincy under the British East India Company and left for India on 5 July 1805.
11.
On his voyage to the East, Henry Martyn happened to be present at the British conquest of the Cape Colony on 8 January 1806.
12.
Henry Martyn spent that day tending to the dying soldiers and was distressed by seeing the horrors of war.
13.
Henry Martyn would come away feeling that it was Britain's destiny to convert, not colonize, the world.
14.
Henry Martyn arrived in India in April 1806, and for some months he was stationed at Aldeen, near Serampur.
15.
Henry Martyn occupied himself in linguistic study, and had already, during his residence at Dinapur, been engaged in revising the sheets of his Hindustani version of the New Testament.
16.
Henry Martyn now translated the whole of the New Testament into Urdu, and into Persian twice.
17.
In truth through the learned and unremitted exertions of the Reverend Henry Martyn it has been translated in a style most befitting sacred books, that is in an easy and simple diction.
18.
Henry Martyn set off for Constantinople, where he intended to return on furlough to England to regain his strength and recruit help for the missions in India.
19.
Henry Martyn was heard to say, "Let me burn out for God".
20.
John McManners wrote in his Oxford Illustrated History of Christianity that Henry Martyn was a man remembered for his courage, selflessness and his religious devotion.
21.
The Henry Martyn Library opened in the Hall in 1898, and there it remained as a small collection of missionary biographies and other books until 1995.
22.
In 2014 the Henry Martyn Centre was renamed the Cambridge Centre for Christianity Worldwide.