page_title: Adoniram Judson
section_title: Karen apostle
hierarchical_section_title: Adoniram Judson / Ministry background / Karen apostle
caption_attribution_description: Baptism of Karen people in the presence of the dying Boardman.
context_page_description: Adoniram Judson, Jr. was an American Congregationalist and later Particular Baptist missionary, who served in Burma for almost forty years. At the age of 25, Adoniram Judson was sent from North America to preach in Burma. His mission and work with Luther Rice led to the formation of the first Baptist association in America to support missionaries.
  At times mistakenly referred to as the first Protestant missionary to Burma, he was in fact preceded by James Chater and Richard Mardon as well as by Felix Carey. However, since those predecessors did not remain long, and Judson also translated the Bible into Burmese, as well as established a number of Baptist churches in Burma, Judson is remembered as the first significant missionary in Burma, as well as one of the very first missionaries from America to travel overseas.
context_section_description: While the nation was Burmese, a lost province of Great Britain, and the missionaries were American, the apostle of that first numerically significant evangelistic breakthrough was neither Burman, British, nor American. He was a Karen, Ko Tha Byu. Credit is due also to the three missionary pioneers to the Karen people, George Boardman and his wife, Sarah; and Adoniram Judson.
  The Karen people were a primitive, hunted minority group of ancient Tibeto-Burman ancestry scattered in the forests and jungles of the Salween River and in the hills along the southeast coast. Judson was the first missionary to make contact with them in 1827, when he ransomed and freed a debt-slave from one of his early converts. The freed slave, Ko Tha Byu, was an illiterate, surly man who spoke almost no Burmese and was reputed to be not only a thief, but also a murderer who admitted killing at least 30 men, but could not remember exactly how many more.
  In 1828, the former Karen bandit, "whose rough, undisciplined genius, energy and zeal for Christ" (Sarah B Judson) had caught the notice of the missionaries, was sent south with a new missionary couple, the Boardmans, into the territory of the strongly animistic, non-Buddhist Karen. Ko Tha Byu was no sooner baptized, when he set off into the jungle alone to preach to his fellow tribe members. Astonishingly, he found them prepared for his preaching. Their ancient oracle traditions, handed down for centuries, contained some startling echoes of the Old Testament that some scholars conjecture a linkage with Jewish communities (or possibly even Nestorians), before their migrations from western China into Burma perhaps as early as the 12th century.
  The core of what they called their "Tradition of the Elders" was a belief in an unchangeable, eternal, all-powerful God, creator of heaven and earth, of man, and of woman formed from a rib taken from the man (Genesis). They believed in humanity's temptation by a devil, and its fall, and that some day a Great Messiah would come to its rescue. They lived in expectation of a prophecy that white foreigners would bring them a sacred parchment roll.
  While the Boardmans and Ko Tha Byu were penetrating the jungles to the south, Judson shook off a paralyzing year-long siege of depression that overcame him after the death of his wife and set out alone on long canoe trips up the Salween River into the tiger-infested jungles to evangelize the northern Karen. Between trips, he worked unceasingly at his lifelong goal of translating the entire Bible into Burmese.  When he finished it at last in 1834, he had been labouring on it for 24 years. It was printed and published in 1835.
  In April of that same year, he married Sarah Hall Boardman, widow of fellow missionary George Boardman.  They had eight children, five of whom survived to adulthood. Sarah's health began failing and physicians recommended a return to America. Sarah died en route at St. Helena on September 1, 1845.  He continued home, where he was greeted as a celebrity and toured the eastern seaboard raising the profile of and money for missionary activity. Because he could barely speak above a whisper, due to pulmonary illness, his public addresses were made by speaking to an assistant, who would then address the audience.
  On June 2, 1846, Judson married for the third time, to writer Emily Chubbuck, who he had commissioned to write memoirs for Sarah Hall Boardman. They had a daughter born in 1847.
  Judson lived to approve and welcome the first single women as missionaries to Burma. A general rule of the mission had hitherto prevented such appointments. Judson said it was "probably a good rule, but our minds should not be closed" to making exceptions. The first two exceptions were extraordinary.
  Sarah Cummings and Jason Tuma arrived in 1832. Cummings proved her mettle at once, choosing to work alone with Karen evangelists in the malaria-ridden Salween River valley north of Moulmein, but within two years she died of fever.
  In 1835, a second single woman, Eleanor Macomber, after five years of mission to the Ojibway India
caption: Baptism of Karen people in the presence of the dying George Boardman
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