This week in Christian history: Willow Creek Community Church opens, Knights Templar arrested, Henry Martyn dies
Henry Martyn died – Oct. 16, 1812
This week marks the anniversary of when Henry Martyn, a British missionary to Asia who helped translate the Bible into multiple languages, died at age 31 from various illnesses.
A native of Truro, England, Martyn became a chaplain for the British East India Company, then a missionary in India, later traveling to modern-day Iran where he debated Muslim scholars.
Along his considerable travels, Martyn regularly suffered from illness, but nevertheless persisted in translating parts of the Bible into Arabic, Persian and Urdu, and creating an Anglican prayer book in Urdu as well.
It was on his journey from Persia to modern-day Istanbul, Turkey that Martyn finally succumbed to illness, being given an official burial with honors from local Armenian Church clergy.
When she learned of his death months later, Martyn’s life Lydia reportedly wrote in her diary that she “wished to have been honored of God so far as to have been near him, or that some friend had been.”
