Bartholomaeus Ziegenbalg
From Missiopedia
Back to Biographies of 2nd millennium AD
Contents |
[edit] Bartholomaeus Ziegenbalg
[edit] Start of the Tamil mission at Tranquebar
2005 was the celebration of the 300th anniversary of the first Protestant mission, the s. c. Tranquebar mission. Here the initiative came from the Christian King of Denmark and Norway, Frederick IV, he discovered two young Halle-trained Pietists, Bartholomäus Ziegenbalg (1683–1719) and Heinrich Plütschau (1678–1747). Ordained at Copenhagen in 1705, they became the founders of the famous Tamil mission at Tranquebar. The king sent the German missionaries Bartholomaeus Ziegenbalg and Heinrich Plütschau to India to spread the gospel to the new subjects of the King in the Danish colony Tranquebar.
[edit] Mission principle
Believing that people best hear and learn the Gospel in their own language and cultural context, their first tasks were to learn Tamil and to understand Hinduism. They preached for a definite conversion as the point of entry into Christianity. Ziegenbalg and Plütschau operated a school for reading and writing in Tamil, so that each convert could read the Scriptures. Ziegenbalg translated the Scriptures, Luther's Catechisms, and other works into Tamil. The missionaries encouraged indigenous leadership of Indian Christians; the first Indian pastor, a convert from Hinduism, was ordained in 1733. In several years' time there was a Christian community of about 350 in Tranquebar. The first Protestant missionaries who stayed in India for a longer period were the Lutheran missionaries of the Royal Danish-Halle Mission, also known as the Tranquebar Mission. They established churches, schools, orphanages, a printing press, a paper mill, a mission library and an internationally cooperating network. They studied and documented not only the religious life, but also the plant and animal life of South India.
[edit] History of the Tamil mission at Tranquebar
From the arrival of the first missionary Bartholomäus Ziegenbalg (1682–1719) in Tranquebar in 1706 to the death of the last missionary August Frederick Kammerer in 1837, there were fifty-four missionaries working in India. [1]
