Danish-Halle Mission
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Danish-Halle Mission
King Frederick IV. of Denmark and Norway, influenced partly by his chaplain, Dr. Lütkens, and partly by the news of the formation in England of a society for propagating the Gospel, was led in 1705 to reflect that the Danish East India Company was for ninety years Danish in Danish hands with the settlemant Tranquebar. He got on contact with August Hermann Francke at Halle, who sent him two young men, Bartholomaeus Ziegenbalg and Heinrich Plütschau. These two young men the Danish King sent out at his own expense to the settlement at Tranquebar, a town on the Coromandel coast south of Madras, in the midst of a dense Tamil population. The story of the arrival and landing of these two pioneers, of the opposition of the Danish governor and their consequent trials, of their extraordinary industry and patience and devotion, is one of the most thrilling in the whole history of Missions. Bartholomaeus Ziegenbalg's greatest work was the translation of the New Testament and part of the Old into the Tamil language, the first Indian version of the Scriptures, which formed the basis of later revisions by Johann Philipp Fabricius (1711–1791). This Bible is still in use today.
From the arrival of the first missionary Bartholomaeus 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. Some of them are: Johann Philipp Fabricius (1711–1791), Bible translator, Christopher Samuel John (1747–1813), educator, passionate botanist and astronomical expert, Christian Frederick Schwartz (1726–1798), missionary diplomat, Christopher T. Walther (1699–1741), Hebrew scholar, Heinrich Plütschau.
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