Adoniram Judson (1788–1850) was one of the first missionaries sent overseas from the United States and spent nearly forty years in Burma, now Myanmar. He and his wife Ann arrived in 1813, waited six years for their first Burmese convert, and endured war, imprisonment, and the deaths of loved ones. Judson translated the entire Bible into Burmese and wrote a Burmese dictionary still respected today. Myanmar now has one of the largest Baptist communities in the world, a harvest grown from seeds Judson and Burmese believers planted.
A Brilliant Skeptic Meets God
Judson was born on August 9, 1788, in Malden, Massachusetts, the son of a Congregational minister. He was exceptionally bright, reading at three and entering what is now Brown University at sixteen. He graduated at the top of his class in 1807.
At college he became close friends with Jacob Eames, a witty classmate who rejected Christianity in favor of Deism, the belief that God created the world but doesn’t interact with it. Judson adopted his friend’s views, and his parents were heartbroken. In 1808, while traveling, Judson stayed overnight at a country inn and spent a sleepless night listening to the groans of a dying man in the next room. He wondered whether that man was ready to face death, and whether he himself was. The next morning he learned the man had died, and that he was Jacob Eames. Shaken to the core, Judson began a serious search for truth. He entered Andover Theological Seminary, and by the end of 1808 he had dedicated his life to Christ.
Called to the Nations
At Andover, Judson joined a group of students who were burning to take the gospel overseas. Some of them had been part of the famous Haystack Prayer Meeting at Williams College in 1806, where students sheltering from a thunderstorm prayed for world missions, an early fruit of the Second Great Awakening described in What Were the Great Awakenings?. Inspired in part by reports of William Carey, whose story we told in Lesson 2, Judson and his friends petitioned the Congregational churches of Massachusetts, which formed the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions in 1810.
On February 5, 1812, Judson married Ann Hasseltine, a gifted and devout young woman who understood exactly what she was signing up for. Before agreeing, Adoniram had written to her father asking whether he could consent to never seeing his daughter again in this world. Two weeks later, on February 19, they sailed from Salem for India.
During the long voyage, Judson studied the New Testament to prepare for meeting Carey and his Baptist colleagues, expecting to defend infant baptism. Instead, he and Ann became convinced that baptism should follow personal faith. William Ward baptized them in Calcutta on September 6, 1812. Their decision meant resigning from the Congregational mission board that had sent them. Their colleague Luther Rice, who reached the same conviction, returned to America and rallied Baptist churches to support them, which led to the founding of the first national Baptist mission body in 1814.
Six Years for One Convert
The East India Company refused to let the Judsons stay in India, so after a difficult search they landed in Rangoon, Burma, on July 13, 1813. Burma was a Buddhist kingdom ruled by an absolute monarch, and there were no known Burmese Protestant Christians. The Judsons threw themselves into learning a language with no grammar or dictionary available in English. Their first child, a son named Roger, died as an infant.
Judson built a zayat, an open-air shelter where Burmese people traditionally gathered to talk about religion, and sat there day after day discussing the gospel with anyone who stopped. In 1819, after six years, a man named Maung Nau professed faith in Christ and was baptized. Judson rejoiced over a single changed life, and soon others followed. Becoming a Christian in Burma was dangerous, because leaving Buddhism could be seen as disloyalty to the king. In early 1820 Judson and a fellow missionary traveled up the Irrawaddy River to the royal court at Ava to ask King Bagyidaw for religious freedom, but the king tossed their gospel tract aside, and they returned to Rangoon disappointed. Still, the small church kept growing, one costly decision at a time, as Burmese believers counted the cost and followed Jesus anyway. Jesus described this kind of slow, costly fruitfulness.
John 12:24 Very truly I tell you, unless a kernel of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains only a single seed. But if it dies, it produces many seeds.
Ann was a missionary in her own right. She ran a school for girls, translated portions of Scripture, and wrote letters and books that stirred thousands of Christians back home to pray and give for missions.
The Death Prison at Ava
In 1824 war broke out between Britain and Burma. The Judsons had moved to Ava, the royal capital, and because Adoniram looked like an Englishman, Burmese officials arrested him as a suspected spy in June 1824. He was thrown into a notorious prison, bound in heavy fetters, and at night had his feet hoisted off the ground on a bamboo pole in crowded, filthy conditions. He was later marched barefoot to a rural prison at Aungbinle, where he nearly died.
For roughly a year and a half Ann walked miles to the prison, pleaded with officials, and brought food to keep him alive, all while pregnant and then nursing a baby daughter. Tradition says she hid his New Testament manuscript inside a hard pillow so it would survive. Paul’s words fit these months well.
2 Corinthians 4:8-9 We are hard pressed on every side, but not crushed; perplexed, but not in despair; persecuted, but not abandoned; struck down, but not destroyed.
Judson was finally released in late 1825 and pressed into service as a translator for the peace negotiations. But the ordeal had broken Ann’s health. She died of fever on October 24, 1826, while Adoniram was away, and their little daughter Maria died a few months later.
The Dark Night and the Finished Bible
Grief crushed Judson. He withdrew into the jungle, built a hut, and spent long periods alone. He dug a grave and sat by it, meditating on death. He wrote that God had become to him “the Great Unknown,” whom he believed in but could not find. Many Christians are surprised that a famous missionary went through such darkness, but Judson’s honesty can comfort anyone who has felt God’s silence.
Psalm 42:5 Why, my soul, are you downcast? Why so disturbed within me? Put your hope in God, for I will yet praise him, my Savior and my God.
Slowly, Judson came back to life and to his work. He finished translating the entire Bible into Burmese in 1834 and spent years revising it with Burmese helpers. Like William Tyndale in England, he believed people needed God’s Word in their own language. He also compiled a Burmese-English dictionary. His translation remains a foundation for Burmese Scripture today. In 1834 he married Sarah Boardman, a missionary widow who was a capable linguist and translator. She died in 1845, and in 1846 he married the writer Emily Chubbuck, who outlived him.
The Karen and the Church in Burma
The greatest growth in Judson’s lifetime came among the Karen, a minority people in the hills. Their story centers on a Karen man named Tha Byu, who had a violent past and had been held as a debt slave. He came to faith through Judson’s teaching and was baptized in 1828. Though he could barely read, Tha Byu became a tireless evangelist, and by his death in 1840 well over a thousand Karen had been baptized. Many Karen were especially open because of an old oral tradition about a lost book from God that a brother from across the sea would one day bring back to them, and some heard the Bible as the fulfillment of that hope. Missionaries such as George and Sarah Boardman worked closely with Tha Byu, but the movement belonged to the Karen themselves. Karen believers took the gospel from village to village, and today Karen Christians remain a strong presence in Myanmar and among refugees around the world.
Judson’s health failed in 1850, and doctors sent him on a sea voyage to recover. He died aboard ship on April 12, 1850, and was buried at sea in the Bay of Bengal. When he arrived in Burma, there were no known Burmese Protestant believers. Today Myanmar has thousands of Baptist congregations, many of them still reading the Bible he translated. When asked about the prospects for missions, Judson is often quoted as saying that the future is as bright as the promises of God. In Lesson 4, you’ll meet another missionary who learned to trust those promises in China.
The Takeaway
Adoniram Judson was an American missionary who spent nearly forty years in Burma. He waited six years for a convert, survived a brutal prison, and buried two wives and several children, yet he translated the whole Bible into Burmese and helped plant a church that now numbers well over a million. Alongside Burmese and Karen believers like Maung Nau and Tha Byu, Judson shows that faithfulness through suffering can bear fruit for generations.
https://www.pursuegod.org/history-makers-of-world-missions/
