Few brilliant students trade a secure career for a life of exhaustion, illness, and loneliness. Henry Martyn did exactly that: the top mathematician of his class at Cambridge chose to spend the few years left to him translating the Bible into languages most Englishmen of his day did not even know existed.
Born in Truro, Cornwall, on 18 February 1781, Martyn graduated from Cambridge as Senior Wrangler, first in mathematics in his year, in 1801. Charles Simeon’s preaching about the missionary William Carey and reading the biography of David Brainerd changed the course of his life.
Ordained in the Church of England, Martyn planned to serve as a missionary, but a financial setback in his family forced him to accept a chaplaincy with the East India Company. He sailed for India in July 1805 and, on arriving in Calcutta, wrote in his journal: “Now let me burn out for God.”
At the stations of Dinapore and Cawnpore, he preached, opened schools, and devoted exhausting hours to language study. With the help of Indian scholars, he produced a careful translation of the New Testament into Urdu, completed in 1808 and recognized as the finest of its time. Around the same time, with the help of the controversial Sabat, he produced a first Persian version, but it became so laden with erudite Arabic terms that he decided to redo it himself in Persia.
The work took a heavy toll. Ill with tuberculosis and physically exhausted, Martyn refused to slow down. Before sailing, he had fallen in love with Lydia Grenfell and even asked her to join him in India, but she could not accept, bound by family obligations. The two never met again, and Martyn kept that unanswered love until the end of his life, never marrying. This boundless devotion carried him to Persia before his body was ready for the journey.
In Shiraz, he debated for months with Muslims, Jews, and Sufis while redoing his Persian translation from scratch from the original Greek, with the help of the scholar Mirza Sayyed Ali. He even found time to dream of an Arabic version, a project illness would not let him begin. Already ill, he tried to personally deliver the revised text to Shah Fath-Ali in Tabriz but could not obtain an audience. The translation only reached the shah’s hands later, carried by the British ambassador Gore Ouseley, who received from the shah a letter praising its clarity, by which time Martyn was no longer alive to know it.
On his way to England, already feverish, he crossed Armenia toward Constantinople. Plague stopped him in Tokat, in present-day Turkey, where he died on 16 October 1812, at age 31, buried by Armenian clergy far from home and from Lydia.
His translation of the New Testament into Persian remained in use for generations and helped shape a model of mission that respects the language and culture of the people reached. The motto attributed to him, “burn out for God,” is still quoted by missionaries facing difficult fields with short life expectancy. His story is also remembered as a warning: the same relentless discipline that produced lasting translations also led him to ignore repeated medical warnings and travel while ill until his death, at 31, never seeing again the woman he loved.
