Mission The Life of Nathan Brown, Early American Missionary

Assam, India

Nathan Brown was an American Missionary, born in the year 1807 in New Ipswich, New Hampshire. He is associated with the Haystack Movement that began unofficially at Williams College in Williamstown, Mass. He attended Williams College at the age of 16, graduating at the top of his class in 1827.

After finishing missionary training, he travelled with wife to Burma, with intent of translating and publishing the Bible in Burmese.

With Rev. Oliver Cutter and Rev. Mile Bronson, he began a much more successful mission in what is now the NorthEast Indian State of Assam. Miles Bronson published the first Assamese-English Dictionary in 1846, and Nathan Brown published an Assamese Grammar in 1848, a translation of the New Testament in Assamese in 1850.

Perhaps the most interesting outcomes of the mission was the association of the Indian philosopher Dr. Hemchandra Barua, who studied English at the mission. Dr. Barua later became editor of the mission's local language magazine Arunodoy and went on to become publisher of The Assam Times, wherein he did much crusading for equal education of women and men, elder rights and other issues. As a reformer, Dr. Hemchandra in turn was an influence and inspiration for Nathan Brown.

Rev Brown returned home to the United States in 1850, to work for the anti-slavery movement (abolitionist movement). His brother, William G. Brown was publisher of the profoundly abolitionist newspaper Vermont Times, and Nathan Brown himself published antislavery material under a pen name, a satire in which the institution of slavery was called "The Black Dragon". Maharba

In 1872, Rev. Brown travelled to Japan to join Jonathan Gobel, the first Baptist missionary to Japan. Rev. Gobel had arrived in 1860, during the time when Christianity was still illegal. In 1876, they saw the first Baptist Chuch built in Tokyo. In 1884, this church established a theological school, which later became Kanto Gakuin University in 1949.
In 1878, in cooperation with a Japanese scholar, T. Kawakatsu, he completed a translation of the Bible from the oldest Greek manuscripts known at that time into Japanese, cumulating with The Revelation of St. John, published by the Yokohama Mission Press/ American Bible Translation Society. In an apartment in Yokohama, He and his son produced several thousand of the Bibles

Links to other sites on the Web

PHOTOGRAPH of ELIZA BROWN
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iabolish.org Modern Day AntiSlavery Organisation

Beliefnet.com
Internet Public Library

Text work in progress. File initiated 9-4-98

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