Bartholomäus Ziegenbalg

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Bartholomäus Ziegenbalg
Silver bust of Bartholomäus Ziegenbalg in Tranquebar.
Golden bust of Bartholomäus Ziegenbalg behind the school square to the right of the Tranquebar high school.
Monument of Bartholomäus Ziegenbalg in Tranquebar.
The golden monument of Bartholomäus Ziegenbalg in Tranquebar.
Portrait of Bartholomäus Ziegenbalg on the monument in Tranquebar.
Monument on Tranquebar Beach.
Copper engraving.

Bartholomäus Ziegenbalg ( Tamil பர்த்தலோமேயு சீகன்பால்க் ; * July 10, 1682 in Pulsnitz ; † February 23, 1719 in Tranquebar ) was the first German Protestant missionary in India from 1706 . He came to South India with the Danish-Halle Mission , learned the Tamil language and translated the Bible, which came out as the so-called Tranquebar Bible in 1713. He founded schools, a children's home and in 1707 the first Evangelical Lutheran Tamil community in Tranquebar, where he also had the New Jerusalem Church built.

life and work

Tranquebar Mission Station
The New Jerusalem Church was built in Tranquebar between 1707 and 1718. Bartholomäus Ziegenbalg is buried in her cemetery.
The Zionskirche in Tranquebar in 1922. It was built in 1707 by Bartholomäus Ziegenbalg.

Bartholomäus Ziegenbalg, who was born in 1682 (according to other sources 1683) as the son of a grain trader in Pulsnitz, Saxony , attended school in Kamenz and from 1694 the grammar school in Görlitz . Ziegenbalg was an orphan at the age of twelve; his eldest sister took care of him afterwards. In 1702 he moved to the Friedrichswerder grammar school in Berlin under the pietistic rector Joachim Lange . In Berlin he also met Philipp Jakob Spener , a leading figure in the newly emerging Pietism . From 1703 he studied theology at the University of Halle as a student of August Hermann Francke . For health reasons he was unable to complete his studies, and he became a teacher at a private school in Merseburg , in Erfurt and an auditor in Pulsnitz and in Werder near Berlin .

On October 1, 1705, Ziegenbalg was called to serve in the Danish-Halle Mission together with Heinrich Plütschau and a little later by the Danish King Friedrich IV and his court preacher Franz Julius Lütkens to the Danish colony of Tranquebar (today: Tharangambadi ) on the southeast coast of India Subcontinent , where he arrived on July 9, 1706 with the ship Sophia Hedwig . While on the voyage he wrote his work General School of True Wisdom . He carried out his work with great difficulty and hostility from the Europeans who were already living there. Resistance to his work was especially shown by the Danish East India Company , which saw its trade interests threatened. He soon came into conflict with the unchristian way of life of the Europeans in Tranquebar. The commandant Johann Sigismund Hassius called him "Teufelsknecht" or " Thomas Münzer ". Ziegenbalg even had to go to prison for several months.

Ziegenbalg decided to take the then very unusual step of learning the Tamil language in order to be able to work better. He was the first to translate the New Testament (NT) and larger parts of the Old Testament into Tamil in 1711 . The Tranquebar Bible could be produced in 1713 with a German printing machine imported from Halle. He also translated the Lutheran Catechism and created a Tamil hymn book and other Tamil scriptures . Conversely, Ziegenbalg translated Tamil books into German. He got involved in the social sector, including founding a children's home and schools. In 1707 he founded the first Evangelical Lutheran Tamil congregation in Tranquebar and had the New Jerusalem Church built there. His detailed description of "Malabar paganism", written in 1711, and his "Geneaology of the Malabar gods" (1716) were sent to AH Francke in Halle. Francke took little pleasure in these fonts and wrote to Ziegenbalg after Tranquebar that these fonts could not possibly be printed. The missionaries were sent to India to eradicate paganism and not to spread pagan nonsense in Europe. The two works were only published in print in excerpts decades after Ziegenbalg's death. Ziegenbalg himself was convinced of the value of this work and drew the attention of the Huguenot scholar Maturin Veyssière de La Croze, who lives in Berlin, to his unused manuscripts in Halle. He then had the manuscripts come from Halle and used them as the basis for his Histoire du christianisme des Indes , published in 1724 .

Between 1714 and 1716 he visited Germany, where he met Maria Dorothea Salzmann, the daughter of a Merseburg official, and married on June 4, 1715 in Halle. He returned with her as the first German missionary woman to return to Tranquebar. On his return he campaigned to establish a seminary for local Christians to train them to preach the gospel. The mission officers in Denmark did not understand this step and also Ziegenbalg's earlier decisions and working methods and criticized him heavily.

The strains of his diverse work and the climate weakened the already ailing missionary so much that he died in Tranquebar at the age of only 36. His close colleague Johann Ernst Gründler became his successor. 250 Tamil Christians from the Jerusalem Church mourned him.

Afterlife

Tranquebar Bible
A page from the Tranquebar Bible from 1713, the first edition of the Bible in Tamil in the translation by Bartholomäus Ziegenbalg

In Tamil Nadu, Ziegenbalg's 13 years of activity resulted in the Evangelical Lutheran Tamil Church (TELC), which still exists today .

In addition, he established some principles of evangelical missionary work, which later regional and free church mission organizations have also adopted. This includes:

  • Use of the colloquial language of the local population,
  • Dealing with the cultural realities,
  • Translation of the Bible into everyday language, possibly even development of a script,
  • Literacy , building schools and founding orphanages,
  • Train local ministers and missionaries.

The Pulsnitz community of St. Nicolai , where Ziegenbalg was born, has been in close contact with Tranquebar again since 1982, collected funds for the victims of the 2004 tsunami, which also hit Tranquebar, and supports a children's home that was built on Ziegenbalg's initiative. Young people from Pulsnitz and Tranquebar visit each other alternately.

From July 9, 2006 to July 9, 2007, the theologian celebrated his 325th birthday with a goat-bellows year.

Remembrance days:

Own works

Grave slab of Bartholomäus Ziegenbalg in Tranquebar ( Tharangambadi )
  • Good news from East India, which two Evangelical Lutheran Preachers, Nahmentlich, Mr. Bartholomäus Ziegenbalg, born in Pulsnitz in Meissen, and Mr. Heinrich Plütscho, Von Wesenberg in Mecklenburg, Sun ... November 29th. 1705. sent from Copenhagen to Dero East Indian Colonie in Trangebar, ... signed to some preachers and good friends in Berlin, and promoted by them for printing . Leipzig and Frankfurt am Main 1708 ( online ). Wikisource text
  • General school of true wisdom . Frankfurt and Leipzig 1710 ( online ).
  • Biblia Damulica . 1713. ("Tranquebar Bible", first Bible edition in Tamil in the translation by Bartholomäus Ziegenbalg)
  • Grammatica Damulica . Hall 1716 ( online ).
  • Brief message from his trip to Europe from East India . Hall 1716 ( online ).
  • Description of the religion, and sacred customs of the Malabar Hindous: collected from notes in Hindostan . Publishing house of the Royal Prussian Academic Art and Bookshop, Berlin 1791 ( online ).
  • Ziegenbalg, Bartholomäus: Genealogy of the Malabrish gods: from own writings and letters of the pagans . Ed .: Germann, Wilhelm. Madras, et al. 1867 ( online ).
  • Werner Raupp (ed.): Mission in source texts. History of the German Evangelical Mission from the Reformation to the World Mission Conference Edinburgh 1910, Erlangen / Bad Liebenzell 1990 (source excerpts including introduction and literature), pp. 138–163, esp. 141–154.

literature

Web links

Commons : Ziegenbalg  - Collection of images, videos and audio files
Indian postage stamp
German texts
Wikisource: Bartholomäus Ziegenbalg  - Sources and full texts
English texts

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c d e f g Andreas Kirschke: Missionar mit Visionen , In: Der Sonntag No. 28 of July 9, 2006, p. 5
  2. ↑ Paul Richter:  Ziegenbalg, Bartholomäus . In: Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie (ADB). Volume 45, Duncker & Humblot, Leipzig 1900, pp. 155-159.
  3. ↑ Paul Richter:  Ziegenbalg, Bartholomäus . In: Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie (ADB). Volume 45, Duncker & Humblot, Leipzig 1900, pp. 155-159.
  4. ↑ Brigitte Klosterberg: The "mission archive" in the archive of the Francke Foundations in Halle . In: MIDA Archival Reflexicon . 2020, p. 1 ( projekt-mida.de ).
  5. ↑ Roland Sckerl: Tranquebar - Pictures from the first hundred years of Lutheran missions in India. Three short biographies compiled from old reports.
  6. ^ The parial legend in Bartholomäus Ziegenbalg . In: Theodor Zachariae (ed.): Small writings on Indian philology, comparative literary history, comparative folklore . Verlag Kurt Schroeder, Bonn and Leipzig 1920, p. 125-134 ( online - first published in: Zeitschrift des Verein für Volkskunde 12, pp. 449-456 (1902)).
  7. ^ Arno Lehmann:  Gründler, Johann Ernst. In: New German Biography (NDB). Volume 7, Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 1966, ISBN 3-428-00188-5 , p. 189 f. ( Digitized version ).
  8. ↑ Paul Richter:  Ziegenbalg, Bartholomäus . In: Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie (ADB). Volume 45, Duncker & Humblot, Leipzig 1900, pp. 155-159.
  9. ^ "Sunday" No. 27 of July 8, 2007
  10. ↑ Bartholomäus Ziegenbalg in the Ecumenical Lexicon of Saints
personal data
SURNAME Ziegenbalg, Bartholomäus
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German Protestant missionary and Bible translator into the Tamil language
DATE OF BIRTH July 10, 1682
PLACE OF BIRTH Pulsnitz , Upper Lusatia
DATE OF DEATH February 23, 1719
Place of death Tranquebar , India