Herbert Udny Weitbrecht

Herbert Udny Weitbrecht (born January 24, 1851 in London , † May 30, 1937 in Highbury ) was a German-born Protestant missionary and scholar of Islam .

Live and act

The son of the India missionary Johann Jakob Weitbrecht (1802-1852) and Martha Edwards (1808-1888) and brother-in-law of theology professor Theodor Christlieb attended school in the London district of Islington and then studied religious studies at the University of Bonn , where his brother-in-law taught. Weitbrecht continued his studies in Berlin and Tübingen and graduated in 1873 with a doctorate in philosophy.

Then Weitbrecht returned to England and from 1874 worked initially as a deacon at the Christ Church in the Liverpool district of Everton and a year later in the diocese of Chester . In 1876 he sailed to India on behalf of the Church Mission Society (CMS) and from 1878 to 1884 he took on the post of deputy director of St. John's Divinity School in Lahore , where Indian pastors were trained, and in 1883 was a member of the college of local University of the Punjab selected. A year later, Weitbrecht was transferred as a district missionary to Batala, where he was appointed chief adviser to lead a committee of Indian and foreign missionaries whose main task was to translate the New Testament into the Indo-Aryan language, Urdu . In 1886 Weitbrecht was appointed literary missionary for the CMS and in this capacity he oversaw the creation of Christian literature, which was necessary for the work of the organization. He received his PhD in 1904 on a monograph on the work of this committee and in 1906 was awarded a Doctor of Divinity (DD) Lambeth Degree by the Archbishop of Canterbury , Randall Thomas Davidson .

In the same year he visited Egypt, which was under British rule, and attended the first mission conference for Islam. His visit coincided with the founding phase of the new National Party of Egypt, and Weitbrecht drew attention to the conference that a new, young Egypt was in the making, which wanted to free itself from the Ottoman Empire and the associated revival of the Islam should take note. Then Weitbrecht was appointed acting secretary of the CMS and first in Amritsar , 1907 in Kashmir , 1908 again in Batala and from 1909 to 1911 in Shimla .

In addition, Weitbrecht had already been appointed honorary secretary of the "Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge" (SPCK) in the diocese of Lahore in 1878 and was in this function from 1886 to 1911 on behalf of the local bishops, Thomas Valpy French, Henry James Matthew and George Alfred Lefroy, responsible for the training and testing of pastors.

After 35 years of service in India, Weitbrecht returned to England in 1911, where he was appointed first secretary of the Board of Study for the Preparation of Missionaries, an organization that promoted better cooperation between missionary societies in the education of their envoys or representatives should serve. He held this office for three years and in the meantime was elected Honorary Governor for life of the Bible Society in 1912. In 1915 Weitbrecht was appointed superintendent of the “Mildmay Institute” and two years later he was made head of the “St. Catherine's Deaconess House ”in Highbury. At the end of his career in 1925, the Church Mission Society elected him as its Vice President.

After his return to London, Weitbrecht wrote several important works, including some translations, and wrote numerous articles for various missionary magazines. Due to his long stay in India and his knowledge of Arabic and Islam, he also published some notable publications on Islam in general and the Koran in particular.

Herbert Udny Weitbrecht-Stanton was married to Ellen Louise Stanton (approx. 1851-1884), whereupon he adopted the double name "Udny-Weitbrecht". Together they had a son and four daughters, two of whom died as young children.

Fonts (selection)

• Modern Doubt and Christian Belief: A Series of Apologetic Lectures Addressed to Earnest Seekers After Truth. together with Theodor Christlieb and Thomas Luck Kingsbury (eds.). T&T Clark, 1877.
• A Descriptive Catalog of Urdu Christian Literature: With a Review of the Same and a Supplementary Catalog of Christian Publications in the Other Languages ​​of the Panjab. Religious tract society, 1886.
• The Urdu New Testament: a history of its language and its versions. British and Foreign Bible Society, London 1900.
• A bibliography for missionary students, Anderson and Ferrier. Edinburgh 1913. (digitized at archive.org)
• Raymond Lull and Six Centuries of Islam. Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, London 1915. (digitized at archive.org) (New edition: Biblobazaar, 2009, ISBN 978-1-113-13687-9 )
• The Gospel According to St. Matthew. Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, London 1919. (digitized atarchive.org) (New edition: BiblioBazaar, 2009, ISBN 978-1-117-45613-3 )
• Selections from the Qur'an. Translation by John Medows Rodwell. Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, London 1922. (New edition: Kessinger Publishing, 2010, ISBN 978-1-120-86582-3 ). (digitized at archive.org)
• Texts for Students. 1922. (New edition: NabuPress, 2012, ISBN 978-1-276-24361-2 )

Literature and Sources

• Church Mission Society. Archives, Section III, Central Records. Part I CMS Register of Missionaries, 1804-1918.
• Paul Weitbrecht: News from the history of the Weitbrecht, Duensing, Sattler and Hölder families. Private print, Stuttgart 1945.

Web links

• Obituary and vita on rootsweb (English) Source there: Obituary in The Times of June 2, 1937, p. 21 (digital archive)
• Obituary In: The Muslim World. Vol. XXVII, No. 4, Oct. 1937, p. 325.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Lambeth Degree ( Memento of the original from December 30, 2010 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.