By Jonathan Arnold, General Secretary 

Robert Jermain Thomas was a nineteenth century missionary who was instrumental in bringing the Scriptures to Korea. This Welsh Protestant missionary, was only young when he heard of the need for Scriptures in Korea. He studied Chinese and Korean, after which he began his mission work in China. He was subsequently able to travel to Korea twice. In 1866 the Rev. Thomas travelled towards Pyongyang (the modern day capital city of North Korea) in an American trading ship called the General Sherman. Westerners were viewed with great suspicion and the boat was attacked, eventually being set on fire. The Rev. Thomas continued with the task of distributing the Scriptures from the boat. After he had distributed all the books but one, he left the burning boat, taking with him his last copy of the Bible. It is said he stretched out this copy towards the soldier waiting for him on shore and begged him to accept the Bible, shutting his eyes to pray. The soldier hesitated to execute him, but then did so, and so the Rev. Thomas gave his life for the Gospel.

These final moments spent in distributing the Scriptures were used by God to lay a foundation. In a letter dated 16 January 1928, the Rev. Han Suk Chin, a minister in Korea who assisted the Rev. Dr S. A. Moffett in establishing the church in Pyongyang, wrote,

I came to Pyongyang for the first time in October 1892. That was only twenty-five or six years after Mr. Thomas’s death. If I had tried to find out something about his preaching at that time, I could have obtained quite a good many interesting facts. But I did not pay any attention to it at all, and I only heard about him when I was going round that district to preach as a colporteur. The people who had witnessed the events of that time, said that they had seen a foreigner on deck saying ‘Jesus’ and throwing out many books to the shore when the foreign vessel was being burnt, and they also said that the books I was selling were the same as those thrown by the foreigner.¹

Missionaries in the following years later heard accounts of an eleven-year-old boy named Choi Chi Ryang who went down to the riverbanks with his uncle to see the foreigners on the General Sherman and brought back three copies of the Scriptures. Another person, a woman named Lee Shin Haing, also came back with a book, and a man, Kim Chang Koo, got hold of several copies and brought them home. However, after a few days an edict was issued threatening with arrest any person who might be found possessing such books. Many people may have thrown them away, but a clerk of the Prefectural Office named Pak Young Sik gathered them up and used them as wallpaper in his house just inside the East Gate of Pyongyang, which was later bought by Choi Chi Ryang.² These premises were subsequently used as a church. Years later in 1893, Samuel A. Moffett discovered, on forming a catechism class, a man who received a Bible in China from the Rev. Thomas before he died.³

This is a moving example of someone’s dedication to distribute the Word of God in perilous circumstances. I trust it might humble and inspire us as we serve the Lord in this generation, that we, by God’s grace, might have a burden for the distribution of God’s Word.

Samuel Moffet noted the position of the view of Scripture and the place it had in mission work,

[T]he one great God-given means for the evangelisation of a people is His own Word, and … the emphasis which has been placed upon the teaching and preaching of the Word of God has brought God’s own blessing upon the work in Korea. The one great commanding feature of the work in Korea has been the position, the supreme position, the perhaps almost unparalleled position given to instruction in the Scriptures as the very Word of God and the power of God unto salvation to every one that believeth.⁴

First published in Quarterly Record 646. Edited for online publication.