Jonas King

    JONAS KING                                                                 ΙΩΝΑΣ ΚΙΓΚ

    Born 29 July 1792                                          Died in Athens 22 May 1869

  

Protestant Cemetery, fourth row up from the entrance – on the aisle

Jonas King undertook his evangelical mission to Greece with proverbial ‘missionary zeal’.  As a Greek speaking Congregationalist minister and Doctor of Divinity, he believed that good works mattered and that Bible study was the route to an intelligent understanding of God.  After his arrival in Greece in 1829, he energetically founded schools and disseminated thousands of religious texts. For well over 30 years he spread the Good News, as he understood it, to anyone who would listen. Many did, including a concerned and increasingly indignant Greek Orthodox Church.

 They would excommunicate him more than once and insist several times that the state prosecute him in the civil courts. By the time it was all over and King exonerated in 1854,  the British and Swedish ambassadors, the American Secretary of State, the American Minister in Constantinople, Greek lawyers, politicians, and intellectuals, would all be involved, and questions about the Greek Constitution would be raised. These sensational events were fodder for the Greek national press. It was a great story, and they knew it. 

Jonas King in native dress in Syria in the 1820s

His Life

Jonas King was born in Hawley Massachusetts.  He became a Congregational Minister and professor of oriental languages and literature at Amherst College. He spent the years 1823-1825 working for the Palestine mission of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions in Syria, distributing bibles and preaching.
In 1828 he was invited to accompany one of the vessels sent with supplies to the Greek freedom fighters. In 1829, he resumed his connection with the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions a body which would support and help finance his efforts, and married Annetta Aspasia Mengous. (1) She was a Greek citizen; King remained an American one. They would settle permanently in a house in the Plaka in 1831.

 By 1832 he had already established five schools and in 1835 began to instruct a class in theology. Many of the foreign Philhellenes who had flocked to Greece were Protestants and King was in demand for weddings, including those between Protestants and Orthodox Christians. To his obvious delight, he records in his journal that he had just presided over the marriage of Byron’s Maid of Athens  to an Englishman because the Greek Church refused to marry her to a man not of the Orthodox faith.

It became his habit to preach to visitors to his home every Sunday.

Greece’s constitution named Orthodoxy as the predominant religion; others were ‘allowable religions’ but no ‘allowable’ religion was allowed to proselytize in Greece. (2) The Greek Church may not have liked competition, but they also knew they had the decisive edge because of this constitutional clause.

It was the gatherings at his house and his preaching that tipped the scales and caused the furor. 


 In August 1845 he was excommunicated by the Holy Synod of the Kingdom of Greece which  denounced both his writings and his person,  calling him  a hypocrite, an imposter, abominable, and a vessel of Satan. Orthodox Christians were forbidden to read his books; no one was to either enter his house or drink with him on pain of excommunication. 
 
In reality this was a turf war, and the Orthodox Church had the Constitution on its side. The Synod asked the government to begin a criminal prosecution against King in the civil courts. King and his lawyers (he had his admirers and defenders) argued that meetings in his own home were not proselytizing. 
  
In September 1845, the police entered his home and confiscated 97 books.
In October of 1845 the Patriarch in Constantinople also excommunicated him.
The case went to the highest court in April 1846. They threw it back to the lower courts and he was to be tried on Syros that summer. However, threats to his life in Syros caused the governor to send him back to Athens where Sir Edmund Lyons, the British Ambassador offered him British protection. The case was becoming a cause célèbre.

The Greek government was clearly reluctant to prosecute and all was left in abeyance until June 1847 when King was again told to appear in court in Syros. The Greek Prime Minister and the Minister of Justice recalled that citation, but the public and press were, by then, in a feeding frenzy.

  In July of 1847, a series of articles entitled “The Orgies of King” appeared in an Athens newspaper purporting to describe shameful acts at the missionary's house. He was accused of all kinds of heresies.

At this point, the governor of Attica, Mr. Soutzos, stepped in and suggested that Jonas stop preaching in his home or the Ministry of Religion would be forced to act. Jonas refused and Soutzos suggested he at least stop admitting Orthodox Greeks to his home. Then the Swedish minister in Greece visited on behalf of the Greek king and suggested a journey out of the country to let things settle down and avoid a court case. 

King did leave until June 1848 when he returned, determined to ‘take whatever would come’. He resumed his Sabbath meetings and scriptural readings and the atmosphere did quiet down – for a time. 

In 1851 King was appointed the U. S. consular agent in Athens. And when hostile crowds again came to his house on 23 March 1851, he dispersed them by displaying the American flag outside of his doorway. 

He was again taken to civil court in March 1852. The charge:  “reviling the God of the universe and the Greek religion,” 

He was found guilty and condemned to fifteen days' imprisonment, to pay court costs, and to banishment when his sentence was completed. As he was taken to the notorious Medresse prison in the Plaka, he claimed that he was undismayed and “full of joy”, a heroic stance somewhat undermined because at the same time he protested against his sentence to the United States government. (3)

The gate of the infamous  Medresse today

King served a few days the Medresse and was then put under house arrest until the arrival in August of George P Marsh, (4) U.S. minister to Turkey, who had been charged by the U. S. Secretary of State to investigate the case against a United States consul, and also to look into a long-running land dispute King had been having with the Greek government. To the American government, the charge of ‘heteradox preaching’ raised the spectre of unfair persecution, especially since other religious sects in Greece were not being targeted.

 Marsh, ready for action

When Marsh arrived in Greece on the frigate San Jacinto, Athens was agog. The press labeled his arrival on a frigate a ‘terror tactic’. 

Marsh waded through the evidence (what he called ‘a mess of paperwork’) and interviewed hostile witnesses and judges. He was not impressed with King either. He found him ‘quarrelsome, plaintive, forgetful of facts and dates, testy over delays and intolerant of compromise’ qualities that had certainly helped lead him to this litigious situation in the first place.

 It took Marsh’s best efforts to get the Greeks to rescind King’s banishment and compensate him for his land but it is also likely that the Greek government was relieved that the American had stepped in when he did. It was a trial that benefited no one but fanatics on both sides.

 In 1854 an order issued by the king of Greece dropped the charge of reviling the dogmas of the Greek Church –and freed him from the penalty that had been imposed. His troubles were over but the ban on proselytism remained, and still remains.(5)

By 1867, Greek Evangelicals had taken up his baton so King refrained from preaching.  He died on May 22, 1969, at the age of 77 and was buried in Athens’ First Cemetery.

 

King’s home is still there at the corner of Flessa and Sxoleiou Streets. He hoped it would become his church, hence the style. Back in the day, his garden would have reached to Adrianou Street. It is still a beautiful building.

 

An Afterword about Protestant Evangelists in 19^th Century Greece

Jonas king was not alone. Even before 1830 and up to 1860 and beyond, there was Herculean effort on the part of American evangelicals to help the Greeks in their struggle against the “infidels” and then to aid in educating the young by publishing an astounding number of tracts and books school books (mostly but not all of a religious nature), and encouraging the reading of the New Testament. (6)  In this way, they endeavored to plant the seeds of a Protestant evangelical movement in Greece, a movement that was part of an ambitious global effort. Their hope was that, once educated, the Greeks themselves would spread the Good News over other areas of the Middle East. (7)  

 A logo for the American Board of Commissioners 

Generally, their contributions were met with approval by Greece’s leaders . King himself describes a meeting on Poros with Ioannis Kapodistria; the president firmly backed his plans for schools and the publication and dissemination of school texts. (8)  There were reasons for this. Many in the new government were intellectuals from abroad, and, although religious (everyone was a believer back then), many were firm adherents of the principles of the Enlightenment. The newly independent Greek Church was itself facing difficulties during this period (neglect, an uneducated clergy, doctrinal issues with the Patriarchate ) and in no position to take on the burden of education. And there was this: in the beginning the new government had no printing presses. The Protestant evangelicals not only had them, but were eager to put them at the disposal of a nation desperate to build schools and educate its new citizens. 

Many Protestant missionaries devoted their entire lives to missions in Greece and by doing so contributed to the nation. John and Fanny Hill  founded the Hill School (9) which still exists today in the Plaka.  Their graves are close to King’s in the Protestant Section of the First Cemetery, but their methods were far apart. The Hills consciously avoided religious disputes by co-operating wherever possible with the Orthodox Church.

King ,on the other hand, could not and would not hide his proselytizing tendencies or his prejudices. He professed open contempt or disregard for many aspects of Orthodox worship (the veneration of Mary, icons, baptismal practices) which he considered either debased or pure superstition. He had strong feelings about what constituted ‘right worship’. This made him a Saint Paul figure in his own eyes, but an agent of the devil to the Greek Orthodox Church.

Of course, the evangelicals did not achieve their ultimate goal in Greece, but they did gain acceptance. In 1874 Athens got its first Evangelical church. 

Footnotes

(1) Annetta came from a family living in Smyrna. Like most missionary wives, she stayed in the background and acted as her husband’s helpmate, especially in the school. Reading excepts from the American Board of Commissioner’s  view of a wife’s role in their evangelical plan reminded me of St John Rivers’ proposal in Jane Eyre – all business and practicality! It would have been unthinkable for an unmarried man to have undertaken King’s mission. Annetta is buried beside her husband in a grave as austere as his own. Her tombstone reads “Anna” rather than “Annetta”

(2) http://www.newjurist.com/religious-freedom-in-Greece  This excellent article by Constantinos G Margaritis in the NEWJURIST( Aug. 12, 2011) presents a comprehensive and illuminating study on the relationship between Church and state –then and now.

(3) See  http://churchesingreece.blogspot.gr/  for a history of the Medresse in the Plaka.

(4) Marsh was a fascinating personality in his own right – an environmentalist and polymath, he helped in the founding of the Smithsonian Institute and collected for them wherever he travelled. See http://www.vqronline.org/essay/polymath-vermont

(5) According to Professor Margaritis, proselytism has been redefined today to mean that no religion should be able to pressure, lie, or force conversions, but he points out that the Greek Church still has a favoured status that might be questioned in that it has the sole right to proselytize in the Greek school system. These are not arcane issues. A Greek minister of Education recently found himself losing his portfolio because he suggested taking religion, as it is taught at the time of writing, off the school curriculum. And although a member of parliament may decline to take a religious oath when taking office, the Greek president must still do so.

(6) See https://www.academia.edu/13751082/Manuals_of_conversion_Protestant_missionary_schoolbooks_in_Greece_during_the_19th_century  Here it states that Mr. King alone distributed for sale and gratuitously during the year 1835, 2,656 copies of the New Testament and parts of the Old in modern Greek and 25,896 school books and religious tracts.

(7)  See the Annual Report, Volumes 27-31. ... Annual Report - American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, Volumes 31-33. Pp 40-41.

(8) King wrote about meeting Ioannis Kapodistria in his journal – a journal which he kept up to date all during his life.

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