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PREFACE
The Nestorian Mission was established by the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions in 1833 upon the recommendation of Eli Smith of the Syria Mission, and H. O. Dwight of the ABCFM Constantinople Station, who had jointly undertaken a tour of northern Iraq and the adjacent parts of eastern Turkey and western Persia two years earlier, to explore the possibilities for Protestant missionary activity in these parts, so little known to the outside world at the time. Subsequently, in 1869, the Nestorian Mission was renamed the Mission to Persia, in view of its “enlarged endeavours.”
From the very beginning, the Nestorian Mission was active not only among the Nestorians (the “Protestants of the East,” as the Protestant missionaries liked to call them), but also among other ethnic and religious communities of the region: Armenians, Kurds and Arabs, Jacobites, Uniate Syrians and Chaldeans, “Mohammedans” and Yazidis. The regular reports sent by its missionaries to the ABCFM office in Boston, which appeared in The Missionary Herald between 1833 and 1870, preserve a wealth of information regarding the conditions prevailing in the area at the time which, for the most part, remains unobtainable from other sources.
The present three-volume publication — a companion to The Missionary Herald; Reports from Ottoman Syria
1819-1870, published by the Royal Institute for Inter-Faith Studies in 1995, in five volumes — reproduces the complete texts of the Nestorian Mission reports as they originally appeared, reset in modem font, and with the original misprints corrected. To facilitate their use, a full index of their material is provided.
As in the case of the preceding publication, acknowledgements are due to Ghada Khoury who patiently helped in the extraction of the relevant material from the pages of The Missionary Herald and assisted in the proofreading.
The Editors
Amman, 20 February 1997
Proposed Mission to The Nestorians of Persia
The Missionary Herald. Vol. 29 (1833) p. 18
Messrs. [Eli] Smith and [H.] Dwight spent a week among the Nestorians of Oroomiah, one of the western districts of Persia; and to them the week appears to have been the most satisfactory and interesting to their whole tour. For an account of this people, the Board is referred to the volumes of their researches, now in the press. While the Nestorians as much need religious instruction as any of the oriental sects, there is strong reason to believe that a mission would encounter fewer obstacles among them, than in any other of the old churches of the East. Their views of open communion, and their liberality towards other sects, are without a parallel in that part of the world, and they entirely reject auricular confession. The Committee look towards this promising field with a strong desire to establish a mission there as soon as the suitable men are found willing to encounter the necessary privations and exposures.
Nestorian Mission
Vol. 29 (1833) p. 149
The intention of the Committee to establish a mission, by leave of Providence, among the Nestorian Christians of Oroomiah, in Persia, was mentioned at p. 37 of the number for January. Mr. Justin Perkins, of the Andover Seminary, and now a Tutor in Amherst College, has been appointed to this mission, and has accepted the appointment. It is expected that he will proceed to Constantinople next autumn, and there spend several months in studies adapted to his particular mission. The Committee are anxious to obtain a well-educated physician, to be associated with Mr. Perkins in this mission.
Mission to the Nestorians
Vol. 29 (1833) pp. 443-444
Justin Perkins, Missionary; and his wife
The Board will remember that a mission was proposed, a year ago, to the Nestorians of Oroomiah, one of the western districts of Persia. The Rev. Justin Perkins and his wife are expected soon to leave this country for the purpose
of commencing such a mission. The position he is expected to occupy is not only interesting in relation to the Nestorians, but it is in the very centre of Mohammedanisn, and on the dividing line between the two great sects of that false religion— the Shiites being on the east, who acknowledge only the Koran as ...
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