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| Jonas King in Syrian garb (early 1820s) |
He was born July 29, 1792, on the family farm in Hawley, Massachusetts. Though his origins were humble, he was an industrious scholar. He read the Bible through once between the ages of four and six and then once a year to age sixteen. As a teenager he is said to have read all twelve books of the Æneid (in Latin, presumably) in fifty-eight days and the New Testament (in Greek, for certain) in six weeks. He obtained degrees from Williams College (1816) and the Andover Theological Seminary (1819) and was ordained a Congregationalist minister in Charleston, South Carolina (1819). Three years later he was appointed professor of oriental languages and literature at newly founded Amherst College, a position he held until 1828. During his lifetime he studied eleven languages and spoke five fluently.
Somehow during his Amherst tenure he found time to join his seminary mate, Pliny Fisk, in Syria and Palestine for three years (1823-1825) as one of the first Americans to preach and distribute Bibles for the American Board of Commissioners of Foreign Missions. The ABCFM, formed in 1810 by recent graduates of Williams College, became the largest and most important of the nineteenth century American missionary organizations.
The ABCFM had a mixed view of the "Oriental Christian Churches," as it called the Eastern Orthodox and other Christian denominations of the Middle East. The ABCFM's Protestant missionaries admired the churches' steadfast adherence to the Christian faith through centuries of subjugation under Muslim regimes. But they condemned what they perceived to be an admixture of flawed belief and ignorant superstition. King's experience in the Middle East was the beginning of a career devoted to "reforming" them.
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| Greece revolts (by Louis Dupré, c. 1825) |
By 1828 King was back in the U.S. By then, the war of independence had turned decidedly in the Greeks' favor with the military intervention of England, France, and Russia. Late that year, the Ladies' Greek Committee of New York City (a group of wealthy Philhellenes) persuaded King to accompany a cargo of food and clothing destined for Greece and to remain there as a missionary at the committee's expense. Once in Greece he re-allied himself with the ABCFM and continued his work under its auspices for the remainder of his career.
In 1829 he married Annetta Aspasia Mengous, a Smyrniot Greek. Two years later, they established their home on Hadrian Street in the Plaka district of Athens on a plot he named "Philadelphia." In 1829, he had also bought another large Athens parcel (more on that later).
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| Athens from the northeast (James Skene, 1840) |
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Despite the unsettled conditions, King began establishing schools for boys, followed by schools for girls, soon after he arrived in Athens. Scripture was the instrument of learning. By 1832 he had established five schools and had begun to instruct a class in theology.
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| The College of New Jersey |
In 1835, King began inviting people to his Athens home for classes in theology, his "Evangelical Gymnasium." It also became his habit to preach every Sunday -- in fluent Greek -- to crowds of thirty to one hundred visitors in his home. But Greece was not fertile soil for the seeds of Protestant evangelism. King's theological sessions and preaching, though conducted mostly from the privacy of his home, nearly became his public undoing.
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Greece's new constitution established Orthodoxy as the nation's "prevailing" religion. Other religions were allowed, but none was permitted to proselytize in Greece. No school, not even a private one in a home, could be established without government permission, which in turn required the approval of the Holy Synod, the kingdom's highest ecclesiastical authority. Likewise, no book could be sold or given away in any place without a license for that place. Despite such restrictions, between 1834 and 1836, King sold or distributed for free nearly 9,000 New Testaments in modern Greek and 87,000 school books and religious tracts.
The Holy Synod naturally became the state's agent for protecting the clergy and schools against the taint of non-Orthodox teaching. It rigorously opposed Protestant evangelical "reforms," and King inevitably came into its sights.
Early in 1845, he was publicly accused of uttering impious language against the Virgin Mary. His 200-page "Defense" invoked the writings of St. John Chrysostom, Clement of Alexandria, and other Greek Fathers, but fell on deaf ears. In August, the Holy Synod denounced King as a vessel of Satan and ordered his "Defense" burned. He was pronounced an outlaw, and on pain of ecclesiastical penalty all were forbidden to greet him in the street, enter his dwelling, or even eat or drink with him.
In September, the police entered his house and seized ninety-seven copies of his "Defense." He was then summoned before a judge to answer charges that it "reviled the Mother of God, the holy images, the liturgies of Chrysostom and Basil, the seven œcumenical councils, and the transformation of the bread and wine into the body and blood of our Lord Jesus Christ in the fearful mystery of the communion."
In defense, King again invoked the Greek Fathers:
Q. Have you any defense to make?It did him no good. In October 1845, he and his book were excommunicated by the "Great Church" at Constantinople, Eastern Orthodoxy's supreme spiritual authority. Precisely how a book could be excommunicated (or even someone who was not Orthodox in the first place) was evidently a mystery known only to the Great Church.
A. Those things in my book with regard to Mary, with regard to transubstantiation, and with regard to images, I did not say; but the most brilliant luminaries of the Eastern Church, St. Epiphanius, St. Chrysostom, the great St. Basil, St. Irenaeus, Clemens, and Eusebius Pamphyli, say them.
In 1846 King was summoned to appear before a criminal court in Athens on similar charges. I do not know the outcome. It happened again in 1847, this time because of a series of articles published in an Athens newspaper by someone named Simonides. The articles, titled "King's Orgies," darkly described "shameful ceremonies" allegedly performed in King's house. The articles produced a popular clamor that temporarily drove King to Italy.
He returned to Greece when a friendlier government took power in 1848. By 1849 he was again printing religious books for his Athens book depository, preaching publicly on the Sabbath, and conducting a "Scripture exposition" on Thursday evenings.
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In the spring of 1851, the same year he was appointed U.S. consular agent in Athens, his troubles resumed in earnest.
On March 23, a crowd of more than one hundred appeared at one of his home services. They were bent on mischief, agitated by the Holy Synod's call for legal action against "the scandalous attacks of the American, King, on the Holy and Orthodox Church." He dispersed the crowd, however, by brandishing from his porch a large U.S. flag, which he had received from Washington only the day before as an accoutrement to his new consular status.
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| Jonas King's house in Athens |
But the pressure against him was unrelenting. On May 15, 1851, he was arraigned before a judge to answer the charge of proselytizing. His inquisition elicited a touch of sarcasm:
Q. You are accused of having, this year and the last, expressed . . . principles, sentiments, and opinions, which attack in general the foundations of religion, and are otherwise injurious. Have you anything to say by way of defense?In September, his evangelism again caused him to be summoned to court, this time for "reviling the Greek Church" in violation of Article 17 of the penal code. For two years, it was charged, he had "[p]reached within his house in this place publicly, in the exposition of the sacred Scriptures, that baptism is no other than a simple symbol, and consequently it is indifferent whether men are sprinkled or immersed; that those who eat a little bread, and drink a little wine, are foolish in thinking that they will be saved by this communion; that the most holy mother of God is not ever-virgin; that those who worship her, as also the other divine images, are idolaters . . .."
A. What religion is meant? If it be that of Mohammed, I may be guilty.
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Trial was ordered for March 5, 1852, a Friday, in the Athens Criminal Court on Athenas Street. Public opposition to King was already at fever pitch, spurred on by local newspapers, particularly the Æon. The day before, a widely circulated handbill invited all Christ-loving Athenians to attend the trial of "the famous false apostle, Jonas King," to see him convicted of "the foolish babblings he has uttered against the Mother of God, the Saints, the Images, and, in a word, all the Sacraments, Doctrines, and Traditions of our Holy Church."
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| Henry M. Baird (1832-1906) |
The group stopped at the residence of Spyridon Pelikas, one of King's lawyers. There King learned that the chief prosecutor, concerned about the public tumult, urged him to wait to enter the court safely. Again King declined, and the group set out on foot. With the aid of four policemen they pressed through an agitated crowd waiting at the courthouse, many of whom were Greek priests. They entered the courtroom without incident, finding it already filled to to capacity.
Baird attended the trial with King and recorded the proceedings in detail. Nine of the prosecution's twelve named witnesses answered present to the clerk's call. Only ten of King's twenty-one witnesses did the same. King nevertheless consented to proceed with the witnesses present.
The offense charged was of secondary grade, so there was no jury. From a platform facing the audience, a panel of five trial judges determined all questions of fact and law.
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| Vasileios Nikolopoulos (1816-1887) |
The government's witnesses against King testified with emotion and partisanship. One of them, a young man named Kyriakoules, expressed such enmity against King that judge Nikolopoulos had to interrupt him, shouting: "You are here as a witness, not as an accuser!" Kyriakoules persisted, trying to speak from notes. He gave up when told his duty was merely to answer questions put to him. Baird recorded that some people present were certain that Kyriakoules carried a dagger under his cloak.
In Baird's view, the prosecution's witnesses mainly testified truthfully. But no Protestant, he thought, would have found anything objectionable in the words they attributed to King, nor that King's words amounted to a reviling of the Greek Church. The testimony, he said, did no more than prove that King was faithful to the doctrines of the Congregationalist denomination.
Although the government witnesses claimed to have heard King utter language disrespectful of the Greek religion, not one of them cited King's exact words or specified where or when he made his allegedly disrespectful comments. Demonstrating the general unfairness of the proceedings, one old witness was permitted to testify even though he admitted he had not been in King's home for seven years. Two of King's publications were brought forward. One was a book published years before the period of the charge; the other was published in the U.S., outside the territory of the charge. Neither reviled the Greek church but merely advocated doctrines at variance with it.
When King's defense witnesses were not being browbeaten by judge Nikolopoulos, they were rattled by the audience's tumultuous applause or antagonistic hooting, which the court did nothing to restrain. When a court bailiff tried to silence some of the noisier priests present, judge Nikolopoulos reprimanded the bailiff and removed him from office for the day.
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| Spyridon Pelikas (1805-1861) |
After a brief rejoinder by the prosecutor, King himself rose to say a few words in his defense. He intended to prove that the case against him was the product of a conspiracy led by some of the prosecution's witnesses. The judges rose too, however, and began to leave as King spoke. Perceiving their impatience, King gave up. The trial had lasted six hours.
Half an hour later, the judges reappeared and orally delivered their judgment that King was guilty as charged. In a later written version, the court cited only two "incontestably malevolent" expressions against the church, namely, calling the Mother of God simply a woman who bore other children besides Jesus Christ, and saying that Holy Communion consisted merely of bread and wine, not the transubstantiated body and blood of Jesus Christ.
Following announcement of the judgment, the prosecutor moved for a sentence of three months' imprisonment as mandated by law, followed by King's banishment as a convicted criminal and a person "pre-eminently dangerous to the common safety and to morals, by his manner of life, character, and conduct." King's counsel opposed the motion, objecting in particular that nothing in King's life justified the latter portion of the proposed punishment.
Again the judges retired to confer. They returned shortly and sentenced King to fifteen days' imprisonment and costs of the trial, followed by banishment from Greece.
The audience burst into prolonged applause and then moved to the street outside to enjoy the spectacle of King being taken away to prison. The prosecutor, however, allowed King first to return to his house to prepare for imprisonment and exile. A friendly police officer suggested they remain in the courtroom until the mob in the street dispersed. But the mob remained. The police therefore led King out a private passage, through an unoccupied shop, and to the Athenas Street entrance of the building where a carriage and two armed policemen waited. Spotting them leaving from around the corner, the mob rushed the carriage but was driven back at bayonet point by soldiers stationed nearby, and King reached home safely.
Three days passed, but no attempt was made to arrest King for imprisonment. His lawyers recognized the silence as a trick. By law, appeals from criminal court decisions had to be taken within five days from judgment while the defendant was undergoing his sentence. The government was purposely delaying King's imprisonment, allowing the five days to lapse to preclude an appeal. King therefore had to demand imprisonment to preserve his right of appeal.
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| Entrance to the Madrasa prison, the only portion that now survives |
Afterward, he was transferred to police headquarters, where he was confined until he became sick and was returned home. No one seemed to care because banishment was what the government and the mob really wanted.
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The questions on appeal were whether a statement of opinion at variance with the doctrines of the Greek Church amounted to reviling the church and whether such an offense rendered a man dangerous to safety and good morals. On March 25, a mere twenty days after pronouncement of the Criminal Court judgment, the Areopagus (Greece's Supreme Court) determined that the Criminal Court was competent to answer the two questions, affirmed the judgment that King had reviled the Greek Church, but disagreed that he had reviled religion in general (a strange decision given that the Areopagus had struck that charge from the indictment prior to trial). Bizarrely, the Areopagus also reduced King's term of imprisonment from fifteen to fourteen days.
Twelve of Greece's most distinguished lawyers signed a letter declaring their dissent from the proceedings. Much of the Athens press condemned the affair, calling it a violation of the religious liberty guaranteed by the Greek constitution and laws. They also pointed out the stupidity (politely termed "a political solecism") of bringing an American government representative to trial in Athens and ordering his banishment from the country just when Greece was negotiating to allow the importation of Greek currants into the U.S. without duty. Another newspaper, not ordinarily sympathetic to King, criticized the trial's debasement of legal proceedings and feared its effect on the U.S., which had been so enthusiastic in the cause of Greek independence.
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| George P. Marsh (1801-1882) |
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| Edward Everett (1794-1865) |
President Fillmore's successor, Franklin Pierce, regarded the decision in King's case as "unjust and oppressive." Marsh was ordered to return to Athens and communicate to the Greek government that Dr. King "did not have a fair trial, and that consequently the sentence of banishment ought immediately to be revoked." After various evasions, subterfuges, and the elevation of Spyridon Pelikas (one of King's defense lawyers in the 1852 trial) to Minister of Justice, King's sentence of imprisonment and exile was fully remitted by royal decree in 1854.
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| Franklin Pierce (1804-1869), c. 1852 |
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| Roger A. Pryor (1828-1919), c. 1870 |
The standoff continued for two decades until 1855 when President Pierce commissioned Roger Atkinson Pryor, a Virginia lawyer, to obtain an indemnification. The Greek government eventually paid King $25,000 (nearly $750,000 today).
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King went back to preaching and publishing. Public sentiment changed in his favor. His weekly service once again had forty to fifty attendees. By 1863, his standing had sufficiently improved that the president of Greece's Holy Synod, who had once denounced King as a reviler of the Greek Church, consented to a friendly meeting. The following year, King was invited by Greece's new king to administer Holy Communion in the palace.From his arrival in Greece until 1864, King had never returned to the U.S. That year, however, health reasons drove him home. He remained in the U.S. for three years, returning to Athens in 1867 where he died two years later, May 22, 1869. His grave, together with Annetta's, is in Athens's First Cemetery.
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| Jonas and Annetta King's graves in Athens's First Cemetery |
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Judged by his "reforms" of the Greek Orthodox Church, King's career in Greece was an abject failure. Three years after his death, the ABCFM put as good a face on it as possible, sententiously claiming that "it is mainly to the preaching of Dr. King . . . in connection with his persistent and triumphant struggle with the Greek hierarchy, that we owe, under God, the visible decline of prejudice against evangelical truth and religious liberty."
King's struggle against the authorities in Greece was hardly "triumphant." And it is doubtful that it reduced Greek Orthodox prejudice against evangelical truth. But something can be said for its being the beginning of a decline in prejudice against religious liberty.
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| Alexandros Rangavis (1809-1892) |
In 1874, Greece gave proof of Rangavis's assertion and realized one of King's earnest labors: the establishment in Athens of the Greek Protestant Church. Soon, more Greek evangelical churches were established in Thessaloniki, Piraeus, Volos, and Ioannina.
But Rangavis's claim of "perfect tolerance" has not been achieved. Despite Jonas King's valiant efforts to reform the Greek Orthodox Church, Section 4 of Greek Law No. 1363/38, as amended by Law No. 1672/39, continues to subject anyone engaging in proselytization to imprisonment, a fine, and police supervision for six months to a year.
