Dear Sir,
It was interesting to read the article about Andrea Williams’s recent visit to South Korea in the May issue. However the statement ‘The Koreans recognise that they owe their faith and the flourishing of their nation to the British missionaries who brought the gospel to them’ is misleading.
While British missionaries had some involvement, notably Robert J. Thomas, who was martyred in 1866 when attempting to get into Korea, and John Ross (Bible translator), the first Protestant missionary to arrive in Korea – in 1884 – was American. He was followed a year later by Horace Underwood and Henry & Ella Appenzeller, also from the USA, as were most of the other missionaries in the late 19th century. Actually a Japanese Christian, Nagasaka, had arrived even earlier, in 1883, ‘as an agent for the National Bible Society of Scotland in Tokyo’.
