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James Craig (1818-1899): Judenmissionar - Evangelist - Gemeingründer

This is first monograph on Irish Presbyterian missionary James Craig, a man ignored by mainstream historiography. Research was carried out in many libraries and archives in numerous countries over eight years in order to reconstruct the life and times of Craig. Much archival material was written in Sütterlin script and was laboriously transcribed into modern German. All leading missionary collections in Britain and Germany – London, Basel, Berlin, Wuppertal, Edinburgh, Belfast, Bremen, Kiel, Hamburg – were consulted. A vast contemporary periodical literature was combed, as was all relevant material about Craig’s work published both during the nineteenth century and subsequently.

Largely unknown in the country of his birth James Craig enjoyed considerable impact in northern post-1850 Germany. He established a church for Jewish converts in Hamburg, which still functions, and pioneered the holiness movement in Schleswig-Holstein. The book examines Craig’s outreach work and his tract and Bible distribution across Europe. The nature of Craig’s interest in the Jewish people and his ecclesiology, seen against the backdrop of Hamburg Lutheran orthodoxy and rapid social change in an urban environment, is meticulously and rigorously examined. In the conclusion Craig’s achievements are placed into the wider context of the religious history of Germany.