John Lazarus (missionary)


John Lazarus was a Christian missionary to India who rendered the Tirukkural into English. He revised the work of his predecessor William Henry Drew, who had already translated the first 63 chapters of the Tirukkural, and translated the remaining portion of the Kural text.

Work

John Lazarus completed his graduation from the University of Madras. His first work was in 1878 when he published Nannul, a grammatical text, with an English translation meant for students. However, scholars consider his Tirukkural translation of chapters 64 through 133 in 1885 A Dictionary of Tamil Proverbs with Introduction, Notes, Texts and Translation in 1894 as his greatest contributions to the Tamil literature. His Tirukkural work made him the first person to render into English prose the chapters 64 through 133 of the Kural text. The Dictionary of Tamil Proverbs contained 10,000 proverbs which remains the most complete collection ever made.
Being a Christian missionary, Lazarus, too, like G. U. Pope, claimed that Valluvar's ideas were partly influenced by Christianity. But modern scholars feel that the Kural portrays no traces of distinctively Christian ideas. None of the ten epithets by which God is described in the introductory chapters of the Kural text have the remotest connection with the concept of God as designated in the Bible. According to Prof. Kamil Zvelebil, the chapter of the Kural text on "non-killing" deals exclusively with the literal taking away of life, without ambiguity, which suggest that the ethics of the Kural is rather a reflection of the Jaina moral code than of Christian ethics.