This is a book focusing on one man’s life. That will at first sight seem a very small topic within the wide span of history, especially in the context of the great nation of China. And this indeed is how it began. The author David, Jowett’s youngest son, brought up in China and Chinese-speaking in his early years, explained its genesis in a letter to a close friend. ‘I inherited from my siblings the plan for an appreciation of my father’s life, with two initial sections about his family’s background and his own early years. Having explored archive sources, I shifted the focus from Jowett and his family to Jowett as a China missionary and the context in which he was living and working’ That was how the author summarised in two short sentences the genesis, aim, generation, and focus of his account. It gives the essence of the book. It is indeed a book about one man’s life – arguably the stuff of history that, carefully examined, can tell us much. But it is also, as noted by the author, about its setting in historical, cultural, educational, and, in this case, theological context. This brings a deeper understanding of mission and missionaries, and of their aspiration to spread enlightenment among the heathen, itself part of the story of western expansion and colonialism. Into this setting the book puts the actions of this one individual.

KIRKUS BOOK REVIEW
A man surveys the life of his father, a British missionary to China, in this biography. From its opening chapter, which introduces readers to Jowett Murray as he studies Confucianism and Taoism on a ship bound for Asia, this biography centers on the nearly 40 years the Oxford-educated Christian missionary spent in China from 1909 to 1945. Mostly written by Jowett’s son, David, the book was completed by Ruth Finnegan, the author’s wife, following his deteriorating health in 2022. And while written by David, the book emphasizes that it “is no hagiography” and is careful to balance its overall favorable analysis with examples of times when the missionary engaged in “unpleasant personal feuding.” Jowett’s evangelism, readers learn, included academic immersion in the Chinese language (so much so that Oxford invited him to join the university as a professor of Chinese), as he helped spearhead the translation of the New Testament for The New Mandarin Bible. A central theme of the biography is its acknowledgment that while 20th-century missionary activity, including from Jowett’s London Missionary Society, is accurately associated with Western imperialism, the label cannot be applied to every missionary unilaterally. Indeed, according to the author, his father could be described as “one of the original post-colonial thinkers” among his cohort of fellow missionaries, as he often butted heads with the sometimes elitist and ethnocentric leaders of his mission’s London office. The author, a former professor of government, balances his personal admiration for his father with scholarly underpinnings. Drawn largely from primary source material—including oral histories and unpublished material held by the family as well as archival research conducted at multiple libraries—the book does an admirable job of placing Jowett within his cultural, historical, and theological context, even when doing so may not be flattering from a contemporary perspective. Beyond its foundations in original sources, the work is accompanied by a 10-page scholarly bibliography. Dedicated “to the Christian community in China,” the volume
doesn’t shy away from its religious underpinnings. Nevertheless, it provides balanced commentary and intellectual rigor.

A well-researched, nuanced account of a 20th-century British missionary.