Johannes Zeller
| John Zeller | |
|---|---|
| Born |
Johannes Zeller 1830 Besigheim, Ludwigsburg, Germany |
| Died | February 19, 1902 (aged 71–72) |
John Zeller (1830–1902), also known by his German name Johannes Zeller, was a 19th-century Protestant missionary in Ottoman Palestine. Zeller's four decades left a lasting impact in the areas of Protestant Christianity, scholarship, and education.
Zeller was born in 1830 in Besigheim (near Stuttgart), with a family heritage of more than 300 years of filling different offices in the church. At the age of 24 he graduated from Basel Mission School, and did his year of practicum in England. Since he was planning to come to the Middle East he dedicated this year to learning English and Arabic. In 1855 he was ordained as a deacon in the Anglican Church, and was sent to the Holy Land by the Church Mission Society. He arrived there in 1857.
After spending two years in Nablus, he was stationed in Nazareth, where he stayed for the next 20 years. In Nazareth he became a very well-known person, not only in the town itself, but also in all of the Galilee area. In 1858 he went back for a year to England, there he was ordained as an Anglican priest. When he returned, he married Hanna Maria Sophie, the daughter of the Samuel Gobat, the second Anglican Bishop in Jerusalem.
Zeller believed that education was the main method to get to the heart of the people and to increase the Protestant influence in Nazareth and the area. This was not easy, since there was great pressure on those people who sent their children to the Protestant school. However, Zeller persevered to establish and develop the school, believing that it would be the seed for the Anglican denomination. Furthermore, he did not stop in Nazareth, but opened classes in Reineh, Kafr Kanna and Jaffa of Nazareth (Yafa an-Naseriyye), and later on in Shefa-'Amr. In the early 1870s he rented a room in Acre and started classes there. He also assisted his Armenian colleague Kaloost Vartan of the Edinburgh Medical Missionary Society in the founding of the Nazareth Hospital.
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