كتاب منهج دراسة الأديان بين الشيخ رحمت الله الهندي والقس فندر
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probably more accurate than that of many of his contemporaries, who relied only on European sources.
Missionary in Armenia
In 1825, after completing his course, Pfander was ordained in Lutheran orders and stationed at Shusha, the provincial capital of Karabagh in Russian Armenia. Some colleagues concentrated on reforming the Armenian Orthodox Church, which they believed was corrupt, and therefore salvifically bankrupt (about one-third of the local population were Armenian Christians), but Pfander quickly turned his attention to attempting to communicate the Gospel to Muslims (about two-thirds of the local population). He believed that if Muslims read the New Testament in Persian, their preferred language, they would automatically acknowledge "its truth and superiority" and would abandon Islam as incapable of removing the burden of sin.]5[To master Persian, Pfander made several excursions into Iran and also spent a year in Baghdad. He began to write works of Christian apology that, he believed, would convince Muslims of Christianity's ineffable superiority. He was well aware that this type of apologia, of Islam to Christians and of Christianity to Muslims, had a long history, but he saw his books as breaking new ground, perhaps in terms of scholarly accuracy, though more probably by attempting to inculturate the Gospel within the linguistic and cultural worlds of his Muslim readers. In this, he succeeded, since not a few Muslim readers thought his books had been written by an apostate Muslim.]6[Pfander also knew Henry Martyn's Controversial Tracts, although any influence "remains conjectural in detail."]7[The German manuscript of his first hook, the Mizan-al-haqq (Balance of Truth), was completed in 1829. Much of his later work was devoted to revising and to translating this first book and its two sequels, Miftah-al-asrar (Key of Mysteries) and Tariq-al-hayat (Way of Life) into other languages. W. A. Rice commented, "Dr. Pfander was 40 years perfecting his controversial works."]8[In 1831 the Mizan appeared in Armenian; in 1835, in Persian.
