The Levant Union Mission

Review and Herald Publishing Association · Takoma Park Station, Washington, D. C. · Nov 26, 1908

The Levant Union Mission

WHAT a wealth of historic associations cluster round the Mediterranean shores!

Old Dr. Samuel Johnson said:— “The grand object of all travel is to see the shores of the Mediterranean. On these shores were the four great empires of the world,—the Assyrian, the Persian, the Grecian, and the Roman. All our religion, almost all our law, almost all our arts, almost all that sets us above savages, have come to us from the shores of the Mediterranean.”

The word Levant suggests the region of the sunrise, which, to old-time Europe, was the eastern Mediterranean. In the Levant union organization are grouped our missions in Greece, Turkey, Syria, and Egypt. Fifty millions of people live in these lands of the Bible story—Greeks, Turks, Armenians, Arabs, Syrians, Egyptians, Copts, and many others, among all of whom our work is beginning.

In 1889 a Greek shoemaker, who became a Seventh-day Adventist in California, returned to his former home in Constantinople to work at his trade and to sow seeds of gospel truth. Through this simple ministry, others received the light, among them a young Armenian theological student, Z. G. Baharian, who began to preach and to publish the message that had come to him.

Adventist believers are now located in Constantinople, Nicomedia, and in the provinces of Bithynia, Galatia, Pontus, Iconium, and Cilicia, where Paul and other New Testament missionaries once labored. Again and again our Armenian workers have been driven about or imprisoned, even as apostolic missionaries were; but God has delivered them, and the work has increased.

Our Armenian, English, and German missionaries are located in Constantinople, Smyrna, Athens, Beirut, Jaffa, Jerusalem, and Cairo.

Eastward in this field our work has reached the region of Damascus and the Euphrates Valley, and representatives of the remnant of the ancient Assyrian nation have received the faith. Southward our outpost is Luxor, on the Nile, by the ruins of the ancient temple of Karnak, though it is said that our publications are known among many villages, from Alexandria to Assouan. The languages thus far represented are the Turkish, Armenian, Greek, Syrian, Arabic, and Coptic.