Biography
His family had a strong Methodist background. His father was the first headmaster of the Leys School, Cambridge where James was one of the first students. After attending King's College, Cambridge, he chose to become a Wesleyan minister. He showed a strong talent for academic studies, and the University of Manchester invited him to teach Classical Greek and other languages. He was also teaching at the Didsbury College, a Baptist Seminar outside Manchester. He was friend of James Frazer, the Scottish social anthropologist. He developed a strong interest in Zoroastrianism, one of the world's oldest known monotheistic religions. Over the course of his life he published many books and papers, mainly focused on Zoroastrianism and the Greek texts that the Bible is derived from. He was a Prison Chaplain at Preston for some time around 1910.
In 1916 he decided to take advantage of the academic lull of World War I and spend a long spell in India, to serve as a Methodist missionary and to research & lecture on Zoroastrianism in one of its traditional homelands. This was not an easy time for James, as his wife had recently died, and while he was in India, his son William Ralph Osborn Moulton died in the French trenches on 5 August 1916. He spent 16 months in India under the auspices of the YMCA, researching, preaching and lecturing. A matter that was of particular interest to him was the religion of the Parsis, the Zoroastrians of the Indian subcontinent, and the relationship between their beliefs and the Judeo-Christian religion. He felt that the former was awaiting its completion by the latter. While in Karachi, he availed of the friendship and library of Maneckji Nusserwanji Dhalla, a U.S.-educated Zoroastrian scholar and the high priest of the Parsi community there.
He left Karachi aboard the S.S. City of Paris, headed for Egypt where he met with friend and colleague Dr J. Rendel Harris. The pair set sail from Port Said but as their ship passed the Gulf of Lion it was torpedoed and sank. Moulton, Harris and several others from the ship escaped in a lifeboat, but James Moulton died on the third of the four days it took the boat to reach Corsica, aged fifty-three. He was buried at sea on 9 April 1917.
Read more about this topic: James Hope Moulton
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