Ben Isay Ngipon

 The First Mission, 1946

In 1946, at the age of twelve, Ruben Ecleo, known in his youth as Ben Isay Ngipon, set out on his first mission in the Visayas, a fact few members of even the second generation know. He went on foot, owning only the clothes he wore and with no house to return to, and a missionary hunger drove him toward the poor and the needy in the mountains of the Visayas and Mindanao. Boyhood, in the ordinary sense of games and school and a mother calling him in for supper, passed him by. His days went to walking, from town to town and barrio to barrio and out to sitios that no road reached, and he knew hunger, thirst, exhaustion and nights on hard ground in the work of bringing good news to people who were weary in spirit or had never been awake to it.

Ben Isay Ngipon

Many people saw what he did, and almost nobody wrote it down. The crowds healed or helped by him over the years ran, by the members' reckoning, into the millions, yet they left behind no written record of what they had seen. Recordings of his messages were made, and they now lie scattered in private hands, with no official collection in audio or in print, no film of him beyond a clip of about thirteen seconds that circulates on YouTube, and nothing to compare with the archive of discourses and footage that devotees assembled around Sathya Sai Baba in India.

The loss matters more than it might seem. A historian who came to the Divine Master nearly four decades after his death in 1987 would reach for the tools that scholars apply to the life of Jesus, among them the criterion of multiple attestation, which trusts what several independent sources report, and the criterion of dissimilarity, which trusts what the later community would have had no motive to invent. Applied to so thin a written record, those tools would very likely set his miracles aside as legend, much as many scholars have set aside the miracles of Jesus, and the fault would lie less with the miracles than with the silence of the people who witnessed them and wrote nothing down.