Few examples show as clearly what it means to learn a people’s language in order to give them the Bible as the English pastor who spent decades studying the sounds of a Native American language, only to place in the hands of his Algonquian neighbors a New Testament and then a complete Bible, the first ever printed on American soil.
Born in Widford, England, in 1604, John Eliot graduated from Jesus College, Cambridge, and emigrated to the Massachusetts colony in 1631. He became pastor of the church in Roxbury in 1632, a post he held until his death nearly six decades later.
Eliot devoted himself to learning the Massachusett language with the help of native interpreters. A first attempt to preach in that language, in 1646, before the sachem Cutshamekin, was met with disdain by the listeners. Weeks later, on October 28 of that year, he preached successfully in the village of the leader Waban, near Boston, in what is considered the first recorded sermon in Massachusett. From then on, he traveled regularly to preach to the Algonquian peoples in their own language.
In 1651 he founded Natick, the first of the so-called praying towns, communities of converted natives organized with their own leaders and laws. Over the following years, about fourteen such towns came to exist in colonial New England under Eliot’s guidance.
His most lasting work was the translation of the Bible into Massachusett, published in parts starting in 1661 and completed in 1663, with the support of the native printer James Printer. It was the first Bible printed in any language on the American continent.
Eliot’s project also bore the marks of its time: it required converts to cut their hair, adopt English clothing and customs, and live in family units modeled on European patterns, breaking traditional bonds of kinship and community, as a sign of conversion. And when King Philip’s War broke out in 1675, Eliot’s own native allies were arrested by the colonial authorities and sent to Deer Island, where more than five hundred died of cold and hunger.
Eliot protested against the internment, though his objection could not prevent it or shorten it. After the war, he and the officer Daniel Gookin helped organize the return of the survivors. The episode exposes the limits of his time, even amid a genuine effort of care.
Eliot died in Roxbury in 1690, leaving behind a language recorded in grammar and dictionary form and a model for Bible translation into a native language. His example anticipated, centuries in advance, the principle followed today by Bible translators around the world: every people deserves to hear the Scriptures in their own language.
