John Eliot, 1604–1690. A Puritan minister of Roxbury who came to America in 1631, and is famous in history as the “Indian Apostle.” He is chiefly remembered for his famous translation of the Bible into the Indian language, but he was the author of other works, among which are the “Communion of Churches;” “The Harmony of the Gospels;” “Dying Speeches of Several Indians;” “The Indian Primer;” “Indian Logic Primer.”
General
The Indian Apostle.
Mamusse Wunneetupanatamwe Up-Biblum God naneeswe Nukkone Testament kah wonk Wusku Testament. Ne quoshkinnumuk nashpe Wuttinneumoh Christ noh asooweesit John Eliot.
Since the death of the apostle Paul, a nobler, truer, and warmer spirit than John Eliot never lived.
I have sometimes doubted whether there was more than a single man among our forefathers who realized that an Indian possesses a mind, and a heart, and an immortal soul. That single man was John Eliot…. Eliot was full of love for them; and therefore so full of faith and hope that he spent the labor of a lifetime in their behalf…. To learn a language utterly unlike all other tongues—a language which hitherto had never been learned, except by the Indians themselves from their mothers’ lips—a language never written, and the strange words of which seemed inexpressible by letters if the task were, first to learn this new variety of speech, and then to translate the Bible into it, and to do it so carefully that not one idea throughout the holy book should be changed … this was what the Apostle Eliot did…. There is no impiety in believing that, when his long life was over, the apostle of the Indians was welcomed to the celestial abodes by the prophets of ancient days and by those earliest apostles and evangelists who had drawn their inspiration from the immediate presence of the Saviour. They first had preached truth and salvation to the world. And Eliot, separated from them by many centuries, yet full of the same spirit, has borne the like message to the new world of the west. Since the first days of Christianity there has been no man more worthy to be numbered in the brotherhood of the apostles than Eliot.
In his intercourse with his parishioners, and in his private life, Eliot was remarkable for mildness, meekness, and generosity. He combined with the latter virtue a total forgetfulness of self, and his household affairs would often have been in sorry plight, had he not had a good wife who shared his old age as she had his youth, to look after them. She one day, by way of a joke, pointing out their cows before the door, asked him whose they were, and found that he did not know. The treasurer of his church paying him a portion of his salary on one occasion, tied the coin in the pastor’s pocket-handkerchief with an abundance of knots, as a check to his freedom of disbursement in charity. On his way home, the good man stopped to visit a destitute family, and was soon tugging at the knots to get at his money. Quickly growing impatient he gave the whole to the mother of the family, saying, “Here, my dear, take it; I believe the Lord designs it all for you.”
He was the first to carry the gospel to the red man, and perhaps the earliest who championed the negro. Strangers with whom he came in contact spoke of the peculiar charm of his manners. He united fervent piety and love of learning to burning enthusiasm for evangelisation, these qualities being tempered with worldly wisdom and shrewd common sense. Taking into consideration the nature of his life, his literary activity is remarkable. No name in the early history of New England is more revered than his. Eliot was truly a saintly type, without fanaticism, spiritual pride, or ambition.
Although producing little that can be accounted as literature, John Eliot deserves prominent mention in the history of American letters…. Eliot’s Bible is now the most valuable relic of a vanished race. Aside from its great interest to the ethnologist and the antiquarian, it has the added interest of being the first Bible printed in America. Copies of it are exceedingly rare and costly.
