Mamusse wunneetupanatamwe Up-Biblium God (Cambridge: Printeuoop nashpe Samuel Green kah Marmaduke Johnson, 1663)

A.2.10

“The Bible is the word of life. They must have it.

Archbishop Laud indirectly brought about the first printing of the Bible in North America

This Bible translation, attributed to the Puritan colonizer John Eliot (1604-1690), is a book of superlatives: ‘the largest printing project of the [North American] colonial era; […] the earliest
complete Bible in a non-European tongue and the first Bible printed in America’ (Dippold, p. 546). Ultimately prompted to leave England by William Laud’s efforts as Bishop of London to suppress Puritanism, Eliot arrived in Boston (Massachusetts) with twenty-three barrels of books in November 1631 (Fausz); the year in which Laud began to build St John’s Canterbury Quad. In 1632, Eliot became ‘the “teacher” (assistant pastor)’ in Roxbury near Boston (Fausz).

Eliot’s missionary efforts among the Wampanoag Nation began in the mid-1640s. Converting the Wampanoags to Christianity did not only include religious re-education, but also cultural re-education to achieve their conformity with English ideas of ‘behaviour, personal grooming, and attire, and literacy’ (Fausz). In fact, Eliot stated clearly that ‘civility’ was a prerequisite for membership to the Puritans’ congregation (Curtis, p. 141). To this end, Eliot established so-called ‘praying towns’ in which Wampanoags would be educated and trained to educate their fellow tribesmen and -women in the Christian religion, but they were also required to live according to set rules and fined for any rule
breaking (Fausz; Curtis, pp. 141-2).

Like other missionaries, Eliot learnt the native language. The Bible translation was undertaken with (or perhaps by) a group of ‘native interpreters and artisans [labouring] over thirteen years’ (Dippold, pp. 546, 569). Nevertheless, Eliot’s bilingualism went beyond simply conversing with the Indigenous Americans, as he ‘published a series of devotional manuals in Wampanoag’ before and after the translation of the Bible (Dippold, pp. 545-6). Rather bizarrely from today’s perspective, Eliot stated in a letter from the 1650s that he believed the Indigenous Americans to be ‘of the lost tribes of Israel who had made their way to the New World’ and he thus expected ‘to discern traces of Hebrew in
their language’ (Curtis, p. 140)