John Eliot: America’s Tyndale

In the summer of 1664, a man scratched a letter in the flickering light of a New England hearth, calling himself “a shrub in the wilderness.” His name was John Eliot, and at sixty, he’d already spent thirty-two years in the rugged Massachusetts Bay Colony, with twenty-six more ahead. Born in 1604 in Widford, England—a small village on the river Lea—he was baptized the third child of Bennett and Lettese Eliot, simple yeomen farmers in the English countryside. Orphaned by 1621, young John looked back on his boyhood and saw God’s fingerprints: “I do see that it was a great labour of God unto me, to season my first times with the fear of God, the word, and prayer.”

In 1618, at barely fourteen years old, John entered the medieval halls of Jesus College, Cambridge. By 1622, with an A.B. (the modern equivalent of a Bachelor of Arts) in hand, he’d mastered Latin, Greek, and Hebrew—tools for a future he couldn’t yet fathom. After graduation, John moved to the village of Little Baddow, where Thomas Hooker, a fiery Puritan, lit a spark in him that would never be extinguished. “The Lord said to my dead soul, live! live!” Eliot recalled, “And through the grace of God I do live and shall live forever!” In 1631, when England’s air grew heavy with persecution, John boarded the “Lyon,” that was bound for the untamed “New World” of North America. On November 2, they dropped anchor off the coast of Boston, greeted by cascades of cannon fire and muskets and a feast of “fat hogs, venison, poultry, geese, and partridges”—a warm welcome for weary travelers, including Governor John Winthrop’s wife, Margaret.

Eliot preached in Boston, then settled in Roxbury in 1632, reuniting with friends and family from England. That October, he wed Hanna Mumford in the town’s first wedding—a union that bore six children and lasted fifty-five years. For nearly six decades, he stood in Roxbury’s rough-hewn meetinghouse, preaching with a Bible-worn grace that Cotton Mather called simple yet profound, fit for the “lambs of the flock.” He helped plant the Roxbury Grammar School in 1645, praying, “Lord for schools everywhere among us!”—a cry for knowledge to bloom in this untamed wilderness.

In 1646, Eliot’s story took a providential turn. He set his sights on spreading the gospel among the Native Americans. At first, he struggled to learn their unwritten language. His sermon to sachem Cutshamekin at Dorchester Mills a muddle of misspoken words that no one could understand. Undeterred, he tried again near Kontent, then threw himself into learning the Massachusett tongue with Cockenoe, a Pequot Native American who became his tutor. By 1649, he was preaching fluently with no interpreter.

He built “praying towns” like Natick in 1651, havens where Christian Native Americans could farm and worship. Yet his boldest stroke was still to come: translating the entire Bible into Massachusett, a language without a single written letter until he gave it life. Begun in the 1650s and finished in 1663 as Mamusse Wunneetupanatamwe Up-Biblum God, it was America’s first printed Bible—a labor of fourteen years that stunned the world. This Algonquian tongue twisted tongues with words like “Nummatchekodtantamoonganunnonash”—thirty-two letters for “our lusts”—lacking prepositions or future tense. Eliot formed an alphabet from scratch, decoding its “new ways of grammar,” and wrote grammar books and dictionaries. With the help of printer Marmaduke Johnson, 1,500 New Testaments rolled off the press in 1661 at Harvard College, then 1,000 complete Bibles in 1663. It had been one thousand years since an alphabet had been created for an unwritten language. Like William Tyndale, who translated the Bible into English in the sixteenth century, Eliot’s one goal was to share the truth of Scripture. He didn’t force English on the Indians; he gave them God’s Word in their own voice, a gospel brushfire blazing across the wilds of New England.

His praying towns multiplied—Punkapoag, Hassanamasit—until King Philip’s War (1675–1678) tore them apart. Eliot rebuilt what he could, though age began to hinder many of his efforts. In 1683, he ordained Natick’s Daniel Tokkohwompait to carry the torch. Late in life, he ached for enslaved Africans, raging with “a bleeding and burning passion” against their neglect. His dear wife, Hanna, died in 1687, then his son Benjamin. On May 20, 1690, Eliot, at eighty-six, breathed his last, whispering, “Welcome joy!” Buried in Roxbury, his tomb reads “Apostle to the Indians.”

John Eliot was a colonial pastor who possessed an ardent call to go to his neighbors and share the gospel of Jesus Christ. He was no grand figure, just a debtor to grace, resolved to see Christ exalted. Simple in his acceptance of Scripture as the Word of God, simple in his trust that God saves all who call upon the name of Christ, simple in his endeavors to establish a Christian society among the Indians, and simple in his belief that all men and women are in need of the saving gospel message. From his voyage to the New World to his first sermon to the Native Americans in 1646, Eliot remains at the helm of all missionary endeavors thereafter. He serves as a preeminent example of the power of the gospel in the lives of ordinary and seemingly insignificant people.

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Adapted from “John Eliot” by Dustin Benge in The American Puritans, with Nate Pickowicz (Reformation Heritage Books, 2020).