The first Bible of the New World

Editor's note: The following text is a transcript of a podcast story. To listen to the story, click on the arrow beneath the headline above.

MARY REICHARD, HOST: Today is Tuesday, November 25th.

This is The World and Everything in It.

Good morning. I’m Mary Reichard.

NICK EICHER, HOST: And I’m Nick Eicher.

Coming next: WORLD’s Paul Butler on the first Bible ever printed in the New World.

Only a handful survive today — a testament to the pastor who learned a native tongue to help make it possible.

One of those Bibles sits inside a climate-controlled room at Gordon College.

ST. GERMAIN: We rebound this in 2021. We had a conservator come in and do some work on it, so the binding’s a bit tight. So when you open it, it might feel a little resistant, it's just because it's been rebound.

PAUL BUTLER: College Archivist Sarah St. Germain holds the first Bible printed in the New World. This copy at Gordon College is one of 37 left. It’s St. Germain’s job to keep it in good condition.

ST. GERMAIN: So we have our big HVAC which you can probably hear in the background, that humming noise that keeps our environment stable.

This Bible is bound in smooth brown leather. Its simple cover has a straight border with fleur de lis embossements at the corners. It looks a lot like how it would have in 1663.

ST. GERMAIN: The pages, the four edges, were painted yellow at some point. So all those the top, bottom and side edges, . . .

On the brown spine, small gilt letters spell the word Biblum. It’s not in English, but a dialect of the Native American language Algonquin. This book is known as the Eliot Bible.

DIMAURO: The Eliot Bible is a Bible of firsts.

Damon DiMauro is a language professor at Gordon College. He spoke with associate correspondent Anne Burgdorf and says the Eliot Bible is one of the first translations completed by a non-native speaker, done for a language with no prior writing system.

DIMAURO: Eliot claims to have discovered new ways of grammar, namely, new possibilities for organizing language and thinking grammatically.

John Eliot is the translator of the Eliot Bible. He was a Puritan minister remembered as the “Apostle to the Indians.”

DIMAURO: He believed in education and that's why, you know, he believed in literacy, not just translating the Bible, but teaching people to read, and he put together primers, catechisms, and other grammars.

Eliot came from England to Massachusetts in November of 1631. He was ordained to pastor a church in Roxbury, and his mission was to share the Gospel with the Native Americans. To do that, he enlisted an indentured native to help him study Wampanoag, a local dialect of the Algonquin language. Eliot was fascinated with the complexity of the Wampanoag language.

DIMAURO: Most people thought that these were just barbarians, but, and I think that linguists know this too, that every language has its inner logic and is organized in a different way.

Eliot also loved that the language organized nouns by distinguishing between animate or inanimate.

DIMAURO: And so he said that they had a notion of the soul, of something being alive, and so that was really encouraging to him, that as a pre evangelistic tool, he could use that to try to minister to them.

After 15 years in Massachusetts, Eliot delivered his first sermon in the Wampanoag language. Biblical scholar Ted Hildebrandt worked on the New Living Translation project. In a video lecture posted online, he says Eliot opened the floor for questions after his sermon.

HILDEBRANDT: I think one of the keys to understanding Elliot, after the sermon, they had a question and answer period of three hours— John Elliot respected the Indians so much that he allowed them to ask questions, and he wrestled with their questions for three hours.

But there was one question in particular that drove Eliot’s mission.

HILDEBRANDT: ‘How do I get to heaven?’ and he basically said, you know, ‘read the Bible, hear what Jesus says, and pray.’ And he realized that they couldn't read the bible in their own language, they didn't have a written language, there was no literature there was no nothing, and so basically he had to start from scratch.

Eliot had translated the Ten Commandments and the Lord’s Prayer into Wampanoag. But the entire Bible was a monumental task. And Wampanoag is not a simple language.

HILDEBRANDT: I've had you know Acadian I've had Ugaritic I've had Hebrew I've had Greek I've had Latin and German and stuff like that, and this language is much much more difficult than anything I’ve ever seen.

Eliot completed the Bible in 1663. Harvard University printed 1,000 copies on a press sent from England specifically for Eliot’s Bible. The King James Bible, published half a century earlier, had been translated in seven years by 54 scholars. Eliot, working largely by himself, completed his translation in 14 years— all while ministering, traveling, and preaching.

DIMAURO: For about a 20 year period, Eliot's ministry was very successful. I mean, it was, it was idyllic, it was utopian. He had achieved what he wanted and it was really going very well.

Unfortunately, Eliot’s vision was short-lived. In 1675, war broke out between the Wampanoag people and the colonists.

Those on both sides destroyed many copies of the Eliot Bible, resenting it as a connecting point between them. However, Eliot’s love for the Wampanoag never faded. Ten years after the war, he published a second edition of his Bible.

HILDEBRANDT: He loved the Indians, he respected them, and treated them with dignity, and respect; he listened and interacted with their questions, he took their children and catechized and taught them the gospel and new ways of living and things, and they trusted him.

Over the course of his ministry, Eliot saw 1,000 converts. He published Wampanoag devotionals, catechisms, and grammar books. In fact, linguists later used Eliot’s works to resurrect the Wampanoag language. Around the world today, modern missionaries and linguists are still doing what Eliot pioneered: studying indigenous languages to create writing systems and Bible translations for them.

DIMAURO: You learn other languages because you learn how other cultures and people think. Language is a reflection of how people think, and I think that that probably fascinated him, and it's a reflection of God's creation, and it does add a new dimension to knowledge of God.

For WORLD, I’m Paul Butler with reporting from Anne Burgdorf.

WORLD Radio transcripts are created on a rush deadline. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of WORLD Radio programming is the audio record.