The University Library recently received the extraordinary gift of an Eliot Bible from a member of the Georgetown University Board of Directors. The first complete Bible to be printed in the Western Hemisphere, the “Eliot Indian Bible,” as it was commonly known, was published in Cambridge, Massachusetts under the title The Holy Bible Containing the Old Testament and the New. Translated into the Indian Language…..
The missionary John Eliot was born in England in 1604, graduated from Jesus College, Cambridge in 1622, and immigrated to Boston in the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1631. A Puritan minister, he earned the name “Apostle to the Indians” for his missionary work with the Native Americans in the area. He translated the Bible into the Massachusett language and published the New Testament in 1661 and the Old Testament in 1663. Because of England’s strict monopoly on Bible printing, an English-language translation of the Bible would not be printed in America until 1782, following the War for Independence.
The Library’s new copy has survived in its 17th-century binding: calf with gilt rules and decorative ornaments. The title page bears the signature of a former owner, the German linguist Andreas Muller, who has also noted his hometown of Greifenhagen (now Gryfino, Poland). Muller’s library was later given to the Royal Gymnasium in Marienstatt, whose stamp can also be seen. The Eliot Bible forms a magnificent complement to the extensive holdings on Native American linguistics in the John Gilmary Shea collection, one of the cornerstones of Georgetown’s rare book collection. It is a book Shea would certainly have wanted to have in the collection.
The Bible will be preserved with many of the Library’s other treasures in the Booth Family Center for Special Collections.