Eliot Indian Bible

The Eliot Indian Bible, or Mamusse Wunneetupanatamwe Up-Biblum God, was the first complete Bible printed in British North America and stands as a major textual monument in an Indigenous language. Prepared for Algonquian-speaking readers in colonial New England, it presents a complete Protestant Bible in a fresh translation rather than a revision of an existing version. Its source languages were English together with original-language aids: the base text was primarily the English Bible, with consultation of the Hebrew and Greek, and its predecessor or base translation lay in the King James Version and the wider English Bible tradition. The governing approach was that of missionary vernacular work, aimed at rendering Scripture in the language of its intended readers, a principle that shaped much later Protestant translation activity. Beyond its original missionary purpose, the work is valued as a linguistic record, preserving evidence of a language for which few other extended written witnesses survive.