# Mamusse Wunneetupanatamwe Up-Biblum God > John Eliot, translator, with Job Nesuton, James Printer (Wowaus), John Sassamon and Cockenoe - 1663 > Canonical HTML: https://iconotheca.com/artworks/john-eliot/eliot-indian-bible-1663-rosenbach/ > Published by Servola Systems GmbH. Last verified: 2026-09-03 ## Tombstone - **Artist:** John Eliot, translator, with Job Nesuton, James Printer (Wowaus), John Sassamon and Cockenoe - **Date:** 1663 - **Medium:** Letterpress printing on paper, in the Massachusett (Wopanaak/Natick) language rendered in Eliot's Roman-alphabet orthography, with an English title page and prefatory matter - **Dimensions:** Not independently measured for this copy in the course of this research. Comparable 1663 first-edition copies are recorded at approximately 19 x 14 cm (7.5 x 5.6 in) in a single bound volume of Old and New Testaments; whether this figure matches the Rosenbach copy exactly has not been confirmed against a public catalogue record. - **Object type:** Printed book - **Period:** Colonial North America, seventeenth century - **Current location:** The Rosenbach Museum & Library, Philadelphia - **Attribution:** disputed ## Summary In 1663 a press at Cambridge, Massachusetts Bay Colony, finished printing the first complete Bible ever produced in the Western Hemisphere in any language: not in English, but in Massachusett, the Algonquian language of the region's Native inhabitants. The title page names one man, the missionary John Eliot. The work of putting the English Bible into Massachusett was in fact done by a team that included Cockenoe, Job Nesuton and John Sassamon as translators and James Printer, a Nipmuc apprentice, who set the type and is credited by modern scholars as the most accomplished Massachusett linguist among them. None of the four appears on the title page.The book was inseparable from the 'praying towns,' the network of segregated Christian Indian settlements Eliot organized from 1646, whose residents faced escalating pressure to abandon Native dress, hairstyles and customary law along with their old religion. Within twelve years of the Bible's completion, King Philip's War (1675-76) had killed Sassamon, killed Nesuton, driven James Printer to the opposing side and back, interned praying-town residents on Deer Island, and broken the missionary project the Bible was built to serve. The language itself fell silent by the nineteenth century.This copy, shelfmark A 663m at the Rosenbach Museum & Library in Philadelphia, has been part of that institution's Americana collection since its founding in 1954 out of the bequest of the brothers Abraham Simon Wolf Rosenbach and Philip H. Rosenbach. How or when it entered their personal collection before that date has not been established from public sources. Two and a half centuries after the language went silent, the Wopanaak Language Reclamation Project, founded by the Mashpee Wampanoag linguist Jessie Little Doe Baird, used Eliot's printed Massachusett texts, this Bible chief among them, as primary source material for reconstructing the language her own community had lost. ## Provenance Every link carries a grade. `documented` means a cited source supports it, `disputed` means the identification is argued but not established, `unknown` means we have no owner for that span and have not bridged it. - **1663** Printed as one of approximately 1,000 to 1,050 copies of the complete Bible `[documented]` (origin) Printed at Cambridge, Massachusetts Bay Colony, by Samuel Green and Marmaduke Johnson, financed by the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in New England. Twenty copies are reported sent to English benefactors of the Society; the remainder distributed within the colony, chiefly to praying-town congregations and colonial and ecclesiastical figures. Which distribution channel this specific copy passed through is not established. - **1663-by 1954** Unknown intervening owners, then Abraham Simon Wolf Rosenbach and Philip H. Rosenbach, Philadelphia `[unknown]` (gap, then acquisition by the Rosenbach brothers) No owner, dealer, or acquisition date is documented in the sources consulted for the roughly 290 years between printing and the copy's presence in the Rosenbach brothers' personal collection. A.S.W. Rosenbach was among the most active American dealers in early Americana in the first half of the twentieth century, so an acquisition through the ordinary channels of that trade during his working life is plausible, but this record makes no claim of a documented chain where none exists. - **1954-present** The Rosenbach Museum & Library (now the Rosenbach), Philadelphia `[documented]` (founding bequest) Abraham Rosenbach died in 1952 and Philip Rosenbach in 1953, both childless, having established a foundation to receive their combined personal collection, business assets, and their Delancey Place townhouses. The museum opened from this testamentary gift in 1954 and has held the Bible as part of its Americana collection continuously since. ## Open questions - When and from whom did Abraham Simon Wolf Rosenbach or Philip H. Rosenbach acquire this specific copy? No acquisition record was located in the public sources consulted for this research; the copy's presence is documented only from the founding 1954 bequest onward. - Is A 663m the Rosenbach's current, correct shelfmark for this volume? It could not be confirmed against a public catalogue record in either of the institution's two searchable databases during this research. - What is the true surviving-copy count for the 1663 first edition, and the complete list of holding institutions? The most rigorous ongoing effort, the Eliot Bible census hosted at eliotcensus.org, had not published a final per-edition figure at the time of this research; a widely repeated figure of thirty-nine copies could not be traced to a primary source. - Was this copy one of the twenty sent to English benefactors of the missionary society in 1663, or part of the wider domestic distribution within the colony? Not established from the sources consulted. - What is the precise print run of the 1663 edition: 1,000 or 1,050 copies? Sources consulted for this record disagree. - What is the full physical collation, binding, and condition of the Rosenbach's own copy? Not established from public sources; direct physical examination or a full institutional catalogue record would be needed. - Beyond John Cotton Jr., did any other named individual, Native or English, assist with the specific textual revisions made for the 1685 second edition? Not established beyond Cotton's involvement in the sources consulted. - Is this copy currently on public display at the Rosenbach, in storage, or shown by appointment only? The institution's current permanent exhibition description names the Bay Psalm Book among its Americana highlights but does not name this Bible, and its display status could not be confirmed from public sources. ## Sources - [1] Wikipedia, 'Eliot Indian Bible'. Tertiary source; flagged for replacement with a primary bibliographic description (e.g. Wilberforce Eames or the modern Eliot Bible census). - [2] Wikipedia, 'Job Nesuton'. Tertiary source citing 'Job Nesuton (d. 1675)', From English to Algonquian: Early New England Translations (American Antiquarian Society), and Indian Education in the American Colonies, 1607-1783 (2007). - [3] Wikipedia, 'James Printer'. Tertiary source citing Walter T. Meserve, Cathy Rex, Siobhan Senier's Dawnland Voices, Neal Salisbury, and Jill Lepore. - [4] Wikipedia, 'John Sassamon'. Tertiary source citing Yasuhide Kawashima's Igniting King Philip's War, Jill Lepore's The Name of War, James D. Drake's King Philip's War, and Eliot's own journal. - [5] Wikipedia, 'Praying town'. Tertiary source citing Kenneth M. Morrison (Ethnohistory, Winter 1974) and Ives Goddard and Kathleen J. Bragdon, Native Writings in Massachusett (1989). - [6] American Antiquarian Society, 'Marmaduke Johnson', From English to Algonquian: Early New England Translations. - [7] The Rosenbach Museum & Library, 'Americana' collection page. - [8] The Rosenbach Museum & Library, 'Catalogs, Databases, & Guides'. - [9] Museum of the Bible, 'The Indian Bible' (accession BIB.001469), collection description. - [10] Sotheby's, 'Bible in Massachuset', Books & Manuscripts sale N09057, lot 173, 5 December 2013. - [11] Fine Books & Collections, '6 Six-Figure Bibles Going to Auction'. - [12] The Wopanaak Bible: A Census, 'About' page, directed by Gabriel Swift, Princeton University Library. - [13] Wopanaak Language Reclamation Project, 'Project History'. - [14] The Harvard Crimson, 'No Fear or Danger of Their Forgetting It: Revitalizing Wopanaak from John Eliot's Bible' (2024). - [15] The MacArthur Foundation, 'Jessie Little Doe Baird', Class of 2010 Fellows. - [16] King's College London Special Collections, 'Reclaiming a Language: Contextualizing John Eliot's Genesis'. - [17] Wikimedia Commons, File:Rosenbach Eliot Indian Bible 1.jpg, API metadata (extmetadata.LicenseShortName: CC BY 2.0). - [18] Wikimedia Commons, File:Portrait of John Eliot.jpg, API metadata (extmetadata.LicenseShortName: Public domain). - [19] Wikipedia, 'A. S. W. Rosenbach'. Tertiary source. - [20] Hidden City Philadelphia, 'With Bloomsday Near, Remembering The Rosenbach Brothers'. - [21] Wikipedia, 'Rosenbach Museum and Library'. Tertiary source. - [22] Bridwell Library Special Collections Exhibitions, 'Second Edition of the Earliest Bible Printed in the Americas', Elizabeth Perkins Prothro Bible Collection. - [23] GREATSITE.com, 'John Eliot', English Bible History timeline. Tertiary, low-authority source; flagged for replacement with a scholarly bibliographic account of the 1685 revision. - [24] Atkins Bookshelf (blog), entries tagged how-many-copies-of-eliot-indian-bible-exist-today. Low-authority secondary source for the commonly repeated thirty-nine surviving copies figure; flagged for replacement once the Eliot Bible census (source 12) publishes a final count. - [25] History of Information (Jeremy Norman), entry on Eliot's Indian Bible, on the type-casting required for Massachusett printing. Tertiary aggregator source; flagged for replacement with a primary bibliographic or typographic study of the Cambridge Press's type stock. - [26] Internet Archive, digitized 1685 second-edition copy from the John Carter Brown Library ('copy 2'), used here only to establish that a different institution's copy of a different edition is freely circulating online, not as a source about the Rosenbach's own copy. --- Images on this record are public domain or CC0 and are hosted by us. No image on this site is generated or simulated. If you quote this record, quote the provenance grades with it.