Reading John Eliot's The Christian Commonwealth at Natick: An Origin Story

This article situates John Eliot's 1659 political treatise The Christian Commonwealth in a colonial and Native American context, amending prior analyses of the text as an English political document. It argues that Eliot's political theory is the result of cultural contact between Native Americans and English colonists, and it focuses on the hermeneutical methods Eliot used to search the Bible for an ideal government form as evidence for that influence. Reading Eliot's text as the outcome of his Puritan training and of his interest in Wampanoag culture and language, the article addresses the divide between Native American studies and Puritan studies.