John Eliot (c. 1604 - 21 May 1690) was a Puritan missionary to the American Indians. His efforts earned him the designation “the Indian apostle.”

John Eliot and fellow ministers Thomas Weld (also of Roxbury) and Richard Mather of Dorchester, are credited with being the editors of the Bay Psalm Book, which was the first book published in the British North American colonies. He participated in the examination, excommunication and exile of Anne Hutchinson, whose opinions he deplored. He was instrumental in the conversion of Massachusett Indians. To help achieve this, Eliot translated the Bible into the Natick language and published it in 1663. Printed in Cambridge, Massachusetts, between 1660 and 1663, the “Eliot Indian Bible,” as it is now known, was the first complete Bible printed in the Western Hemisphere.  John Eliot, an English Puritan clergyman and pastor in Roxbury, Massachusetts, translated the Bible into the Natick dialect of the region’s Algonquin tribes to aid in the propagation of the scriptures. One thousand copies were to be printed by Samuel Green and a young English press assistant, Marmaduke Johnson, an order so large that it required a special shipment of paper from England. 

In 1666, his grammar of Massachusett, called "The Indian Grammar Begun", was published as well. As a cross-cultural missionary Eliot was best known for attempting to preserve the culture of the Native Americans by putting them in planned towns where they could continue by their own rule as a Christian society. At one point in time, there were 14 of these towns of so-called "Praying Indians", the best documented being at Natick, Massachusetts. These towns were mostly destroyed by furious English colonists during King Philip's War (1675). Although restoration was attempted, it ultimately failed. The praying Indian towns included: Littleton (Nashoba), Lowell (Wamesit, initially incorporated as part of Chelmsford), Grafton (Hassanamessit), Marlborough (Okommakamesit), a portion of Hopkinton that is now in the Town of Ashland (Makunkokoag), Canton (Punkapoag), Mendon-Uxbridge (Wacentug), and Natick.

Eliot was also the author of The Christian Commonwealth: or, The Civil Policy Of The Rising Kingdom of Jesus Christ, considered the first book on politics written by an American and also the first book to be banned by an American government. Written in the late 1640s, and published in England in 1659, it proposed a new model of civil government based on the system Eliot instituted among the converted Indians, which was based in turn on Exodus 18, the government instituted among the Israelites by Moses in the wilderness. Eliot asserted that "Christ is the only right Heir of the Crown of England," and called for the institution of an elected theocracy in England and throughout the world. The accession to the throne of Charles II of England made the book an embarrassment to the Massachusetts colony, and in 1661 the General Court banned the book and ordered all copies destroyed. Eliot was forced to issue a public retraction and apology.