Talk:John Bunyan/Archive 1

List of Works
The list of works should be divided by books vs the many pamphlets, and listed by date. DGG 22:46, 8 June 2007 (UTC)

Self-contradiction?
The article now seems to contradict itself as to when "Pilgrim's Progress" first started to be written... AnonMoos (talk) 11:42, 5 March 2008 (UTC)

Odd text in article
Somebody put this text in the article: 想新日字越来越难过 ，该怎么办呢] 没人能够相信一个睡梦人，我一直在做梦，两年了 , overwriting some text. Google translate says it means "Think more and more new words, sorry, how to do that] no one can believe that a Shuimeng, I have been dreaming, for two years"

I removed the text, but I wonder what a Shuimeng is.. --Shanedidona (talk) 18:01, 27 May 2008 (UTC)

Diggory Press
I removed the ISBNs for this publisher from the collected works having failed to find any of the titles on their web site or on Amazon. Since all the works are available online they aren't of much value anyway. Chris55 (talk) 21:55, 11 August 2008 (UTC)

Agree with above
Language in article does indeed seem a little loaded, it needs a lot of tidying and shortening somewhat.I vote for removal of hatred of Catholicism section, otherwise where will wiki articles end if hatred topics included for each individual. As for the statement ...Macaulay has said, that... "In England during the latter half of the seventeenth century there were only two minds which possessed the imaginative faculty in a very eminent degree. One of these minds produced the Paradise Lost, the other The Pilgrim's Progress." Well clearly this Macaulay guy never read Sir Thomas Browne's  'The Garden of Cyrus' of 1658 a work which easily qualifies as an example of the imaginative faculty in operation to a very eminent degree!! Bunyan not the sole imaginative author of the 17th century but certainly the best known due to his agenda.Norwikian (talk) 11:05, 28 September 2009 (UTC)

Bunyan a Romanichal?
In the article listing famous Romanichals, John Bunyan is there, yet it's not mentioned here. What's the truth? 194.72.120.131 (talk) 13:12, 17 February 2012 (UTC)

Gaol vs jail
Is there a reason to use the term "gaol" instead of "jail"? I would imagine that most English speakers would not even know what "gaol" means. Kaigew (talk) 06:31, 11 June 2014 (UTC)

≈≈ More Changes Needed ≈≈

These comments are largely derived from the biography of John Bunyan by Vera Brittain, referred to above. (1) Thomas Bunyan junior (John's father) was a "landed tinker", not a roving one, with a forge adjacent to his cottage in Bunyan's End, Elstow. John's grand-father (Thomas Bunyan senior) was a small trader, describing himself in his will as a "pettie chapman". (2) Thomas Bunyan junior was first married, when he was 20, to Anne Pinney, but she died childless after less than four years of marriage. His third wife, whom he married in 1644, seems also to have had Anne as her first name, but she was NOT Anne Pinney (or Purney). (3) John Bunyan worked as a travelling tinker, but was never accused of being a "tinkerer" - as in the current WP text. (4) It would be helpful to state that the Puritans held the "Lord's Day" (i. e. Sunday) to be sacred, rather than using the word Sabbath without explanation. The Puritans were not Seventh Day Adventists. (5) Mary Bunyan (John's first wife) died in late 1658 - not in 1655. She bore two daughters - Mary in 1650 and Elizabeth in 1654 and two sons - John in 1656 and Thomas in 1658. John married Elizabeth one year after the death of her friend Mary. (6) I cannot find any justification for describing, in the sections "1672 to 1688" and "The Pilgrim's Progress", Bunyan's congregation as a Baptist church or Bunyan as a Baptist preacher. Theologically, John Bunyan was an independent, non-conformist, puritanical Christian. (7) The paragraph, at the end of the "Freedom" section, regarding John's family would fit in more naturally immediately after the sentence, under "First Imprisonment", about John's marraige to Elizabeth. (8) As stated previosly, the Chiltern Hills (mentioned in the section on "The Pilgrim's Progress") do NOT surround Bedfordshire, but cross the extreme south of the county, for about ten miles, from west of Dunstable to just west of Hitchin. JohnRAbrams (talk) 23:39, 20 July 2014 (UTC)JohnRAbramsJohnRAbrams (talk) 23:39, 20 July 2014 (UTC)

1907 Guide to Leicester and Neighbourhood -British Association for the Advancement of Science.
Religion isn't my forte but I have a somewhat fragile copy of the above book. On P14, talking about the civil war in 1645 it says :- ''John Bunyan was a soldier in the siege of Leicester serving probably on the King's side, and his conversion dates from a miraculous escape from death he had there. When he returned to the town in later years he came as a fervent preacher of the gospel.''

Is this of any use? JRPG (talk) 20:59, 18 August 2014 (UTC)

Question whether the tone of main article is appropriate for wikipedia
There is a specific line in the wikipedia text about Bunyan's work "Abundance of Grace to the Chief of Sinners", specifically: It is very prolix and, being all about Bunyan himself, would seem intolerably egotistical except that his motive in writing it was plainly to exalt the Christian concept of grace and to comfort those passing through experiences like his own.

The terms "intolerably egotistical" don't seem to be a neutral viewpoint. Having read a Penguin Classics version of this work, I would note that the introduction calls this work "a spiritual autobiography", and names certain characteristics of spiritual autobiographies, which this work shares. Specifically, it has to tell about a life before salvation, possible cases of divine intervention saving the person's life, the salvation process, the calling to ministry, and the current state of the person's life. As such, it is actually a specific type of literature which *must* be about the person themselves.

So my question is: could this be improved by being made more neutral? 216.54.1.206 00:24, 5 October 2007 (UTC)Mike Rudmin, 8:22 PM Oct. 4, 2007

In a hagiographical article, THAT is your objection?
The whole article is swimming with adoration. "John" does this, and "John" does that, and "John" is "persecuted!" Poor John is striving earnestly to do good, but the evil Anglican Church is out to put him down (even though he was imprisoned by the Protectorate).

In fact, any autobiography was generally greeted as being "egotistical." However, stories of conversion were just beginning to be popular. They are now an established genre with (wait for it) Southern Baptists, but only after Knox's theology put an emphasis on conversion as an integral part of all Christian faith. This is a point (that everyone "converts") that the Established Church did not agree with, that none of the older Protestant churches agreed with. Therefore, to fellow Dissenters, the conversion narrative would later be an expected thing, but could have been seen as outlandish to the wider readership. (See the reaction to secular autobiographies much later -- 1715.)

Finally, this article draws on apocryphal sources. Why on earth isn't anyone porting from the DNB? If nothing else, just grab the oDNB of the 1890's. From asserting that Pilgrim's Progress is the most famous religious allegory (so Divine Comedy isn't so well known? that's news) to its adoring tone, this article is a mess. (As for "sofixit," I'm not here. Wikipedia does not like scholarship.) 64.234.66.158 (talk) 17:26, 28 November 2014 (UTC)


 * A major problem is the lack of citations. I am going to replace the unsourced text with sourced text. Southdevonian (talk) 13:44, 6 December 2014 (UTC)

I agree
The issue was changed. Thank you. --Austin.McKnight (talk) 01:44, 3 October 2008 (UTC)

This may go beyond a problem of tone, but I was loath to open a new thread. The following passage quoted form the section on the Pilgrim's Progress is an example of one of the worst pseudo-intellectual and overtly biased attempts at literary criticism that I have ever seen: "Bunyan's writings are more believable than Daniel Defoe's, regardless of Defoe's realistic portrayals of the human world. Bunyan is not only telling a story and constructing a plot, he is creating a divine composition, in which everything refers to itself. While Defoe may succeed in realistically describing others, Bunyan creates a figurative representation; a complex and somewhat distorted mirror image of ourselves." This passage attempts to make a qualitative comparison between two very different writers that falls apart under even the most superficial scrutiny. In fact, it reveals only an enthusiasm for Bunyan that is inappropriate for anything that would call itself an encyclopedia. I suggest it be removed and replaced with nothing as the value judgment it deploys has no value whatsoever. Please forgive the fact that my post is anonymous. I do not make regular contributions to Wikipedia and I do not know how to sign my response. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 76.208.11.198 (talk) 00:06, 26 May 2009 (UTC)
 * That used to be here? That would fail even the worst publisher in history as literary criticism. In other words, it isn't a valid literary critique from any perspective. Such criticisms are acceptable if attributed (e.g. "F.L. Cross felt that Bunyan's work was more successful than the more narrowly written contemporary tracts"), but whoever read that originally should have seen it as bogus. No one should have thought it was a universal truth.
 * No, "replacing text" with sourced material is not a way to fix this article. Deleting the whole and rewriting it from scratch -- following a traditional organizational plan (accomplishments; biography; lasting effect; reception contemporary and current; critical issues in theology, history, and social trends raised; further reading) -- is the only hope. 64.234.66.158 (talk) 14:37, 21 December 2014 (UTC)

Hatred of Catholicism
Aside from including half-finished sentences and loaded language, I fail to see how this section is contributing anything noteworthy to the article. I vote for removal. Razzendahcuben (talk) 21:26, 16 July 2009 (UTC)
 * Agree. Very poorly written, seemingly POV-motivated, little if anything of note, certainly doesn't justify a section by itself. Removing. Vilĉjo (talk) 23:04, 26 July 2009 (UTC)

i believe that john bunyan is an extremely important historical figure of religious history and therefore it should be included that he thought the catholic church was satanic. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Ned262626 (talk • contribs) 16:12, 26 August 2009 (UTC)
 * Um, no. That's a game of transitive authority, and it's a fallacy, friend. Bunyan thought the RCC was the Whore of Babylon, but he borrowed that imagery from other dissenters. He was neither original, nor particularly vehement, in this respect. During the English Civil Wars (note the plural), the Independents saw nearly everyone as Antichrist at one point or another, and they had been calling the RCC Antichrist for decades.
 * “...every particular Church (in Geneva) did that within itself, which some few of their own thought good, by whom the rest were all directed. Such number of Churches then being, though free within themselves, yet small, common conference beforehand might have eased them of much after trouble.”
 * “...every later endeavoured to be certain degrees more removed from conformity with the Church of Rome, than the rest before had been: whereupon grew marvellous great dissimilitudes, and by reason thereof, jealousies, heart-burnings, jars and discords amongst them.” – Richard Hooker, “Preface” Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity
 * Or you could hear what Izaak Walton had to say about the state of the Puritans in the years before the Civil War:
 * “. . . they called the spirit of opposition a tender conscience, and complained of persecution, because they wanted power to persecute others; when the giddy multitude raged, and became restless to find out misery for themselves and others; and the rabble would herd themselves together, and endeavour to govern and act in spite of authority: in this extremity of fear, and danger of the church and state, when, to suppress the growing evils of both, they needed a man of prudence and piety, and of an high and fearless fortitude..." Life of Richard Hooker
 * So, sure, Bunyan was like those in his church. That goes without saying. Say he was an Independent, and you say that he was accusing various persons of being Antichrist. You can even understand why the public was sick to death of it, since the Independents had had their way and decapitated the king, instituted theocracy, and then seen the son of the Protector go to inherit the position.
 * "A little Learning is a dangerous thing/ Drink deep or touch not the Pierian Spring." Hithladaeus (talk) 13:54, 18 May 2015 (UTC)

The ignorance and bias of the author exceeded only by the commentators.
"This Macauley guy" happens to have been the most well-respected historian in Victorian England. You may have read a book you stumbled over which impressed you, but you know precious little of historians and historiography in Victorian England.

This biography of Bunyan is hopelessly biased, and should be removed altogether until it can be cleaned up. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 206.80.248.223 (talk) 04:33, 31 March 2010 (UTC)


 * That Macauley guy was responsible for gorgeous prose and very bad history. Would you rely upon Clarendon's History of the Civil Wars by themselves? We all know he's good, but we all know that he had a dog (and an estate) in the hunt. Macauley was responsible for the Whig History that was extremely influential and extremely insidious. It has a clear narrative of capitalist triumph, civilization regnant, and the British Empire righteously defending all noble qualities. It dismisses all politicians, political forces, and causes that align with the Tories.
 * His prose is remarkable, but even one of his friends said that he could not read much at a time because, "One does not live underneath a waterfall." Neither Carlyle's "Great Man" history nor Macauley's Whig History can be allowed to keep their tendrils running through contemporary analysis. Hithladaeus (talk) 14:01, 18 May 2015 (UTC)

--== Some Minor Changes Needed ==

While this article largely does justice to John Bunyan, the writer may have relied too much on one source - the public domain text by J W Cousin. Of many biographies about John Bunyan, I especially recommend the well-researched book  by Christian pacifist Vera Brittain . (1) John was not really a "Baptist in the Church of England". After his conversion, John considered himself an independent Christian and did not believe that baptism was a pre-requisite to communion (as stated clearly, later in the article). His book on baptism would not endear John to a big "B" Baptist! The license that was issued, in 1672, for the Bedford free church to use the barn south of Mill Street, included the words "to be a place for the use of such as doe not conforme to the Church of England who are of the Perswasion commonly called Congregationall." In the 1950's the Bunyan Meeting was still considered to be a Congregational church - although it is now called the Bunyan Meeting Free Church and defines itself as ecumenical  (2) It's unlikely that Bunyan became "pastor of St Paul's church", which is the largest Anglican church in Bedford. He probably preached there during the Commowealth period  and was interrupted by Quakers (as was their custom), but was not qualified to be a rector/vicar. (3) The Chiltern Hills (near Dunstable) were the image for the Delectable Mountains, but do NOT surround Bedfordshire. Rather, the Chilterns are in the extreme south of the county and run, in a south-westerly direction, into Buckinghamshire                 JohnRAbrams (talk) 16:24, 10 May 2010 (UTC)

What about the historical, political, and cultural context?
The article presents Bunyan altogether too exclusively in his own ahistorical and religious terms. Though the text is strewn with numerous dates (and a link to Charles II), they only situate Bunyan chronologically. There is little or no attention to situating Bunyan historically, culturally, and politically. Bunyan is writing during the period of English Restoration, when there was no such thing as a religious position without political and social implications and vice-versa. The article fails almost completely to take this into account.

Ludwig X (talk) 21:18, 18 January 2009 (UTC)


 * Good question. The answer to your question is probably that most of the people who value Bunyan these days do so purely for his religious imagery and heritage. So why don't you add something to the article? Good source material might be Christopher Hill's "A tinker and a poor man". I haven't read it but it's available on Amazon very cheaply. Chris55 (talk) 19:50, 28 May 2009 (UTC)

I have changed the words "The English Parliament" and its Wikipedia link to "The Parliamentarians" with a direct to Roundhead. Everybody got to be somewhere! (talk) 00:48, 16 October 2009 (UTC)

It is absurd to refer to Bunyan's parents as 'working-class' people. The term is entirely inappropriate for the early seventeenth century. The most appropriate way to classify Bunyan's parents (if classifying people rocks your boat) is to refer to them as ordinary villagers, which is what they were. Johnpretty010 (talk) 20:08, 17 July 2011 (UTC)
 * This discussion is not otiose, but User:Johnpretty010 is correct in his first half. There was no English working class before the depredations of industrialism had created it (viz. E. P. Thompson's The Making of the English Working Class), which most of us think of as occurring from about 1680 - 1824. (People later than Thompson would point to the innovation of the slave trade as necessary for the kick off of industrialism, so that pushes it to James II.) (Other people would argue that class does not exist until class consciousness emerges, and that lags behind the material changes, so Thompson was right to look at the Enclosures and other factors of the early 18th century, as well as the massive destruction of legal protections for the poor in the 1760's.) Regardless, a better term might be "yeoman" or "peasant" or "artisan," if we're trying to avoid industrial terminology. (Then again, "historical, political, and cultural context" leads us to essays, not encyclopedia articles.) Hithladaeus (talk) 14:13, 19 May 2015 (UTC)

Stray reference
I removed this book from references because it doesn't appear in footnotes. Putting it here in case I missed something. Southdevonian (talk) 16:43, 21 May 2015 (UTC)

Saints? Let's remove a category, eh?
Since Bunyan was a dissenter/Independent, the CoE cannot count him as one of the "Blessed," I think, which as near as it gets to saints. The RCC would obviously not canonize a man who considered its popes servants of Satan. Nor would Bunyan approve of canonization. Now, he writes of "saints" pretty regularly, but this is standard language for dissenter (Puritan) and Independent writers for themselves (the Elect).

In short, there is no way in which John Bunyan belongs in any Wikipedia Project of saints, since he wasn't one, in the usual sense, and no organized church has canonized him. This is not to take away from his personal holiness, but rather to preserve the meaning of the category term. Hithladaeus (talk) 14:04, 19 May 2015 (UTC)


 * Bunyan is actually in the Calendar of saints (Church of England) under August. Southdevonian (talk) 13:16, 21 May 2015 (UTC)
 * Really? Really? Crud. We're all to forgive and forget and all that, and pay no man evil for evil, and pray for one's enemies and all that, but. . . the dude died very much opposed to the established church. (sigh.) I stand corrected. Hithladaeus (talk) 18:21, 22 May 2015 (UTC)

Let's talk: "Legacy"
The "Legacy" section is currently a bit slavish to a single source that is entirely Anglophile and a bit blind.
 * For example, there is a reference to "the Evangelical revival." Now, that is actually a reference to something most contemporary British readers wouldn't understand and no American readers (nor Australian nor African) would get. The reference here is to the introduction of evangelical preaching during the late 18th to early 19th century in England. It is mainly associated with George Whitefield, I believe, and the emergence of the Methodist Church. Specifically, the quarrel that John Wesley and Whitefield had led to the latter's moving out from both strict Anglicanism and nascent Methodist doctrine. For British religion, the argument was extremely vexed precisely because it seemed to be a recall of the old days (i.e. Puritan and Independent days) of people like. . . Bunyan.
 * So, should that link to The Great Awakening? I doubt it. Should it link to evangelism? Definitely not!
 * Next, though, for audiences outside of the UK, this bit of the "legacy" is still important, because the 1982 writers were trying to explain something important. Therefore, there needs to certainly be a link to the second awakening, if an article on that exists, which was the evangelical explosion of the 1820's in America. It is that moment that saw the real proliferation of small, neo-Calvinist churches and congregational churches in America. Hithladaeus (talk) 13:16, 19 May 2015 (UTC)
 * Unfortunately the article titled The Great Awakening is devoted to an album by a Christian rock band. We do, however, have the following:
 * Great Awakening - an overview article which seems devoted to "several periods of religious revival in American religious history"; and
 * First Great Awakening - "an evangelical and revitalization movement that swept Protestant Europe and British America, and especially the American colonies in the 1730s and 1740s. (This is the one associated with George Whitefield.)
 * Perhaps the overview article - although seeming think that Protestant revivalism was limited to the colonies - would still be the best starting point we have for someone trying to understand Bunyan's legacy. Thoughts? --RexxS (talk) 18:36, 21 May 2015 (UTC)
 * I have reverted to the original sentence (no countries mentioned) because I have checked the source and it doesn't mention countries. By all means, add something about America or anywhere else - but with a different source. This is what the existing source says (after a bit about Southey's biography and Macauley's review of it): "Bunyan's works were ready-made for the evangelical revival; a host of evangelical commentators, led by William Mason, George Burder, and Thomas Scott, expounded upon Bunyan's works [actually the Mason, Burder and Scott edition of Pilgrim's Progress pre-dates the Southey biography]. While they too enhanced Burden's reputation, their uncritical works were of a different stamp from the more significant and scholarly contributions of Southey and Macauley. Yet together these two traditions laid the foundation for the Victorian Age's exaltation of Bunyan as a genius, a theme especially pronounced in Robert Philip's 1839 biography. The 19th century witnesses a substantial outpouring of often uncritical adulation of Bunyan, most of it somewhat repetitious in content and evangelical in spirit. Reading Bunyan was more akin to reading the Scripture than to perusing Shakespeare or Milton. Piety, not scholarship was the emphasis." Does that help over which article to link to? I wasn't sure so left it unlinked. Again - if anyone can find published sources that discuss Bunyan's legacy in US or anywhere else - go ahead. By the way the ODNB entry was written by one of the authors of the above extract, so the legacy section is pretty similar. Southdevonian (talk) 16:49, 22 May 2015 (UTC)


 * We have several issues to discuss.
 * 1. The existing articles for the various evangelical movements are mislabeled and then some. Although some historians hate the terminology of "awakening," because they think that it validates a foregrounding of faith, they are still a minority view, and Wikipedia has to serve the student doing a look-up, not the academic purging the world of implicit linguistic bias. (E.g. quite a few historians hate "medieval" because the word means "middle age," which is only true if we assume that Rome is "our" founding and today is the end of history. Great argument, but an encyclopedia needs to use the term people search, not the one that's ideologically pure.)
 * The Great Awakening and Great Awakening should go to the same destination, and the band with an album will have to disambig. So sad, too bad, and all that, but there's no way that any record album is a more likely search than a major revolution in protestantism. The Great Awakening was not American. "America" was Great Britain. (Duh.) There was no United States before 1778, so the Great Awakening can't be called American in the first place, although the preachers came to America, and Jonathan Edwards had a massive effect on the communities he visited.
 * There is a second great awakening which matters because it was a much more perplexing, disorganized, and revolutionary event. It's harder to discuss, because it's easiest to see in its effects than its causes. The thing definitely happened, because suddenly masses of churches came into existence.
 * The overarching narrative behind "awakening" goes back to the 1570's and the Puritans. The radicals would eventually win the Civil Wars (1640's), only to lose by winning. From 1660 - 1715, there is a strong push-back against "enthusiasm." After the Georges come in, though, a more lattitudinarian church develops by default, because the Georges, after the Bangorian controversy stopped the convocation. That sets everyone up for a marriage of the "dissenter" style of preaching (enthusiasm) with an ostensibly establishment message in Whitefield and Wesley. Whitefield especially liked the "personal narrative" and conversion story that had previously been found in the Scottish church and. . . John Bunyan. Hence, this "awakening" was a reintroduction of the preaching methods that had been present before, but only in the dissenting churches.
 * The oDNB author is quite smart, and quite negative. He is suggesting, properly, that the new readers came to read Bunyan the way that they read the Bible, and that's how he's being read today by home schooled children in the US and Australia. He's "right" without having any literary or theological qualities -- as if the whole work were a seamless artifact that dropped from revelation. The author's correct that that's a fruit of the evangelical movements of the first and second awakenings. The only missing item, and I don't have a reference for this, just reading in primaries, is that there was a shift toward "piety" in the early decades of the 18th century among the dissenters in England. They abandoned the push toward changing the church and concentrated on the individual being saved from the fire (like Christian, who pretty blithely leaves his children to Hell). William Law's A Serious Call, Boyle's Meditations and dozens of books of bound sermons tell the tale of a retreat from "the world" toward contemplation.
 * 2. The original source's documentation of the age's formation of opinion should probably stay as clipped as it is now. We need to indicate that Bunyan got his boost from the change in preaching, may easily hint that it got a further boost from the growth in Baptist and other new churches (that's all the source does), and we might include the line that the favorable impression did not come with increased academic interest (better than "scholarly").
 * 3. I think we have to leave Macauley and Southey out, by and large. They can be mentioned, but their names won't mean much to contemporary readers. Contemporaries only know Southey, if at all, as the "Bob" that Byron clobbered in Don Juan.
 * Finally, forgive me if I'm not so bold as to go grab the "Awakening" articles and redirect and renamed them myself, but I haven't the juice yet. Hithladaeus (talk) 18:52, 22 May 2015 (UTC)