John Bunyan, perhaps the best-known Puritan writer, was born in 1628 at Elstow, near Bedford, to Thomas Bunyan and Margaret Bentley. Thomas Bunyan, a bra­zier or tinker, was poor but respectable and adequately supported his family. Still, for the most part, John Bunyan was poorly educated. He became rebellious, frequently indulging in cursing. He later wrote, “It was my delight to be taken captive by the devil at his will: being filled with all unrighteousness; that from a child I had but few equals, both for cursing, swear­ing, lying, and blaspheming the holy name of God” (Works of Bunyan, ed. George Offor, 1:6). Sporadic con­victions of sin helped restrain some of that rebellion, however.

When Bunyan was sixteen years old, his mother and sister died a month apart. His father remarried a month later. Young Bunyan joined the Parliamentary Army, where he continued his rebellious ways. Fight­ing in the Civil War sobered him considerably, however. On one occasion, his life was wonderfully spared. “When I was a soldier, I with others, was drawn out to go to such a place to besiege it. But when I was just ready to go, one of the company desired to go in my room; to which when I consented, he took my place, and coming to the siege, as he stood sentinel he was shot in the head with a musket bullet and died” (ibid.).

Bunyan was discharged from the army in 1646 or 1647. He later reflected on that experience in his book, The Holy War.

In 1648, Bunyan married a God-fearing woman named Mary, whose only dowry was two books: Arthur Dent’s The Plain Man’s Pathway to Heaven and Lewis Bayly’s The Practice of Piety. When Bunyan read those books, he was convicted of sin. He started attend­ing church, stopped swearing and tried to honor the Sabbath. After some months, Bunyan came into con­tact with some women whose joyous conversation about the new birth and Christ deeply impressed him. He mourned his joyless existence as he realized that he was lost and outside of Christ. “I cannot now express with what longings and breakings in my soul I cried to Christ to call me,” he wrote. He felt that he had the worst heart in all of England. He was even jealous of animals because they did not have a soul to account for before God.

In 1651, the women introduced Bunyan to John Gifford, their pastor in Bedford. God used Gifford to lead Bunyan to repentance and faith. Bunyan was par­ticularly influenced by a sermon Gifford preached on Song of Solomon 4:1, “Behold thou art fair, my love, behold thou art fair,” as well as by reading Luther’s commentary of Galatians, in which he found his own experience “largely and profoundly handled, as if (Luther’s) book had been written out of my own heart” (cited by Greaves, John Bunyan, p. 18). While walking through a field one day, Christ’s righteousness was revealed to Bunyan’s soul and gained the victory. Bunyan writes of that unforgettable experience:

One day, as I was passing in the field, this sentence fell upon my soul: Thy righteousness is in heaven; and me thought withal I saw with the eyes of my soul, Jesus Christ, at God’s right hand; there, I say, as my righteousness; so that wherever I was, or whatever I was a-doing, God could not say of me, He wants my righteousness, for that was just before Him. I also saw, moreover, that it was not my good frame of heart that made my righteousness better, nor yet my bad frame that made my worse; for my righteousness was Jesus Christ Himself, the same yesterday, today, and forever. Now did my chains fall off my legs indeed. I was loosed from my afflictions and irons; my temptations also fled away. Now I went home rejoicing for the grace and love of God. I lived for some time very sweetly at peace with God through Christ. Oh! Me thought, Christ! Christ! There was nothing but Christ that was before my eyes. I saw now not only looking upon this and the other ben­efits of Christ apart, as of His blood, burial, and resurrection, but considered Him as a whole Christ! It was glorious to me to see His exaltation, and the worth and prevalency of all His benefits, and that because now I could look from myself to Him, and would reckon that all those graces of God that now were green in me, were yet but like those cracked groats and fourpence-halfpennies that rich men carry in their purses, when their gold is in their trunk at home! Oh, I saw that my gold was in my trunk at home! In Christ my Lord and Saviour! Now Christ was All.

Grace Abounding, paragraphs 229-32, pp. 129-31

In 1653, Bunyan became a member of Gifford’s church. His testimony became the talk of the town. Several people were led to conversion in response to it.

The following year, Bunyan moved to Bedford with his wife and four children under the age of six. His first-born Mary was blind from birth. That same year, Bunyan was appointed deacon, and lost both his beloved wife and his pastor to death.

In 1655, Bunyan began preaching to various congregations in Bedford. Hundreds came to hear him. Three years later he published A Few Sighs from Hell. The book was well received.

In 1660, while preaching in a farmhouse at Lower Samsell, Bunyan was arrested on the charge of preaching without official rights from the king. When told that he would be freed if he no longer preached, he replied, “If I am freed today, I will preach tomorrow.” He was thrown into prison, where he made shoelaces for twelve and a half years (1660-1672).

Prior to his arrest, Bunyan had remarried, this time to a godly young woman named Elizabeth. She pleaded repeatedly for his release from prison, but biased judges distorted the case and on some occasions even lied to keep him there. So Bunyan remained in prison with no formal charge and no legal sentence, in defiance of the habeas corpus provisions of the Magna Charta, all because he refused to give up preaching the gospel.

In 1661 and from 1668-1672, certain jailers permitted Bunyan to leave prison at times to preach. George Offer notes, “It is said that many of the Baptist congregations in Bedfordshire owe their origins to his midnight preaching” (Works of Bunyan, 1:lix). Prison years were times of difficult trials, however. Bunyan experienced what his Pilgrim’s Progress characters Christian and Faithful would later suffer at the hands of Giant Despair, who thrust pilgrims “into a very dark dungeon, nasty and stinking.” Bunyan especially felt the pain of separation from his wife and children, particularly “blind Mary,” describing it as a “pulling of the flesh from my bones.”

Prison years, however, were productive years for Bunyan. In the mid-1660s, Bunyan wrote avidly in prison, with only the Bible and Foxe’s Book of Martyrs at his side. In 1664, he finished Profitable Meditations, Prayer, and Christian Behaviour; in 1665, One Thing Needful, The Holy City, and The Resurrection of the Dead. In 1666, the middle of his prison-time, he wrote Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners, in which he declared, “The Almighty God being my help and shield, I am determined yet to suffer, if frail life might continue so long, even till the moss shall grow upon my eyebrows, rather than violate my faith and principles.” During the last half of his imprisonment, he finished A Confession of Faith, A Reason for My Practice, and A Defence of the Doctrine of Justification, an uncompromising criticism of the rising tide of Pelagianism among the Nonconformists, and latitudinarianism among the Anglican establishment.

The Bedford congregation, sensing some relaxation of the law against preaching, appointed Bunyan as pastor on January 21, 1672, but Bunyan was not released until September. He had been the first to suf­fer under Charles II and was the last to be released. His long years in Bedford’s county prison made him a “martyr” in the eyes of many.

Bunyan had enjoyed less than two years of freedom when he was again arrested for preaching and put in the town jail. Here he wrote Instruction for the Ignorant, Saved by Grace, The Strait Gate, and the first part of his famous Pilgrim’s Progress. That book, which sold more than 100,000 copies in its first decade in print, has since been reprinted in thousands of editions and trans­lated into more than a hundred languages.

John Owen, who had told Charles II that he would gladly exchange all his learning for Bunyan’s power of touching men’s hearts, was instrumental in winning Bunyan’s release in 1676. Bunyan spent his last years ministering to the Nonconformists and writing. In 1680, he wrote The Life and Death of Mr. Badman and in 1682, The Holy War. In 1685, he published the sec­ond part of Pilgrim’s Progress dealing with Christiana’s pilgrimage, A Caution to Stir Up to Watch Against Sin, and Questions About the Nature and the Perpetuity of the Seventh-day Sabbath. In the last three years of his life, he wrote another dozen books, of which the best-known are The Pharisee and the Publican, Come and Welcome to Jesus Christ, The Jerusalem Sinner Saved, The Work of Jesus Christ as an Advocate, The Water of Life, Solomon’s Temple Spiritualized, The Acceptable Sacrifice, and The Greatness of the Soul.

In 1688, Bunyan died suddenly from an infection that he caught while traveling in cold weather. On his deathbed, he said to those who gathered around him, “Weep not for me, but for yourselves. I go to the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who will, no doubt, through the mediation of His blessed Son, receive me, though a sinner; where I hope we ere long shall meet, to sing the new song, and remain everlastingly happy, world with­out end” (Works of Bunyan, 1:lxxviii). After telling his friends that his greatest desire was to be with Christ, he raised his hands to heaven, and cried, “Take me, for I come to Thee!” and then died. He was buried in Bunhill Fields, close to Thomas Goodwin and John Owen.