226 Bradford, William
Protestant believers who were like-minded in what
they saw as right Christian doctrine (orthodoxy)
and right practice (orthopraxy). The community’s
existence was warranted by the New Testament
teachings of Paul in his second letter to the church
in Corinth: “The body is a unit, though it is made
up of many parts; and though all its parts are many,
they form one body. So it is with Christ. For we were
all baptized by one Spirit into one body—whether
Jews or Greeks, slave or free—and we were all given
the one Spirit to drink.... Now you are the body of
Christ, and each one of you is a part of it” (1 Cor.
12:12–13, 27). Thus, every believer who took these
words seriously—as Bradford certainly did—had
an obligation to first look to the spiritual health of
the overall body before looking to his or her own
well-being.
This mindset explains why the Scrooby con-
gregation members were willing to make major
decisions like leaving England and moving to the
Netherlands and then to the New World. The issue
was not that it was inconvenient for their individual
members to live in England, but that if they moved
together as a group, they could help themselves and
thus have a convenient move to a convenient locale.
Bradford makes clear at the beginning of his second
chapter that there was nothing easy about the moves.
He makes note of the pain of separation from their
native land and the many uncertainties that await
them. He says, though, that they gladly accept this
challenge, because they are eager to do God’s will.
This specific community moved from England
to Amsterdam in order to be free to follow these
ordinances as the members thought they should
be followed. These same members moved from
Amsterdam to Leyden so that their own com-
munity would not be corrupted by the infighting
of the congregation that had been established in
Amsterdam before they arrived (this is John Smith’s
congregation, mentioned in chapter 3 of Bradford’s
text). They moved from Leyden to the New World
mainly in order to save their children from acquir-
ing the worldly lifestyle of the Leyden inhabitants.
Before this final move, the congregation had already
lived in Leyden for more than a decade and had seen
some of their younger members stray. The danger to
the whole group was such that they worried that all
of their members could be corrupted.
These incidents show that the driving passion
for this group was their own unity and identity.
Thus, one way for Bradford to highlight the dif-
ficulty of carrying out these moves is by emphasiz-
ing how the unity suffers during the process. For
example, when the group prepares to move from
England to Amsterdam, political difficulties cause a
sudden rupture in the group when half of the group
gets arrested on the shore while the other half sails
away unwillingly under the orders of the desperate
Dutch captain. And when the community begins
to sail from Leyden to America, physical difficul-
ties with the ship itself cause a good portion of the
pilgrims to separate from the group and remain in
Leyden, much to the distress of those who choose
to remain aboard. At the end of chapter 8, Brad-
ford seems hard put to make credible excuses for
those who have decided to remain behind. In fact,
by his reference to the Gideon story ( Judges 7:1–8
in the Old Testament), he implies that those who
remained behind were not really part of God’s plan
to populate New England in the first place.
All this is not to say that the individual did
not matter to Bradford. On the contrary, in Brad-
ford’s theology, the decisions of the individual were
paramount as far as an individual’s own particular
spiritual condition was concerned. But once the indi-
vidual made a decision toward biblical Christianity
(once he or she was “in Christ”), the needs of the
group—for unity, growth, edification, correction, and
so on—took precedence. And Bradford the author
exemplifies this stance perfectly: Throughout his
narrative, he constantly refers to himself in the third
person, thereby maintaining a posture that includes
him as, in essence, just another part of the whole. He
also overlooks personal matters that would them-
selves be justified in being part of the narrative—his
wife’s death, for example—because he is writing the
account not as a narrative of his own experience but
as an account of the Community’s experiences.
Matthew Hornidentity in Of Plymouth Plantation
The fact that, in his work, William Bradford does
not refer to himself in the first person but instead