Welcome back to another episode of five minutes in church history. On this episode we are talking about the life of Bunyan.

I suppose we should get one order of business taken care of first.

We're talking about John Bunyan, the British reformer, not Paul Bunyan, the American legend.

So we have John Bunyan.

I'm holding in my hands a beautiful book.

It's bound very Victorian, it's leather, it's gold, gilded edge on the

pages and the cover has a beautiful monument on it and is gold and stamped on the very cover of these words, Elizabeth

gets a present from her affectionate mother. And as you open this beautiful

leatherbound book you come to the title page and you find that it is

the Pilgrim's Progress, The Holy War, and other selected works of John Bunyan. Well usually

when we think of John Bunyan,'s what we think of we think of

Pilgrim's Progress but he wrote many other books beyond Pilgrim's Progress some

think actually that Holy War is a better book than the famous

pilgrim's progress. Well, on this episode, let's talk about

his life. Bunion was a tinker, a poor tinker from Bedford. A Tinker was an itinerant mender of pots. In those days people had very few possessions. If your pot handle broke off or your spoon broke, wouldn't throw it out you'd wait for the

tinker to come by and he would fix that pot for you and he would fix that spoon

for you that's what John Bunyan's father was by trade and that's what he was. Bunion was born November

1628. In the 1640s Britain was engaged in a civil war and so Bunyan was a soldier in Oliver Cromwell's

parliamentary army. Doesn't look like he saw much action, and very soon after his time in the war he was married and had four children.

We don't know much about his first wife.

We don't even know her name.

We think it's Mary because that's the name of the first child that was born to that couple.

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