Casiodoro de Reina

Casiodoro de Reina or de Reyna (1520-94)was a former monk who, perhaps with several others, translated the Bible into Spanish.

Reina, was born about 1520. [Balderas, Eduardo. "How the Scriptures can be Translated into Spanish". Ensign, Sep. 1972] He became a monk of the Abbey de San Isidoro del Campo outside Sevilla, fled with about a dozen others when they came under suspicion by the Office of the Inquisition for Reformist tendencies. He first turned to John Calvin's Geneva but he did not find the atmosphere of doctrinaire rigidity of the Consistory to be salutary. In 1558, Reina declared that Geneva had become "a new Rome" and left.

Reina traveled to London where he served as pastor to Spanish Protestant refugees. However King Philip II of Spain was exerting pressure for his extradition. Reina then went on to Antwerp where he associated with the authors of the Polyglot Bible and then on to Frankfurt.

In Seville, (1562), the Inquisition made a "auto-da-fé" in which an image of Casiodoro was burned. The works of Reina and his colleagues were placed in the prohibited book Index and he was declared "heresiarch" (leader of heretics). Reina wrote then the first great book against the Inquisition: "Some arts of Holy Inquisition". He translated secretly the book of Sebastian Castellion, "Concerning Heretics", that condemns the executions for conscience reasons and documents the original Christian rejection for this practice.

While in exile, variously in Frankfurt, London, Antwerp, Orleans, and Bergerac, funded by various sources (such as Juan Pérez de Pineda) he began translating the Bible into Spanish, using a number of works as source texts. For the Old Testament, the work appears to have made extensive use of the Ladino Ferrara Bible with comparisons to the Masoretic Text and the Vetus Latina. The New Testament derives from the Textus Receptus of Erasmus with comparisons to the Vetus Latina and Syriac manuscripts.

It is speculated that the version he published in Switzerland in 1569—which became the basis of the Reina-Valera Bible—was a composite work of the expatriate Isidorean community, done by several different hands with Reina first among them.

He died in 1594.

ee also

*Bible translations
*Spanish translations of the Bible

Notes

References

*Kinder, A. Gordon. 1975: "Casiodoro de Reina: Spanish Reformer of the Sixteenth Century". Tamesis, London. ISBN 0-7293-0010-2