Casiodoro de Reina

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

Reina, 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. First turning the Jean Cauvin'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 eventually led his colleagues to Frankfurt.

In Seville, (1562), the Catholic Inquisición made a auto-da-fé in which an image of Casiodoro was burned. Their works were placed in the prohibited book Index and 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 Syraic 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.

[edit] Sources

• Kinder, A. Gordon. 1975: Casiodoro de Reina: Spanish Reformer of the Sixteenth Century. Tamesis, London. ISBN 0729300102