Casiodoro de Reina or de Reyna (born 1520 in Montemolín; died 15 March 1594 in Frankfurt am Main was a Lutheran[1] theologian who (perhaps with several others) translated the Bible into Spanish.
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Reina was born about 1520.[2][3] From his youth on he studied the Bible.[2] In 1557 he became a monk of the Hieronymite-Monastery of San Isidoro del Campo outside Sevilla (Monasterio Jerónimo de San Isidoro del Campo de Sevilla). At this time he had contact with Lutheranism and he became an adherent of the Protestant Reformation. He fled with about a dozen other monks 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 1559[4] to London where he served as pastor to Spanish Protestant refugees. However King Philip II of Spain was exerting pressure for his extradition.
In Seville, (in April 1562), the Inquisition made an 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).
Ca. 1563[4] Reina went on to Antwerp where he associated with the authors of the Polyglot Bible. In the April 1564 he went to Frankfurt, where he settled with his family.[4]
Reina wrote the first great book against the Inquisition: "Sanctae Inquisitionis hispanicae artes aliquot detectae, ac palam traductae" (Some arts of Holy Inquisition). This Book was printed in 1567 in Heidelberg under the pseudonym: Reginaldus Gonsalvius Montanus. He translated secretly the book of the critic of Calvin Sebastian Castellion, "De haereticis, an sint persequendi" (English: Concerning Heretics (Whether They Should Be Persecuted)), that condemns the executions "for conscience reasons" and documents the original Christian rejection of this practice.
While in exile, variously in London, Antwerp, Frankfurt, Orléans 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 Ferrara Bible in Ladino 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. For the New Testament he had great aid from the translations of Francisco de Enzinas and Juan Pérez de Pineda.
It is speculated that his Bible 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.
Reina got the citizenship of the town Frankfurt in 16 August 1571. In this time he traded with silk, to get the money for his family. Step by step he became a true member of the Lutherans. Ca. 1580 he published a Catechism, in the sense of Luther's Catechism, in Latin, French and Dutch.[5]
He died in 1594 in Frankfurt.[4]
Beside his Spanish Bible translation he published other works:[4][6]