Jacques Lefèvre d'Étaples

Jacques Lefèvre d'Étaples, known in Latin as Jacobus Faber Stapulensis, was a French humanist, theologian and philosopher, widely regarded as the founder of French humanism. His outlook belonged to Christian humanism: go back to the Greek and biblical sources and read them with careful philological attention. His lasting importance lies in establishing that method in the French universities and the Church.

He was born in Étaples, in Picardy, around 1450, though some accounts place his birth closer to 1455. He studied in Paris and then travelled to Italy, where he encountered Platonic thought through Ficino and the ideas of Pico della Mirandola. Back in Paris he taught at the Collège du Cardinal Lemoine and devoted himself to translating and commenting on Aristotle, convinced that the inherited Latin versions had been distorted by their translators. His paraphrases of the Physics and his introductions to the Metaphysics grew out of that project.

From 1507 he turned to the Bible. He published a psalter arranged in five versions and commentaries on the Pauline epistles, seeking the meaning of the Greek text beyond scholastic tradition. In 1521 Guillaume Briçonnet, bishop of Meaux and a former pupil, invited him to help reform the diocese, and he translated the Gospels into French. His views that Scripture alone is the rule of doctrine and that faith justifies clashed with the Sorbonne, and in 1525 he had to flee to Strasbourg.

He never broke with Rome. He criticised clerical celibacy and some sacramental practices, but wanted reform from within. That same year he entered the service of Francis I, who protected him, and his complete Bible in French appeared in 1530. He spent his last years under the patronage of Margaret of Angoulême, at Nérac, dying around 1536 or 1537.

His influence was twofold. He trained pupils such as Guillaume Farel, and his push for reading Scripture directly in the vernacular opened a path that the Reformation took up, although he never separated from the Church.