Who has never regretted a mistake made in youth, one that insists on returning to memory years later? Theodore Beza, one of the greatest scholars of the Protestant Reformation, carried for decades the weight of verses written before his conversion, verses he himself would condemn for the rest of his life.
Born on June 24, 1519, in Vézelay, in French Burgundy, Beza studied law in Orléans and spent years as a lawyer and poet in Paris. In 1548, he published Juvenilia, a collection of Latin poems praised for its elegance but marked by indecorous verses that adversaries would later use against him.
A serious illness led him to reconsider the direction of his life. Still in 1548, he converted to the Reformed faith, gave up the ecclesiastical benefices he had held since childhood, and moved to Geneva, where he grew close to John Calvin, becoming over the years his closest collaborator. Before that, in 1544, he had already secretly committed to Claudine Denosse, a woman of humble origin, without making the union public, precisely so as not to lose the benefices and literary reputation he held; only in Geneva, in 1548, was the marriage publicly celebrated by Calvin.
Between 1549 and 1558, he taught Greek at the Lausanne Academy; during that period, he also served as the school’s rector, between 1552 and 1554. In 1559, now in Geneva, he founded the city’s Academy together with Calvin, a school that would train Reformed pastors for all of Europe; Beza was its first rector.
In 1554, Beza published a treatise defending the execution of the theologian Michael Servetus, condemned to the stake in Geneva for denying the doctrine of the Trinity. The position, rigid even by the standards of the time, reveals the limits of his understanding of freedom of conscience.
When Calvin died in 1564, Beza succeeded him as chief pastor of Geneva and wrote the reformer’s first biography, Life and Death of Calvin. Around the same time, he completed, together with Clément Marot, the complete metrical translation of the Psalms into French, published in 1562.
His most enduring work was his biblical scholarship: between 1565 and 1604, he published successive editions of the Greek New Testament, collating ancient manuscripts. These editions fed decisive Protestant translations, among them the King James Bible of 1611. In 1581, he donated to the University of Cambridge the manuscript now known as the Codex Bezae.
Beza died in Geneva on October 13, 1605, at the age of 86. His rigor with the Greek biblical text reminds us that faithfulness to Scripture requires patient work, the kind of service that rarely makes headlines but sustains generations of Bible readers to this day.
