Lyon in 1535–40, he converted to the Reformation and left for Strasbourg, where
he hoped to complete his theological studies with John Calvin.
On his return to Geneva in 1541, Calvin obtained for Castellio the post of
rector at Geneva’s high school, then known as the Collège de Rive. The role of
the Bible and its status in the still young Protestant movement were already at
the centre of Castellio’s interests. At this point too, in 1542, he published his
Sacred Dialogues(Dialogi sacri), a school manual composed of stories from the
Bible in the form of Erasmian dialogues for the use of schoolboys, which
proved to be extremely popular until the eighteenth century. Although man-
uals in the form of dialogue were a very popular didactic aid at the time,
Castellio was thefirst Protestant to apply the pagan form to the biblical text.
The Bible and the status of its text were also at the root of the quarrel between
Castellio and Calvin in 1545. Castellio took the Song of Songs to be a profane
erotic poem and not an allegory of Christ’s love for his church. Although he
included the Song of Songs in his versions of the Bible when he came to
produce them, Castellio still violated the most fundamental principle defended
by Basil, Augustine, Jerome, Murner, and most of the reformers including
Calvin, in whose view there was to be no conflation of sacred and pagan letters.
Not even Salutati, who thought God’s truth shone in the best of pagan
compositions as well as in the Bible, would have ever suggested that a profane
erotic text could ever be included in the Scripture.
Castellio also believed that Christ’s descent to hell in the Apostles’Creed
was literally that and not, as most theologians of the time believed, Christ
being abandoned on the cross by the Father. He had to leave Geneva in the
face of Calvin’s opposition to these views and came to settle in the more
tolerant Basel, where he initially found employment as a proof corrector.
Castellio’sfirst Latin translation of a biblical text appeared in 1546. This was
his version of the text of the Pentateuch entitledMoses latinus. At about the
same period, he published numerous editions of Greek pagan authors, Homer
and Xenophon among them. Castellio is one of the rare Christian scholars of
the period to have never even attempted an edition or a translation of patristic
material. Instead, he concentrated his energies on the Latin translation of
the eight books of theSibylline Oracles, which he, in common with most
scholars of the period, misidentified as the Sibylline Books.^31 He also pub-
lished another New Testament apocryphal text, the Acts of John by Prochor.
He approved of the Old Testament Apocrypha, which he integrated into his
Latin version of the Bible, while supplementing the historical gap between
(^31) See Jean-Michel Roessli,‘Sébastien Castellion et lesoracula Sibyllina: enjeux philologiques
et théologiques’, in Marie-Christine Gomez-Géraud (ed.),Sebastien Castellion, des écritures à
l’Écriture. Actes du colloque international, Université de Paris-Ouest-Nanterre-La Défense,
15 – 16 avril 2010 (Paris: Garnier, 2013), 223–9; Irena Backus,Historical Method and Confessional
Identity in the Era of the Reformation(Leiden: Brill, 2003), 118–28.
44 Irena Backus