Casiodoro de Reina

Translator of the ‘Bear’ Bible (1569), born in Granada, S Spain, of Moorish descent. The Bible is named after the emblem of a bear tasting honey on the title-page, which has been traced to the Bavarian printer Mattias Apiarius, ‘the bee-keeper’. Reina turned Protestant and fled from Spain in 1557, spending the next 12 years on the first complete translation of the Bible into Castilian, La Biblia, que es, los sacros libros del Viejo y Nuevo Testamento. Trasladada en Español. It was revised in 1602 by Cipriano de Varela, and the 1569 edition was reissued in facsimile by the Bible Society of Madrid (1970). Menéndez y Pelayo was the first scholar to stress Reina's achievement in his Historia de los heterodoxos españoles (Vol 5, 1882).

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. Reina wrote then the first great book against the Inquisition: Some arts of Holy Inquisition.

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.