Lefèvre d'Étaples Bible

Associated with the French humanist scholar Jacques Lefèvre d'Étaples, this sixteenth-century undertaking produced an early complete printed French Bible and stands as an important milestone in continental vernacular Scripture. Covering the complete Bible, it was made from Latin, taking the Latin Vulgate as its base text, and its approach is accordingly Vulgate-based; it is best classed as a vernacular translation or revision, with the Vulgate serving as its predecessor and base translation. Its distinguishing characteristic is that it was translated primarily from the Latin Vulgate rather than directly from the Hebrew and Greek, a feature that sets it apart from later French versions prepared from the original languages. Produced in an age when printing was making Scripture available to lay readers in their own tongues, it belongs to the wider movement of humanist and reform-minded biblical scholarship, and it helped shape the subsequent tradition of French Bible translation.