I spent a month of my free time transcribing an influential 1800s religious novel. And having just completed it, I can say it was so worth every minute.

Theodosia Ernest by Amos Cooper Dayton made an immense impact on American Protestants, especially Baptists. Dayton, a physician turned minister, was convinced of believer’s baptism in his 40s and thus joined a Baptist church. Soon afterward he wrote Theodosia Ernest, rumored to have been made to convince his still-Presbyterian wife (it worked, by the way).

William Tyndale is perhaps the most famous Bible translator in the English-speaking world, but the francosphere (encompassing France, Belgium, Switzerland, and much of Africa) has its own pioneer translator. Pierre Robert Olivétan brought the Hebrew Masoretic Old Testament and Erasmus’ Greek New Testament to French—the first from the original languages. La Bible d’Olivétan shaped French-speaking Protestant identity and laid the groundwork for the Reformation’s spread in France and beyond.

Before Olivétan, the Holy Scriptures were restricted to the clergy and academia. In the Occitan-speaking south of France, the Waldensian barbes (itinerant pastors) had been preaching from their Occitan translation for over three hundred years, but in the langue d’oïl north, hearing the Bible in the people’s tongue was nearly impossible. Jacques Lefèvre d’Étaples (alias Jacob Faber) was the first to produce a French Bible, but it was not accepted by the early Reformers due to its source text being Jerome’s Latin Vulgate.

Chance meetings can be the best ones. Last summer, my wife and I attended the CHAP (Christian Homeschool Association of Pennsylvania) Convention. While browsing the exhibitor boots, a map of southern France caught my eye. Intrigued, I stepped closer to his publisher’s booth, where Andrew Lambdin was representing his books.

Among the Christian books on display, I noticed two novels by Mr. Lambdin himself: Hills of Zion and Fields of Zion. As a Christian author writing in a similar historical setting, I had to ask him who his books were about. When he told me his books take place in the thirteenth century, during the Albigensian Crusade, I was stunned.