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.