Konrad Pellikan

This step helped his studies, for he was sent to Tübingen in 1496 and became a favorite pupil of the guardian of the Minorite convent there, Paulus Scriptoris, a man of considerable general learning.

There seems to have been at that time in southwest Germany a considerable amount of sturdy independent thought among the Franciscans; Pellikan himself became a Protestant very gradually, and without any such revulsion of feeling as marked Martin Luther's conversion.

He learned the letters from the transcription of a few verses in the Star of the Messiah of Petrus Niger, and, with a subsequent hint or two from Johannes Reuchlin, who also lent him the grammar of Moses Kimhi, made his way through the Bible for himself with the help of Jerome's Latin.

[1] In Basel he did much laborious work for Froben's editions, and came to the conclusion that the Church taught many doctrines of which the early doctors of Christianity knew nothing.

[citation needed] Pellikan's autobiography describes the gradual multiplication of accessible books on the subjects, and he not only studied but translated a vast mass of rabbinical and Talmudic texts, his interest in Jewish literature being mainly philological.

The chief fruit of these studies is the vast commentary on the Bible (Zürich, 7 vols., 1532–1539), which shows a remarkably sound judgment on questions of the text, and a sense for historical as opposed to typological exegesis.

Pellikan's scholarship, though not brilliant, was really extensive; his sound sense, and his singularly pure and devoted character gave him a great influence.