[1] His father, Pierre de Bèze, bailiff of Vézelay,[1] descended from a Burgundian noble family; his mother, Marie Bourdelot, was known for her generosity.

[2] Beza's father had two brothers; Nicolas, who was member of the parlement of Paris, and Claude, who was abbot of the Cistercian monastery of Froimont in the diocese of Beauvais.

[2][2] To escape the many temptations to which he was exposed, with the knowledge of two friends, he became engaged in the year 1544 to a young girl of humble descent, Claudine Denosse, promising to publicly marry her as soon as his circumstances would allow it.

[2] But his work attracted unexpected criticism; as Philip Schaff says, "Prurient minds...read between his lines what he never intended to put there, and imagined offences of which he was not guilty even in thought".

[1][2] Following his recovery, Beza adhered to the Reformed faith, a decision which resulted in a condemnation from the parlement of Paris, the loss of part of his property and the need to leave France.

[2] In defense of Calvin and the Genevan magistrates, Beza published, in 1554, the work De haereticis a civili magistratu puniendis (translated into French in 1560).

[2] In the autumn of 1558, Beza undertook a second journey with Farel to Worms by way of Strasburg in the hopes of bringing about an intercession by the Evangelical princes of the empire in favor of the persecuted brethren at Paris.

[2] As a result, Beza undertook another journey with Farel, Johannes Buddaeus, and Gaspard Carmel to Strasburg and Frankfurt, where the sending of an embassy to Paris was resolved upon.

[2] In union with many ministers and professors in city and country, Viret at last thought of establishing a consistory and of introducing a church discipline which should apply excommunication especially at the celebration of the communion.

[2] It was originally prepared for his father in justification of his actions and published in revised form to promote Evangelical knowledge among Beza's countrymen.

[2] King Antoine of Navarre, yielding to the urgent requests of Evangelical noblemen, declared his willingness to listen to a prominent teacher of the Church.

Beza hastily issued a circular letter (March 25) to all Reformed congregations of the empire, and went to Orléans with the Huguenot leader Conde and his troops.

[2] He founded the Academy's law faculty in which notable jurists such as François Hotman, Giulio Pace, Lambert Daneau, and Denis Godefroy, lectured in turn.

[2] The magistrates had fully appropriated the ideas of Calvin, and the direction of spiritual affairs, the organs of which were the "ministers of the word" and "the consistory", was founded on a solid basis.

[2] Beza did not force his will upon his associates, and took no harsh measures against injudicious or hot-headed colleagues, though sometimes he took their cases in hand and acted as mediator; and yet he often experienced an opposition so extreme that he threatened to resign.

[2] Although he was inclined to take the part of the magistrates, he knew how to defend the rights and independence of the spiritual power when occasion arose, without, however, conceding to it such a preponderating influence as did Calvin.

[2] In 1574, he wrote his De jure magistratuum (Right of Magistrates), in which he emphatically protested against tyranny in religious matters, and affirmed that it is legitimate for a people to oppose an unworthy magistracy in a practical manner and if necessary to use weapons and depose them.

[2] Without being a great dogmatician like his master, nor a creative genius in the ecclesiastical realm, Beza had qualities which made him famous as humanist, exegete, orator, and leader in religious and political affairs, and qualified him to be the guide of the Calvinists in all Europe.

[2] He was the moderator of the general synod which met in April 1571 at La Rochelle and decided not to abolish church discipline or to acknowledge the civil government as head of the Church, as the Paris minister Jean Morel and the philosopher Pierre Ramus demanded; it also decided to confirm anew the Calvinistic doctrine of the Lord's Supper (by the expression: "substance of the body of Christ") against Zwinglianism, which caused a dispute between Beza and Ramus and Heinrich Bullinger.

[2] He was also interested in the controversies which concerned the Augsburg Confession in Germany, especially after 1564, on the doctrine of the Person of Christ and the sacrament, and published several works against Joachim Westphal, Tilemann Heshusius, Nikolaus Selnecker, Johannes Brenz, and Jakob Andrea.

"[12]When the edition of the acts of the colloquy, as prepared by Jakob Andrea, was published, Samuel Huber, of Burg near Bern, who belonged to the Lutheranizing faction of the Swiss clergy, took so great offense at the supralapsarian doctrine of predestination propounded at Montbéliard by Beza and Musculus that he felt it to be his duty to denounce Musculus to the magistrates of Bern as an innovator in doctrine.

[2] As the colloquy was resultless, a debate was arranged at Bern, 15–18 April 1588, at which the defense of the accepted system of doctrine was at the start put into Beza's hands.

[2] The three delegates of the Helvetic cantons who presided at the debate declared in the end that Beza had substantiated the teaching propounded at Montbéliard as the orthodox one, and Huber was dismissed from his office.

[2] He contracted, on the advice of his friends, a second marriage with the widow Caterina del Piano, a Protestant refugee from Asti, Piedmont,[1] in order to have a helpmate in his declining years.

[1] He was not buried, like Calvin, in the general cemetery at Plainpalais (for the Savoyards had threatened to abduct his body to Rome), but at the direction of the magistrates, at Saint-Pierre Cathedral.

Later productions like the humanistic, biting, satirical Passavantius and his Complainte de Messire Pierre Lizet... prove that in later years he occasionally went back to his first love.

His view of life is deterministic and the basis of his religious thinking is the predestinate recognition of the necessity of all temporal existence as an effect of the absolute, eternal, and immutable will of God, so that even the fall of the human race appears to him essential to the divine plan of the world.

Although some contend that Beza's view of the doctrine of predestination exercised an overly dominant influence upon his interpretation of the Scriptures, there is no question that he added much to a clear understanding of the New Testament.