
Sixtus of Siena (or Sixtus Senensis) (1520–1569) was a
Jew who converted to
Roman Catholicism
The Catholic Church, also known as the Roman Catholic Church, is the List of Christian denominations by number of members, largest Christian church, with 1.3 billion baptized Catholics Catholic Church by country, worldwide . It is am ...
, and became a Roman Catholic
theologian.
Biography
He began his career as a Franciscan preacher, speaking throughout Italy. Though he was convicted to die in Rome for the crime of
heresy or recidivism, he was saved by a Dominican inquisitor, the future
Pope Pius V, who repealed the condemnation when Sixtus recanted and pledged to transfer to the
Dominican Order instead. He is considered one of the two most outstanding
Dominican scholars of his generation. He had as a master
Lancelotto Politi
Lancelotto Politi (religious name Ambrosius Catharinus, 1483–1553) was an Italian Dominican canon lawyer, theologian and bishop.
Historians and theologians generally have regarded Catharinus as a brilliant eccentric. He was frequently accu ...
, some of whose writings he later publicly criticised. Sixtus apparently destroyed all his remaining manuscripts and writings before his death.
Sixtus coined the term ''
deuterocanonical'' to describe certain books of the Catholic
Old Testament
The Old Testament (often abbreviated OT) is the first division of the Christian biblical canon, which is based primarily upon the 24 books of the Hebrew Bible or Tanakh, a collection of ancient religious Hebrew writings by the Israelites. The ...
that had not been accepted as
canonical by Jews and Protestants but which appeared in the
Septuagint, and the definer for the Roman Catholics of the terms ''
protocanonical'' and the ancient term ''
apocryphal''.

His work ''Bibliotheca sancta ex præcipuis Catholicæ Ecclesiæ auctoribus collecta''
["Sacred library collected from the precepts of the authorities of the Catholic Church".] (Venice 1566) treats the sacred writers and their works, the best manner of translating and explaining Holy Writ, and gives a copious list of Biblical
interpreters, in eight books. It was the first of the genre of
encyclopedic teaching repertories of
dogma and Church tradition issued in the wake of the
Council of Trent.
Notes
Further reading
* John Warwick Montgomery, 1963. "Sixtus of Siena and Roman Catholic Biblical Scholarship", ''Archiv für Reformationsgeschichte'' 54 p. 214ff.
* Fernando Dominguez, "Sixtus von Siena", in: ''Lexikon für Theologie und Kirche'' 3 IX, 647.
* Elias H. Füllenbach, ''Bibel- und Hebräischstudien italienischer Dominikaner des 15. und 16. Jahrhunderts'', in: ''Bibelstudium und Predigt im Dominikanerorden. Geschichte, Ideal, Praxis'', ed. by Viliam Stefan Doci und Thomas Prügl, Rome 2019 (= Dissertationes Historicae, vol. 36), p. 255-271.
External links
"Franciscan scholars": Sixtus of Siena*
{{Authority control
1520 births
1569 deaths
16th-century Italian Jews
16th-century Italian Roman Catholic theologians
Italian Dominicans
People convicted of heresy
Converts to Roman Catholicism from Judaism
People from Siena