Many people have felt they were in the wrong calling, even after years of preparation. Johannes Oecolampadius, a gifted scholar in the biblical languages, lived through that search before becoming one of the leaders of the Protestant Reformation in Switzerland.
Born in 1482 in the German town of Weinsberg, the son of a merchant, he studied the humanities at Heidelberg and later theology at Tübingen, where he came into contact with humanism and became skilled in Greek, Latin, and Hebrew. While still young, his family surname, Hussgen, was Hellenized into Oecolampadius, meaning house lamp.
In 1515, he moved to Basel, Switzerland, to help the humanist Erasmus of Rotterdam prepare the first printed edition of the Greek New Testament. That rigorous work with the original biblical text would mark all of his later work as a preacher.
Seeking a life of deeper consecration and unsettled by Luther’s ideas, he entered a monastery in 1520, but left the habit about two years later, convinced that it was not the ideal Christian path. He summed up the experience in a phrase that would become well known: he had lost the monk and found the Christian.
Back in Basel in 1522, he became a preacher and, in 1523, reader of Holy Scripture at the city’s university. A close friend of the Swiss reformer Huldrych Zwingli, he came to share Zwingli’s symbolic reading of the Lord’s Supper, which put him at odds with Martin Luther.
In February 1529, a popular revolt took to the streets of Basel, destroyed images and altars in the churches, and forced out the Catholic councilors, opening the way for the Reformation in the city. Oecolampadius became the chief pastor of the new Reformed church, though the episode of violence against religious property remains a dark page in that history.
As leader of the church in Basel, he argued that excommunication and church discipline should be exercised by the church itself, not by the city council. The council refused to hand over all that power, and Oecolampadius accepted a compromise solution, with mixed panels of councilors and congregation representatives.
That same period saw the Basel government persecute the Anabaptists who rebaptized adults: in 1530, one of them was beheaded by order of the council, and another escaped the same sentence thanks to a plea for clemency from Oecolampadius himself. He debated repeatedly with the group without managing to change their minds, a reflection of the limits of that quest for religious unity, and of a stain the young Reformed tradition still carries today.
Zwingli died in October 1531, at the Battle of Kappel. Shaken by the loss of his friend, Oecolampadius passed away just weeks later, on November 24, leaving a legacy of biblical scholarship that still inspires the study of Scripture in its original languages.
