Reina was born about 1520 in
Montemolín in the
Province of Badajoz. From his youth onward, he studied the
Bible. Around then, he had contact with
Lutheranism and he became an adherent of the
Protestant Reformation. He fled with about a dozen other monks when they came under suspicion by the
Spanish Inquisition for Protestant tendencies to Geneva to
London, where he served as a
pastor to
Spanish Protestant refugees. However King
Philip II of Spain was exerting pressure for his extradition.
In exile on the Continent In the late 1550s he was suspected by the Spanish inquisitors in
Seville to have been the one who converted the monks of San Isidro to Lutheranism. in April 1562, the Inquisition made an
auto-da-fé in which an
effigy of him was burned. The works of Reina and his colleagues were placed in
the Index of prohibited books and he was declared a "heresiarch" (leader of
heretics). About 1563 Reina went on to
Antwerp, where he became associated with the authors of the
Polyglot Bible. In April 1564 he went to
Frankfurt, where he settled with his family. Reina wrote the first great book against the Inquisition:
Sanctae Inquisitionis hispanicae artes aliquot detectae, ac palam traductae ("Some arts of Holy Inquisition"). This work was printed in 1567 in
Heidelberg under the pseudonym:
Reginaldus Gonsalvius Montanus. He secretly translated the work of the critic of Calvin,
Sebastian Castellion,
De haereticis, an sint persequendi ("Concerning heretics, whether they should be Persecuted"), that condemned executions "for reasons of conscience" and documented the original Christian rejection of the practice. ==Biblical translation==