Louis Cappel

Louis Cappel, also called Cappellus (* October 15, 1585 in Saumur, † June 18, 1658 ) was a Reformed theologian from France.

After studying in London and Saumur and he worked as a priest and professor of theology in his native town. Cappel was one of the few men of the 17th century who ventured a critical evaluation of biblical books. He did not believe in the divine origin of the Hebrew text of the Bible and proved, for example, that the vowel points were invented only after completion of the Babylonian Talmud. Against his main work Critica sacra, sive de variis, quae in sacris VT libris occurrunt, lectionibus libri VI (Paris 1650) wrote of the Basel Hebraist Johann the Younger Buxtorf his Anticritica (Basel 1653), in which he defended the infallibility of the text to the vowel points.