Konrad PELLIKAN. — Born at Ruffach (Alsace) on 18 or 9 January 1478, died at Zurich on 6 April 1556. He studied from 1491 to 1492 at Heidelberg; in the following year he entered the Franciscan order in his native place. Sent to Tübingen, he studied Hebrew thoroughly and composed a grammar which was the first to appear in the German language; in 1501 he was invited by Reuchlin to collaborate on his Hebrew dictionary. In that same year he was ordained priest and assigned to teach theology at Basel, where he collaborated on the edition of the works of St Augustine for the publisher Amerbach.
In 1508 he was lecturer at Ruffach, in 1511 guardian at Pforzheim, in 1514 provincial secretary, in 1517 guardian at Ruffach and in 1519 at Basel. In a compendium of Christian doctrine (Imbegriff der christlichen Lehre) he had already inserted some errors: he then moved ever more towards the Protestant Reformation and in 1526 he left the religious habit, though he had already been outside obedience since 1524 when he was appointed by the Protestants as professor of theology at the University of Basel, and two years later at Zurich, on the advice of Zwingli, as professor of Hebrew. In August 1526 he took a wife and in 1528 he remarried. In 1536 he collaborated on the drafting of the first Confessio Helvetica. He wrote various other works, especially commentaries on Holy Scripture, largely unpublished.