Alfred Loisy, the French biblical exegetist, was the best-known and most controversial representative of the Modernist movement in France at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries. His scholarly investigation led him to the kind of destructive criticism of the Gospel narratives and Christian dogmas carried on earlier by such scholars as D. F. Strauss and Ernest Renan, whose lectures at the Institut Catholique Loisy attended from 1882 to 1885. Loisy's long career, from his entry into the priesthood in 1879 to shortly before his death, was one of much controversy and progressive estrangement from personal religion.

Loisy was born at Ambrière, Marne, and died at Ceffonds, Haute Marne. He became professor of Hebrew in 1881, and of Holy Scripture in 1889, at the Institut Catholique. Loisy's views on the date of the book of Proverbs soon aroused misgivings, and he was warned that...