Loisy, Alfred Firmin (1857–1940)

French modernist theologian. He was dismissed from a Sorbonne lectureship and excommunicated in 1908 after a theological controversy. But in 1909 he became professor of church history at the Collège de France.

He was born in Ambrières, Marne. He studied at the Catholic theological seminary, Chalons, and was ordained priest in 1879. He was professor of Hebrew and biblical literature at the Institut Catholique, Paris 1881–93, and lecturer at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes, Sorbonne 1900–04. It was from this post that he was dismissed, and excommunicated. The controversy arose out of his L'Evangile et l'Eglise (1902), a Catholic's reply to Harnack's Wesen des Christentums. His excommunication came after the publication of his most important work, Les Evangiles synoptiques (1907–08). Other works are Les Actes des Apôtres (1920), L'Apocalypse de Jean (1923), Mémoires pour servir a l'histoire religieuse de notre temps (1930), and La Naissance du Christianisme (1932).