CAPPEL, the name of a family of distinguished theologians, scholars, and jurisconsults, of whom the following are the most important. Guillaume Cappel, in 1491, as rector of the university of Paris, had the boldness to forbid the payment of the tithe demanded by Pope Innocent VIIL His son Jacques, jurisconsult and councillor of state under Francis I., is famous for the speech which he delivered in 1537 before the king and nobility of France against Charles V. and the counts of Flanders, Artois, and Charolais. His son, Louis Cappel, sieur de Moniambert (1534-1586), who began life as professor of Greek at Bordeaux, and ended his days as professor of theology at> Sedan, is remarkable for his devotion to the cause of Protestantism, for the sake of which he risked his life on more than one occasion. It was he who, in 1560, presented to Charles IX. the Confession of Faith which had been drawn up by the Parisian Protestants. Another son, Jacques Cappel (1570-1624), was a distinguished jurisconsult. He was the father of Jacques Cappel, author of a number of works of considerable celebrity on theology, history, philology, and antiquities, and of Louis Cappel, noticed below....
CAPPEL, Louis, the most celebrated member of the above family, a learned Protestant theologian and scholar, was born at St Elien in 1585, and died at Saumur in 1658. He studied theology at Sedan, Oxford, and Saumur. At the age of twenty-eight he accepted the chair of Hebrew at Saumur, and twenty years after that of theology. As a Hebrew scholar, his greatest achievement is his demonstration, against the Buxtorfs, that the vowel points and accents are not an essential part of the Hebrew language, but were inserted by the Masorete Jews of Tiberias, not earlier than the 5th century A.D., and that the primitive Hebrew characters are those now known as the Samaritan, while the square characters are Chaldean, substituted for the more ancient at the time of the Captivity. As a theologian, he advocated liberal views with regard to the verbal inspiration of Scripture and the history of the Bible. These doctrines of Cappel were generally distasteful to his coreligionists. Their protest against the Church of Rome being founded upon Scripture, to allow the possibility of the slightest inaccuracy in its text seemed to them to be striking at the very root of their position. They, therefore, made strenuous efforts to prevent the publication of his views. The Swiss clergy were compelled to sign a paper condemning them, and Cappel found great difficulty in printing some of his works. His Critica Sacra, a collec tion of various readings in the Old Testament and of canons of textual criticism, lay in MS. for ten years, and he was only able to print it at Paris, in 1650, by aid of a son who had turned Catholic. Cappel is also the author of Annotationes et Commentarii in Vetus Testamentum, Chronologia Sacra, and other theological works, as well as of several treatises on Hebrew besides the Critica Sacra, among which are the Arcanum Punctuationis revelatum (1624), and the Diatriba de veris et antiquis Ebroeorum literis (1645). His Commentarius de Capellω∙wm gente, giving an account of the distinguished family to which he belonged, was published by his nephew James Cappel (1639-1722), who, at the age of nineteen, became professor of Hebrew at Saumur, but, on the revocation of the edict of Nantes, fled to England, where he died in 1622.
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