The Waldensian Churches

The Merchant Who Gave Everything Away

Around 1173 a rich citizen of Lyon named Valdes heard a street entertainer tell the old legend of Saint Alexis, a nobleman's son who left his bride on their wedding night to live in poverty for God. The story pierced him. According to a chronicle compiled at Laon early in the next century, he went to a master of theology and asked how he might most surely be saved. The master answered with the words Jesus spoke to the rich young ruler.

“Jesus said unto him, If thou wilt be perfect, go and sell that thou hast, and give to the poor, and thou shalt have treasure in heaven: and come and follow me.”MATTHEW 19:21 · KJV

Valdes took the words as they stood. He settled property on his wife, placed his two daughters in a convent, repaid those he had wronged in business, and gave the rest of his wealth to the poor, some of it in the streets of Lyon during a famine. Later sources call him Peter Waldo, but the first name appears only long after his death. To his contemporaries he was simply Valdes.

Above all he wanted to know what the Bible said in a language he could read. A Dominican writer of the next century reports that Valdes paid two clerics, one to translate and one to write, to render the Gospels and other books of Scripture, along with sayings of earlier Christian writers, into the Romance speech of the Lyonnais. He studied them until he knew much of them by heart, and then he began to preach in the streets and squares. Men and women joined him, gave up their goods, and went out preaching too. People called them the Poor of Lyon.