Paul Paradis (date of birth unknown) was a descendant of the Jewish Meshulam family, known in Venice by the nickname "Del Banco". He converted to Catholicism in 1528, adopting the name of his godfather Lodovico Canossa, ambassador to the King of France and Bishop of Bayeux (Secret). In 1531, following in the footsteps of Agacio Guidacerio and François Vatable, he became the third lecturer in Hebrew at the Collège Royal founded in 1530 by King François I, which later became the Collège de France. His entry into the Collège de France was probably thanks to the support of Marguerite de Navarre, the king's sister, to whom he is said to have given Greek and Hebrew lessons. The appointment of Hebrew and Greek lecturers to the Collège Royal took place in the context of the creation of colleges of biblical languages, which in most cases were a reaction against the reluctance of the Catholic Church and the universities, more specifically the faculties of theology, to accept the return to the original biblical texts advocated by the humanists and Reformers. Paradis' lectures were popular, and he attracted a large number of listeners. The king was particularly fond of him, as evidenced by his salary and naturalization in 1536. In 1534, Paradis announced a course on the book of Proverbs, which was cited in a complaint lodged against four royal lecturers (the three Hebrew lecturers and Pierre Danès, Greek lecturer) by the Faculty of Theology in Paris, via their dean, Noël Béda. The complaint alleges that the lecturers are no theologians and that they call into question the Latin translation of the Bible used by the Catholic Church. For the members of the theology faculty, it was a matter of defending "their" Bible and the Church's Bible against the interference of philologists and the humanists. Obviously, the King could not allow his college to be controlled by the Faculty of Theology, and the Dean had to withdraw the complaint. Paradis left few writings. In 1534, one of his pupils, Joannes Fraxinoa, published a dialogue between two of his listeners, Martial Gouveia and Matthieu Budé, son of Guillaume Budé, the king's librarian, on how to teach and read Hebrew, under the title Pauli Paradisi, Veneti, Hebraïcarum Litterarum Regii interpretis, de modo legendi hæbraïce, dialogus. This is a playful and sometimes humorous introduction to Hebrew phonetics. In 1539, Paul Paradis translated an apocryphal text from the 10th or 11th century, the "Chronicle of Moses", probably based on the Sefer Hayyashar (Abraham, 11-22). The manuscript, probably written by Paradis himself, is entitled La vie et la naissance du prophète Moyse traduicte de haebreu en françoys (translation reprinted with notes by Abraham, 46-74). Paradis died probably in 1549 (Lefranc 1893, 180) and 1554, leaving a natural child named Charles, whom the king legitimized.