Jean-Baptiste Chabot

Jean-Baptiste Chabot (16 February 1860 – 7 January 1948) was a Roman Catholic secular priest and the leading French Syriac scholar in the first half of the twentieth century.

Born into a viticultural family at Vouvray-sur-Loire, Chabot trained at the seminary in Tours where he was ordained. Appointed as assistant priest to La Chapelle-sur-Loire in 1885, he served for two years before becoming a student of Thomas Joseph Lamy (1827–1907) at Louvain Catholic University in Belgium. His thesis published in Latin in 1892 was devoted to Isaac of Nineveh and included three unpublished homilies from British Museum manuscripts which Chabot translated.

Returning to Paris Chabot studied under Rubens Duval whose collaborator he became.

In 1893 Chabot published catalogues of Syriac manuscripts preserved at the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate of Jerusalem and of Syriac manuscripts acquired by the French Bibliothèque Nationale since 1874 (i.e. subsequent to the Zotenberg catalogue). Other catalogues of Oriental manuscripts in the possession of the Eastern Churches were to follow.

An early student of the École pratique des hautes études (founded partly to fill the gap caused by the suppression of the Sorbonne Theology faculty) Chabot worked on the fourth part of the Chronicle of Pseudo-Dionysius of Tell-Mahre, which he published in 1895.

Four years later he obtained a copy of the original Syriac version of Michael the Syrian's Universal Chronicle, which had been rediscovered in a church at Edessa in 1887 by Ephrem Rahmani, subsequently patriarch of the Syriac Catholic Church. This led to the publication of four volumes of text with Latin translation in 1899, 1901, 1905, 1910 with a follow-up consisting of introduction, corrections and indices in 1924.

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