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.

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.

[1] His thesis published in Latin in 1892 was devoted to Isaac of Nineveh and included three unpublished homilies from British Museum manuscripts which Chabot translated.

In 1903 Chabot founded the Corpus Scriptorum Christianorum Orientalium, which he directed single-handed for ten years, supervising the publication of 70 original texts in the four languages initially planned, i.e.; Syriac, Coptic, Arabic and Ethiopian, and personally editing a series of further Syriac chronicles (including the invaluable Documenta ad Illustrandas Monophysitarum Origines 1908) together with the first part of the surviving Syriac version of Cyril of Alexandria's Commentary on St. Luke's Gospel 1912 and (with A. Vaschalde) James of Edessa's Hexaemeron 1928.

In 1922 he published Choix d' inscriptions de Palmyre, a major work on Palmyrene Aramaic texts, and in 1935 a general introduction, Littérature Syriaque.