Jean Hardouin

1646-1729. Classicist and polemicist. Born at Quimper in Brittany, son of a bookseller, he joined the Jesuits, studied theology at Paris, and became librarian of the Jesuit Collège Louis-le-Grand in 1683. He was a gifted numismatist, philologist, classical scholar, and editor, but his wild assertions earned him a certain notoriety. He claimed that, with a few salient exceptions, the Greek and Latin classics were the productions of thirteenth-century monks, and he asserted that some of the works of the Fathers were likewise spurious. Though he declared that all the church councils before Trent were fabrications, he nonetheless prepared careful transcripts of the texts for his excellent editions of the church councils from the year 34 to 1714, including a number never before published. This definitive work, Conciliorum collectio regia maxima, co- sponsored by Louis XIV and his clergy, was suppressed by the French clergy for ten years until 1725 because it countered their Gallican pretensions. Hardouin rejected the Greek NT, insisting that Jesus had preached, and the NT had been written, originally in Latin.