Eusèbe Renaudot

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Eusèbe Renaudot (1646–1720), was a French theologian and Orientalist.

Born in Paris, he was brought up and educated for a career in the church. Despite his interest in theology and his title of abbé, much of his life was spent at the French court, where he attracted the notice of Colbert and was often employed in confidential affairs. The unusual learning in Eastern languages which he acquired in his youth and maintained amid the distractions of court life did not bear fruit till he was sixty-two.

His best-known books are Historia Patriarcharum Alexandrinorum (Paris, 1713) and Liturgiarum orientalium collectio (2 vols., 1715-16). The latter was designed to supply proofs of the perpetuity of the faith of the church on the subject of the sacraments, the topic on which most of his theological writings turned, and which was then, in consequence of the controversies attaching to Antoine Arnauld's Perpétuité de la foy de l’Église, a major matter of debate between French Catholics and Protestants.