BABUT, ETIENNE-CHARLES. - French historian of Protestant origin, professor of the history of Christianity at the University of Montpellier, killed in action in Belgium in 1916.
He was the author of numerous studies in ecclesiastical history on the fourth and fifth centuries, in which, alongside keen critical investigation, there are no lack of the prejudices of his school, which often vitiate his conclusions. He made his debut with the study Le Concile de Turin; essai sur l'histoire des Eglises provençales au Vᵉ siècle (Paris 1904); he continued with La plus ancienne décrétale (ibid. 1904), which, according to him, would be the collection Canones Romanorum ad Gallos episcopos and which he attributes to Pope Damasus; Priscillien et le Priscillianisme (ibid. 1909). Still more disputed was the biography S. Martin de Tours (ibid. 1912); cf. Anal. Boll., 32 (1913), pp. 439-72, and subsequently Anal. Boll., 38 (1920), pp. 5-136, where Fr H. Delehaye offers a thorough criticism of the criteria that guided B. in his work. Last was the Etude Biblique sur la Rédemption (Nîmes 1914).