Jean Hardouin (; ; 1646 – 3 September 1729), was a French classical scholar. He is most known for his theory that most texts from Antiquity were forgeries. Biography He was born at Quimper in Brittany. Having acquired a taste for literature in his father's book-shop, he sought and obtained admission into the order of the Jesuits in around 1662 (when he was 16). In Paris, where he went to study theology. He ultimately became librarian of the Lycée Louis-le-Grand in 1683, and he died there. His first published work was an edition of Themistius (1684), which included no fewer than thirteen new orations. On the advice of Jean Garnier (1612–1681) he undertook to edit the Natural History of Pliny for the Dauphin series, a task which he completed in five years. Aside from editorial work, he became interested in numismatics, and published several learned works on this subject, all marked by a determination to be different from other interpreters. His works on this topic include: Nummi antiqui populorum et urbium illustrati (1684), Antirrheticus de nummis antiquis coloniarum et municipiorum (1689), and Chronologia Veteris Testamenti ad vulgatam versionem exacta et nummis illustrata (1696). Ideology Hardouin was appointed by the ecclesiastical authorities to supervise the Conciliorum collectio regia maxima (1715); but he was accused of suppressing important documents and including apocryphal ones, and by the order of the parlement of Paris (then in conflict with the Jesuits) the publication of the work was delayed. After his death a collection of works Opera varia appeared in Amsterdam 1733. It is, however, as the originator of a variety of unorthodox theories that Hardouin is now best remembered. Hardouin recalled that in August 1690, he began to suspect some of the works of Augustine of Hippo and his contemporaries of being inauthentic, and by May 1692 he had "uncovered everything." Hardouin came to believe that for the first thirteen hundred years of Christianity, Christian doctrine had been handed down by an unwritten oral tradition, and books on theology had not been written; in the 14th century, all of the works of the Church Fathers as well as the medieval Scholastics had been counterfeited by "atheist" monks under the direction of a certain "Severus Archontius" (by whom he might have meant Frederick II) for the sake of introducing heresy into the Church. Accordingly, Hardouin believed the entire history of the Church from Pope Linus to