Jacques Abbadie was born about 1654 at Nay in Bearn (SW France) and studied at Saumur and Sedan. His early proficiency in his studies allowed him when only seventeen to receive his D.D. degree from the academy at Sedan (town in NE France on Belgian border known as a Protestant stronghold in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries). In 1676 he accepted an invitation from the Elector of Brandenburg, Germany, to serve as the pastor of the French Protestant church at Berlin. His small congregation grew quickly after the revocation of the edict of Nantes in France in 1685 caused a large-scale emigration of the Huguenots into Brandenburg.

After the death of the Elector in 1688, Abbadie went with Marshal Schomberg to Holland and then went to England with the Prince of Orange (who soon became King William III of England). In 1690, he was appointed the minister of the French Church in the Savoy chapel in London. In 1699, he was made the dean of Killaloe in Ireland. He died near London on September 25, 1727.

He wrote, as he ministered, in French. The English titles of his chief works are as follows:

• Treatise on the Truth of the Christian Religion – It became one of the chief apologetic works in the French language.
• Treatise on the Divinity of Jesus Christ
• The Art of Knowing Oneself; or, An Inquiry into the Sources of Morality – It gives an outline of his moral system.
• Chemical Change in the Eucharist – This work was written as an argument against the doctrine of transubstantiation. It answered the Roman Catholic claim “that every atom of the elements, by consecration, is changed into the natural body, soul, and divinity of the Son of God, and to the blood that flowed from his side.”
• Accomplishment of Prophecy in Christ