Butler was educated at the English College in Douai, France, where after ordination in 1734 he held successively the chairs of philosophy and divinity. In 1749 he returned to England but later became president of the English College at Saint-Omer. His monumental achievement, The Lives of the Fathers, Martyrs, and Other Principal Saints, 4 vol. (1756–59), was considered a sound, critical, and authoritative work. Containing more than 1,600 hagiographies, it went through many editions. It was revised by Herbert Thurston and Donald Attwater in Butler's Lives of the Saints, 4 vol. (1956), and revised again under the same name but in 12 volumes by David Hugh Farmer and Paul Butler (1995–2000).