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Eusebius and His Ecclesiastical History 1 Eusebius and His Ecclesiastical History Eusebius’s Ecclesiastical History (HE) is the most important of his many books. It created a new literary genre that would have a long and influential history. In an often-quoted statement, F. C. Baur called Eusebius the father of ecclesiastical his- tory, just as Herodotus was the father of historical writing in general.1 The Ecclesi- astical History is our single most important source for recovering the history of the first three centuries of Christianity. And it is the centerpiece of a corpus of writings in which Eusebius created a distinctive vision of the place of the Christian church in world history and God’s providential plan. A book of such significance has attracted an enormous body of commentary and analysis driven by two rather different motives. One was the value of the HE as a documentary treasure trove of partially or completely lost works. For a long time, that was the primary driver of scholarly interest. The past two generations have seen the emergence of a second trend that focuses on Eusebius as a figure in his own right, a writer of exceptional range, creativity, and productivity, and an actor on the ecclesiastical and political stage.2 How, for example, did current events shape the way Eusebius thought and wrote about the church’s past? And what can his con- struction of the past tell us in turn about Christian consciousness and ambition during a time of enormous transition? Seen from that angle, the HE becomes not a source for history but itself an artifact of history, a hermeneutical redirection that will be applied to other works of Christian historiography in this book.3 1. Cited in Markus, “Church History and Early Church Historians,” 1. 2. Johnson and Schott, Eusebius of Caesarea; Inowlocki and Zamagni, Reconsidering Eusebius. 3. For a similar contemporary shift in the study of non-Christian ancient historians, see Marincola, “Introduction.” 1 Hollerich-Making Christian History.indd 1 31/03/21 3:25 PM 2 Eusebius and His Ecclesiastical History The purpose of this book differs from both of those. It is concerned less with what Eusebius used than with how subsequent tradition used him over the very long period since he wrote his history. To do that we need a baseline of under- standing. We can only appreciate the impact of his book—and, at times, its eclipse and obscurity—if there is clarity about what he intended to create and how it must be understood on its own terms. This first chapter, then, offers an introduction to Eusebius’s life; a selective review of his literary production; an account of his core theological and historical vision; and then a more focused examination of the HE, first in its relation to its companion work, the Chronological Canons, then in a description of its structure, composition, and purpose, and finally in a review of Eusebius’s predecessors. The chapter has two purposes: to provide a template for understanding Eusebius’s reception by later ecclesiastical historiography; and to give readers not well acquainted with Eusebius an introduction to him and to the rich and diverse contemporary scholarship on him.4 Subsequent chapters will carry the story forward from Eusebius’s first successors to contemporary interpre- tations and debates over Eusebius and his legacy. EUSEBIUS AS TRANSITIONAL FIGURE Life Eusebius of Caesarea, or Eusebius Pamphili (b. ca. 260–264, d. 339 or 340) as he was known in antiquity,5 was born just as the “little peace of the Church,” the forty or so years of toleration following the rescript of the emperor Gallienus in 260, was beginning.6 He witnessed and survived the decade of intermittent persecution launched by Diocletian in 303. And he outlived the emperor who restored tolera- tion and took the first steps toward religious establishment. Eusebius seems to have been a native of Caesarea Maritima in Palestine, the capital of the Roman province of Judea. He spent most of his life there and rarely left, apart from travels inside Palestine and, during the last two years of the perse- cution, to Phoenicia and Egypt, and possibly Arabia.7 In the era after persecution 4. Johnson, Eusebius, is an admirably complete, concise, and up-to-date introduction to Eusebius in all of his authorial versatility. 5. Barnes, Constantine and Eusebius, is still the landmark study, despite requiring revision of Barnes’s proposed early dating of both the HE and the Chronicle. His picture of Constantine as a con- vinced Christian has also met resistance, but my subject is Eusebius, not Constantine. See also Barnes’s more recent Constantine; Lenski, Cambridge Companion to the Age of Constantine; and the overview of Morlet, “Eusèbe de Césarée.” 6. On the importance of Gallienus’s rescript to Christian bishops (in Eus. HE 7.13) as a watershed in Roman recognition of Christianity, see Barnes, Early Christian Hagiography and Roman History, 100–105. 7. Barnes, Constantine and Eusebius, 148. Hollerich-Making Christian History.indd 2 31/03/21 3:25 PM Eusebius and His Ecclesiastical History 3 ended, he occasionally traveled for church business. He adopted his surname (“son of Pamphilus”) out of respect for the scholarly presbyter Pamphilus, ho emos despotēs (my master8), in whose household he apparently lived from a young age. There he was educated and trained in copying manuscripts in the library for which Caesarea would become famous.9 The library was part of Pamphilus’s project of collecting and preserving the works of Origen of Alexandria (ca. 184–ca. 253), who had spent the last approximately twenty years of his life in Caesarea after being forced to leave Alexandria because of difficulties with his bishop, Demetrius.10 Eusebius became a valued collaborator of Pamphilus and worked with him on an apology for Origen after Pamphilus was arrested in 307 during the last persecu- tion. Following Pamphilus’s martyrdom in 310, Eusebius wrote his Life in three books and assumed the role of his successor. There would always be a question about his success in surviving a persecution that took his master.11 The projects of copying and collating manuscripts, and curating Origen’s literary and theological legacy, under the sign of possible martyrdom, left a fundamental stamp on every- thing Eusebius did throughout a long and productive career. Not long after the end of persecution in 313, Eusebius was consecrated as bishop of Caesarea. His entry into the privileged fellowship of the Christian episcopacy cemented his standing among Eastern bishops who shared his Origenian theo- logical orientation. For the next quarter century until his death, he would be a dominant figure in those circles and a major player in the clerical jockeying for position in relation to the newly sympathetic imperial government. He experi- enced a severe crisis when his association with the theology of Arius, an Alexan- drian presbyter, put him on the temporarily losing side of the battle between Arius and Bishop Alexander of Alexandria. Forever after, the Arian tag would tarnish the reputation of his many books, and the Ecclesiastical History above all.12 In the winter of 324/325, he was provisionally excommunicated during a council of bish- ops in Antioch, held under the presidency of Bishop Hosius of Córdoba in Spain.13 He was thus under a cloud six months later when he attended the council con- vened in Nicaea by Constantine. In an awkward letter written afterward to his 8. Eus. Martyrs of Palestine 11.1 (GCS 2.2:932.8–9, ed. Schwartz). Unless otherwise stated, I will quote the translation of Oulton, The Ecclesiastical History and the Martyrs of Palestine, revising as need- ed. Schott’s new translation, Eusebius of Caesarea, The History of the Church, will become the de facto standard. 9. Grafton and Williams,Christianity and the Transformation of the Book, 178–194. On the contents of the library, see Carriker, Library of Eusebius of Caesarea. 10. Nautin, Origène, esp. 166–168. 11. Ibid., 193–194; Barnes, Constantine and Eusebius, 149. 12. See Beeley, “Eusebius’ Contra Marcellum”; and Parvis, Marcellus of Ancyra, esp. 128–131, on Eusebius’s “deeply contentious case” against Marcellus. 13. Barnes, Constantine and Eusebius, 213–214, 378–379. Hollerich-Making Christian History.indd 3 31/03/21 3:25 PM 4 Eusebius and His Ecclesiastical History church in Caesarea, he strove to rationalize his acceptance of the creed of the council, with its buzzword homoousios and its (to him) dubious associations.14 Subsequently he was an avid combatant in the dogmatic polemics sparked by the council. It was not until this last stage of his long life that Eusebius made the actual acquaintance of Constantine, after the final defeat of Constantine’s Eastern coruler Licinius in 323/324. Timothy Barnes suggested that the bishop and the emperor probably met in person on no more than four occasions.15 Eusebius made sure his readers were aware of those contacts in his writings, including two speeches and the Life of Constantine, written after the emperor’s death and not long before Euse- bius himself passed away. So successful was his promotional effort that in modern times he has been reviled as a flatterer and a court theologian, famously denounced by Jacob Burckhardt as antiquity’s first thoroughly dishonest historian.16 Recent scholarship has done much to correct that picture with a more comprehensive understanding of Eusebius as scholar, apologist, and churchman. By bringing under scrutiny his entire oeuvre, in all its impressive variety, without letting our perspective be skewed by the Constantinian literature, we gain a more accurate grasp not only of Eusebius but of the Christian culture of his day during a time of unparalleled turbulence.
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