Making Christian History

Eusebius of Caesarea and His Readers

Michael Hollerich

• Publisher: University of California Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780520968134
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: History of Christianity

Known as the "Father of Church History, " Eusebius was bishop of Caesarea in Palestine and the leading Christian scholar of his day. His Ecclesiastical History is an irreplaceable chronicle of Christianity's early development, from its origin in Judaism, through two and a half centuries of illegality and occasional persecution, to a new era of tolerance and favor under the Emperor Constantine. In this book, Michael J. Hollerich recovers the reception of this text across time. As he shows, Eusebius adapted classical historical writing for a new "nation, " the Christians, with a distinctive theo-political vision. Eusebius's text left its mark on Christian historical writing from late antiquity to the early modern period—across linguistic, cultural, political, and religious boundaries—until its encounter with modern historicism and postmodernism. Making Christian History demonstrates Eusebius's vast influence throughout history, not simply in shaping Christian culture but also when falling under scrutiny as that culture has been reevaluated, reformed, and resisted over the past 1, 700 years.

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 history, just as Herodotus was the father of historical writing in general.¹ The Ecclesiastical 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 construction 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

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 understanding. 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 interpretations 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 toleration 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 persecution, to Phoenicia and Egypt, and possibly Arabia.⁷ In the era after persecution 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 persecution. 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 everything 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 theological 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 experienced a severe crisis when his association with the theology of Arius, an Alexandrian 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 bishops 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 convened in Nicaea by Constantine. In an awkward letter written afterward to his 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 Eusebius 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. Historians often talk of “periods of transition.” If ever the phrase applied, it fits the generation to which Eusebius belonged and to which he is our premier witness.

On the other hand—and this is part of the gain of the rich trove of research that we will encounter in this book—we can also see how much continuity there was in the before-and-after of that era. We have become better at reading Eusebius as he was—already forty years old at the outbreak of the last persecution—without endowing him with a clear-eyed knowledge of the future that he could not have possessed, of the Christian Roman Empire as it would exist by the end of the fourth century under Theodosius. Peter Brown recently suggested that we might imagine Eusebius—and Constantine, and their generation—as limited by “horizons of the possible considerably more narrow than we might suppose,” and that we should perhaps credit Eusebius with no more than a “thin” universalist outlook, for which it was sufficient that Christianity’s victory took visible form in buildings and laws and selective purging, without the expectation that the world would be made totally clean of idolatrous practices.¹⁷

Literary Production

Only a brief and selective survey of Eusebius’s literary production is possible here, for the sake of illustrating its diversity and some of its underlying themes, as well as to give a sense of where the HE fits into the whole. An important circumstance for Eusebius’s work is its setting in Caesarea, with its vigorous commercial, religious, and intellectual life, and vibrant Jewish, Samaritan, and Christian communities coexisting with Greco-Roman paganism.¹⁸ Eusebius must certainly have interacted in some fashion or other with the Jewish community and its famous academy, founded about the same time as Origen’s arrival.¹⁹ Origen’s tenure there had dramatically raised Caesarea’s profile as a center of Christian intellectual activity. Major archaeological work at Caesarea Maritima has recovered remains of the great expansion since Herod the Great’s development of the place formerly known as Straton’s Tower.²⁰ We must always keep in mind the presence of those religious and intellectual others in Caesarea, Jews above all, when we read Eusebius’s books.

Eusebius’s writings can be organized into five broadly different groups. First, there is his biblical scholarship,²¹ for which he was prepared by his years copying and collating biblical manuscripts on the basis of the Hexapla, Origen’s great synopsis of Greek versions of the Hebrew Bible or Christian Old Testament. Manuscripts still survive with his name and that of Pamphilus listed in the colophons.²² Then there are instruments for biblical study, such as the gazeteer of biblical place-names called the Onomasticon, an invaluable handbook with apposite annotation.²³ Works like the Onomasticon played a role in promoting pilgrimage to Palestine once persecution ended and Constantine’s building program commenced.²⁴ There is also Eusebius’s ingenious synoptic index of the contents of the four gospels, commonly called the Gospel Sections and Canons, which distinguished and numbered individual pericopes in the Gospels...