The Church owes a profound debt to Eusebius of Caesarea, for without him much of early Christian history and lore would have passed into oblivion, and we would be ignorant of a good deal of our early past.
Most believers are probably unaware that the question of Jesus Christ’s divinity was once put up for a vote in the Roman Senate.
According to the account, news of Jesus’ resurrection was buzzing in Judea, and Pontius Pilate provided a report about the recent happenings to the emperor, Tiberius. Tiberius, impressed by the report, proposed the matter to the senate, urging them to declare Jesus as a god. But the senate rejected the proposal, as Roman law stated that for any human being to be proclaimed as a god required a prior approval of the human authorities. At this point the historian intervenes, commenting that the episode held a deeper prophetic meaning: “no human decision or commendation was required for the saving teaching of the divine message.”
Ratification of the Jesus amendment would take three more centuries in the Roman world. And when it finally came, our historian was there to welcome it.
The passage is classic Eusebius—for he is the historian in question, who recounts this episode in his indispensable History of the Church (from Christ to Constantine). Typical of his method, Eusebius relies on prime earlier sources—in this case, Tertullian—and combines collation of materials, quotation, and theological comment on the events recounted.
The church owes a profound debt to Eusebius of Caesarea (263–339), for without him much of early Christian history and lore would have passed into oblivion, and we would be ignorant of a good deal of our early past. Essentially, Eusebius gathered up the entire first three centuries of the faith and packaged them in his History, a book that still affords stimulating reading. A recent spokesman has said, regarding early Christian history, “Millions of people hunger for these historical discoveries and these ancient writings.” Eusebius fills that need richly, and his history is still vital and relevant.
Eusebius’s historical sweep is compelling; he can clarify points of detail and summarize whole epochs in a single paragraph. He explains, early in Book I, why Christ’s advent happened when it did, evoking the prophet Daniel’s prediction spelling out the exact date of the Messiah’s birth. These and similar pieces of data about early Christian history have become commonplaces, part of our consciousness even if we didn’t know their source. In many cases they are straight out of Eusebius, or from earlier Christian writers by way of Eusebius.
Eusebius’s accomplishment becomes all the more impressive when we consider the difficulty of his task (as G. A. Williamson reminds us in his preface to the History). In a digital age, we can gather information from just about anywhere in a matter of minutes. But in Eusebius’s day, books were neither plentiful nor easy to come by. They were hand copied onto a voluminous papyrus scroll, and there were no page numbers or indexes to aid the scholar. References had to be painstakingly sought out. Producing a complex work like Church History was a feat of juggling as well as genius, and its existence should never be taken for granted.
Cicero called Herodotus “the father of history,” and Eusebius was the father of Christian history—the first writer to provide a complete chronicle of the church’s growth up to his day. Eusebius was well aware of the importance of what he was doing: “I am the first to venture on such a project and to set out on what is indeed a lonely and untrodden path.” True, it was a path that Greek and Roman secular historians had walked before, but none of them had as their basic framework a reality of such cosmic magnitude as the coming of Christ and his Church. As Eusebius tells us at the start: “my book will start with a conception too sublime and overwhelming for man to grasp—the dispensation and divinity of our Savior Christ.”
Writing in the early fourth century, Eusebius was roughly at the same historical distance from Jesus as we are from George Washington. Already by then many early Christian sources were irretrievably lost, much information forgotten. Yet there was also a living fund of oral tradition from which to draw. Eusebius’s task was to a great extent that of a detective culling through the remaining sources, comparing them, and reconciling them in a harmonious narrative. Josephus, the first-century Jewish historian, and the earlier church fathers play a major role in Eusebius’s historical reconstruction, providing abundant material and quotations.
Eusebius’ quote-heavy approach had an unseen benefit: his book has preserved substantial portions from texts that have otherwise not survived. As he tells us: “from the scattered hints dropped by my predecessors I have picked out whatever seems relevant to the task I have undertaken, plucking like flowers in literary pastures the helpful contributions of earlier writers, to be embodied in the continuous narrative I have in mind.” In this way, Eusebius functions as a link between the apostles, the earliest Fathers, and today—a role he was conscious of filling, knowing that his chronicle would serve to inform generations of Christians in the remote future.
In Church History, events of early Christianity are closely woven with general history of the times. Eusebius makes clear that the major secular rulers of the time feared Jesus’ power and wanted to exterminate his followers (an echo of King Herod at the time of the Nativity). The gentile rulers were intent on wiping out the ancestral line of David, as it was from there that any kingly power would arise. This is what happened under the emperor Vespasian, leading to murder and persecution of the Jews. Gentile Christians were caught up in this net too, suffering exile, confiscation of property, and death.
Along the way of this via dolorosa, we find wonderful tidbits and surprising revelations. Eusebius traces what befell the Jesus family—that is, his surviving blood relatives, of which there were quite a few down to the third generation after Calvary. Foremost among them was St. James the Righteous (or the Just), known as the brother (or kinsman) of the Lord [1]. He became the first bishop in Jerusalem, the seedbed of the Christian movement. In the year 62 he was martyred by being thrown down from the parapet of the Temple and clubbed to death, after having given a robust witness to the Messiah Jesus before the people.
Jesus’ remaining relatives together with the apostles and disciples chose Symeon, another cousin of the Lord, to succeed James as the leader of the church in Jerusalem. Guilty of a double crime—a descendant of David and a Christian, not to mention a relative of Christ himself—he was martyred during the reign of Domitian. Symeon was no less than 120 years old when he was arrested, tortured, and crucified. Around the same time, the grandsons of Jude, another of Jesus’ relatives, got off much more easily. They were called up before emperor Domitian, who questioned them about the coming kingdom of God. Upon learning that Jesus’ kingdom was not of an earthly stamp, the emperor let the brothers go. They then presumably returned to their 25 acres of land, where according to Eusebius’s source they practiced subsistence farming.
Suffice it to say, this is not stuff they teach you in CCD class. But you will learn it if you crack open a copy of Eusebius.
As I mentioned earlier, Eusebius does fine work of showing how the early events in our faith related to the wider world—to a degree many modern readers would be surprised to learn. For example, he reports that James’s martyrdom was widely regarded as having led to the calamities subsequently suffered by the Jewish people at the hands of the Romans, culminating in the destruction of Jerusalem and its Temple in AD 70. Here we come against some of the moral assumptions that color his narrative, ones widely shared in Eusebius’s time: namely, the existence of collective guilt and a literal divine vengeance. This is one of the reasons why the modern reader should read Church History with discernment and in historical context—and cum grano salis when it comes to some of Eusebius’s conclusions and judgments.
In fact, Eusebius was “not much of a theologian” according to one patristic expert [2], and he was no literary stylist either in the judgment of those well versed in koine Greek. Nor should we expect him to be an “objective historian” by modern standards. But he didn’t need to be any of these things for the task he had at hand. Church History is, to quote the Catholic Encyclopedia, “a storehouse of information collected by an indefatigable student.” Eusebius’s narrative helps bring sacred people and places near to us, driving home the concrete, particular, and historical character of our faith. The way Eusebius coordinates sacred and secular history (the emperors with the early bishops of Rome, for example) emphasizes the historical consistency of the faith, its incarnation in the flow of time.
The author of Church History was a classic hinge figure, living between two epochs. The Constantinian era was a turning point in the history of the church and of the West. Eusebius was a confidant of Constantine, a sort of court bishop to the new Christian ruler, a fact we should bear in mind as we read the conclusion to the narrative. In that 10th and final book of Church History, following Constatine’s military victory and establishment of religious freedom, Eusebius ends his story aglow with celebration and optimism for the church’s future. And who can blame him for rejoicing? The church went overnight from a persecuted sect to place of honor under an (ostensibly) Christian emperor. But a note of warning is sounded in these closing pages, for we know only too well the historical perils of a church that dwells too comfortably in the shade of the state.
Here, for comparison, is a sample of what Eusebius had witnessed first hand during the persecution under the previous emperor, Domitian:
I saw with my own eyes the places of worship thrown down from top to bottom, to the very foundations, the inspired holy Scriptures committed to the flames in the middle of the public squares, and the pastors of the churches hiding disgracefully in one place or another, while others suffered the indignity of being held up to ridicule by their enemies […]
But Church History is not only concerned with martyrdom and successions of bishops and emperors. Eusebius chronicles the great early minds of the church, the theologians and their writings, and also the opposite side of the coin: the false Messiahs, false prophets, and heretics, starting with Simon the Magician, the grandfather of all deceivers. Needless to say, Eusebius stands up for the orthodox and apostolic teaching. The bishop of Caesarea also establishes the reliability of the New Testament canon of books, citing the earliest traditions about the origins of the gospels and epistles. These were essential points to establish the church’s credibility and can play the same role today, supplementing the knowledge we derive from scripture itself.
Perhaps most of all, Eusebius’s book fires the Christian imagination, helping us to see our faith as a great story. In reading him, we will discover—or remember—who we are: members of a living Body extended through time and awaiting a final revelation of God’s power at history’s end.
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Notes:
[1] Catholic and Orthodox tradition regards him as either a half-brother or cousin of Jesus.
[2] William A. Jurgens, The Faith of the Early Fathers, Volume 1, p. 290.
Source:
Eusebius, The History of the Church, trans. G. A. Williamson, Barnes & Noble Books, 1965
The featured image is an image of Eusebio de Cesarea and is in the public domain, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.
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