Eusebius’ life
Eusebius was born in the early 260s, probably in Caesarea, which was to be the scene of his activities for most of his long life. Originally a small town on the Palestinian coast of the Mediterranean with a fortified harbour, known as Strato’s Tower after the dynast of Sidon who had built it, it became a Greek city during the struggles for Palestine between the Seleucid and Ptolemaic kings. About 100 B.C. it became part of the Hasmonean kingdom and probably received a large influx of Jewish settlers, but forty years later Pompey made the city once again a Gentile city. Strato’s Tower then came under the rule of Herod the Great, who ruled as king of Judaea 37–4 B.C.: he rebuilt the city on a grandiose scale as a Hellenistic capital and Roman metropolis and renamed it after Augustus Caesar. Henceforth he was regarded as its founder. When Judaea became a Roman province, Caesarea became its capital. It was raised to the status of a Roman colony by Vespasian, who settled veterans there. The importance of Caesarea was further enhanced by Jerusalem’s decline in significance after the Jewish wars (A.D.66–73 and 132–5): in 135 Jerusalem became a pagan city, Aelia Capitolina, from which Jews were banned on pain of death. The growing importance of Persia in the third century made Caesarea even more important to the Romans as a focal point for campaigns against Persia. In the fourth century it was even deemed worthy to be, briefly, the residence of one of the Roman Emperors, Maximin Daia.1
By the third century Caesarea had a population of 100,000. A pagan city under the protection of the goddess Tyche (Fortune), it had a cosmopolitan population with a large Jewish community, an almost equally large Samaritan community, and a growing Christian presence. Origen the great Christian theologian had spent the last twenty years of his life there and had established a kind of Christian academy that had attracted Christian pupils from all over the East. This academy, with its library, was consolidated by Pamphilus, a great admirer of Origen (though he had never known him), who settled in Caesarea and set about preserving Origen’s heritage by making copies of all his voluminous works and continuing his labours on the text of the Scriptures. This Pamphilus was Eusebius’ adored mentor: Eusebius became Pamphilus’ pupil and collaborated with him on his last work, the Apology for Origen, composed while Pamphilus was in prison awaiting martyrdom during the Great Persecution at the beginning of the fourth century. Eusebius preserved Pamphilus’ memory after his death, both in his account of his martyrdom in Martyrs of Palestine and in his (lost) Life of Pamphilus, and, more personally, by adding Pamphilus’ name to his own so that he was known as Eusebius Pamphili, ‘Pamphilus’ Eusebius’.
Eusebius was born after a decade that had seen the first attempts by the Roman Emperors to persecute the Christian Church on an imperial scale. By the time of his birth, the successive waves of that persecution had come to an end and from the time of the Emperor Gallienus (who ruled as sole Emperor 260–68) the Church knew a period of settled peace and an officially recognized right to its places of worship. Eusebius thus grew up in a Church that seemed to have seen the back of persecution, both the imperial persecution of the immediate past and the sporadic local persecution the Church had always known. Such conditions of peace were conducive to scholarship and Eusebius was, more than anything else, a scholar. During these years he acquired the massive learning he was to put to use in the great works of his maturity. This period of peace came to an abrupt end with the Great Persecution, initiated by the Emperor Diocletian in 303, which continued spasmodically in the East until 313.
In fact we know little in detail about Eusebius’ life: his date of birth has to be deduced from hints in The History of the Church (from which it transpires that he was born during the very last years of the life of Dionysius, bishop of Alexandria, who died c.264); he became bishop of Caesarea in about 313 (probably in succession to Agapius, who had ordained him priest and seems to have survived the persecution), and died on 30 May 339. His successor in the see of Caesarea, Acacius, wrote a life of Eusebius, but this has been lost. The loss of the Life and the obscurity about the details of his life are both probably due to one factor: his involvement in the great theological controversy of the 320s, the Arian controversy, among the supporters of the heresiarch Arius. The Church never canonized him, and though many of his works have been preserved, the memory of the man has been largely lost. Further, what can be gleaned of Eusebius does not endear him much to modern scholars. When the Arian controversy blew up, Eusebius was one of those condemned at the council of Antioch, presided over by Bishop Ossius of Cordova (Constantine’s religious adviser), in early 325. (We learn of this from a document preserved only in Syriac.) He therefore arrived at the council of Nicaea (originally arranged for Ancyra – modern Ankara – but moved to Nicaea on account of the climate: apparently a credible reason) as a condemned heretic, which is hard to square with the prominent role in which Eusebius casts himself in his letter about the Council of Nicaea to his Church back home in Caesarea. Eusebius, however, emerged from that council among the orthodox majority, having signed the creed and condemned Arius. At the council, too, he met the Emperor, Constantine the Great, and conceived a great admiration for him. Eusebius would like us to think that this admiration was mutual, and that he became the confidant of the Emperor. We may feel that he was deceiving himself; none the less he was chosen by the Emperor to deliver an oration on the occasion of his Tricennalia (the celebration of Constantine’s first thirty years as Emperor, which he celebrated 335–6) and after the death of Constantine wrote his Life, on which he was still working when he died himself. The oration in praise of the Emperor and the Lifeare works of flattery (which we, anachronistically, find tasteless) and give expression to a theology of the place of the Christian Emperor in the Christian Empire, which, while foreshadowing the political ideas of ‘Christendom’ that were to hold sway in the Middle Ages and later, both in the East and the West, seems irrelevant, or worse a betrayal of the essential nature of the Gospel, to most modern Christians living in a secular society and holds little appeal for non-Christians. According to Eusebius, the (Christian) Emperor is God’s representative on earth, and as the Word of God expressed God’s will in the creation of the world, so the Emperor expresses the will of God in the government of the civilized world (the oikoumene), and fulfils this role by his imitation of the Word (or Logos), by his logomimesis. Such an understanding of the Emperor’s role in relation to the Word, who is God’s agent in creation and who became incarnate in Christ, not only gives the Emperor’s position a religious aura (which it had always had for pagans) but also affects the way in which Christ’s religious significance is seen. As A. N. Whitehead provocatively put it (thinking more specifically of the culmination under the Emperor Justinian of the process initiated by Constantine):
When the Western world accepted Christianity, Caesar conquered; and the received text of Western theology was edited by his lawyers. The code of Justinian and the theology of Justinian are two volumes expressing one movement of the human spirit. The brief Galilean vision of humility flickered throughout the ages, uncertainly. In the official formulation of the religion it has assumed the trivial form of the mere attribution to the Jews that they cherished a misconception about their Messiah. But the deeper idolatry, of fashioning God in the image of the Egyptian, Persian, and Roman Imperial rulers, was retained. The Church gave unto God the attributes which belonged exclusively to Caesar.1
The Arian controversy and Eusebius’ ‘Constantinian theology’ do not much affect The History of the Church: its latest edition dates from 324/5, and most of it was written about a decade (or more) earlier. Most of what we can glean about Eusebius otherwise – from his books – is, however, directly relevant to an understanding of The History of the Church. His literary output was enormous and he continued writing, as we have seen, right up to his death in his late seventies. They are all the works of a scholar who delights in displaying his massive erudition, rather than the works of an original thinker. Eusebius knew an awful lot; it is less clear how much he really understood. His works are full of endless citations from the works of others; rarely does Eusebius allow himself to speak with his own voice. Such writing is enormously valuable to have, though tedious to read. As Photius, the great ninth-century scholar and Patriarch of Constantinople, remarked, ‘his style is neither agreeable nor brilliant, but he was a man of great learning’.1 But it is probably as well. Eusebius the theologian was the Arian-sympathizer, the opponent of Athanasius: later generations would not have preserved the works of such. But Eusebius the great repository of learning was useful; even in his own century his works were being used as a more convenient source for the writings of others than the original texts:2 as such he was valued and his works preserved.
Eusebius’ works
The History of the Church was not Eusebius’ only work of history. Earlier he had composed a Chronicle. This is in two parts: the first consists of brief epitomes of the history of the Chaldaeans, the Assyrians, the Hebrews, the Egyptians, the Greeks and the Romans, based on appropriate historical sources; the second part consists of tables of dates arranged in columns, the columns corresponding to Hebrew history, Greek history, and so on, so that events that took place at the same time are next to one another. These columns begin with the year of Abraham’s birth (2016/15 B.C., though it must be remembered that the B.C./A.D. system that we are familiar with was not invented for a couple of centuries after Eusebius’ time) and continue (subdivided into five sections) up to Eusebius’ own time. It is clear that the Chronicle was revised and brought up to date from time to time. Part of the purpose of the Chronicle was to demonstrate the superior antiquity of the Hebrew religion (of which, for Eusebius, Christianity was the continuation or, rather, recovery) over any other. The system of tables was accompanied by notes. As we shall see, Eusebius’ The History of the Church could be regarded as a continuous collection of such notes. The Chronicle does not survive in Eusebius’ original Greek: there is a Latin translation of the second part by Jerome, which makes up for Eusebius’ inadequacies as far as Roman history is concerned and brings the story up to his (Jerome’s) own day (380), and an Armenian translation of the whole (of a version that went as far as 325). Another work of history Eusebius composed was his Martyrs of Palestine, which recorded the progress of the Great Persecution in Caesarea. This is intimately connected with The History of the Church and we shall have more to say of it later on. Eusebius compiled various other works of history – a collection of the accounts of the martyrs and his Life of Pamphilus – which do not survive; his Life of Constantine is also a work of history, though its literary form is not that of a biography but an encomium, a celebration of Constantine’s virtues and achievements, not a dispassionate account of his life.
Another main group of Eusebius’ works is apologetic: that is, they stand in the tradition of those works, beginning in the second century with Quadratus’ Apology, that put forth a defence of Christianity against pagan (and Jewish) objections. (Apologia in Greek means ‘defence’ rather than ‘apology’ in the modern sense.) These apologists, the most notable of whom was Justin Martyr, defended Christianity against charges that it undermined traditional religion and political loyalty, that it was newfangled and that it was immoral. Their defence was that if there was any truth in traditional religion, it lay not in the myths that provided the justification for the various pagan religious ceremonies but in a lofty philosophical piety, and that the truth glimpsed by the philosophers (especially the Platonists) was grasped more surely by Christianity. Against the charge that Christianity was newfangled, they argued that Christianity was the truth behind Judaism, which had a fair claim to be the most ancient of all religions. Accusations of immorality were misunderstandings, inexcusable in view of the austere moral standards Christians demanded of themselves. Accusations of political disloyalty, even sedition, were met by claims that the prayers of the Christians to the true God were of greater benefit to the stability of the Empire than prayers and sacrifices to false gods who, at best, were no more than deceitful demons. The appeal to philosophy, especially to Platonism, and the claim that Christianity was vindicated by what was best in the philosophers, coupled with the claim that Christianity, through its link with Judaism, was the oldest of all religions, are the parts of this apologetic tradition that most appealed to Eusebius. These themes had been thoroughly worked over in the centuries before Eusebius, especially in Origen’s late work Against Celsus, and little was left to Eusebius other than massive elaboration based on his own enormous erudition. But this elaboration, which refutes paganism out of its own mouth by citing extensively from the works of the philosophers themselves, is claimed by Eusebius, justly, as a ‘way of [my] own’. It has also given us a vast repository of extracts from ancient philosophy. His Preparation for the Gospel was valued for its learning, and still is: not a few pagan philosophers would be no more than names to us, had not Eusebius excerpted them for his Preparation.1 It was preceded by his General Elementary Introduction, of which only a part survives concerned with the Messianic prophecies of the Old Testament, and followed by his Proof of the Gospel, directed against the Jews, in which he explains away the Jewish religion as a temporary concession to human sin which served to prepare the way for the coming of Christ, who restored the ancient, universal religion of the Patriarchs, and goes on to expound the mystery of the Incarnation of the Word of God (about two thirds of the Proof survives). His Theophany (or ‘Divine Manifestation’), which he composed in the last decade of his life, is a compendium of the earlier apologetic works and in large part drawn from them (it survives complete only in a Syriac translation). All this apologetic work was not mere erudition: it had direct contemporary relevance. In the first decade of the fourth century, the Church had faced not simply an attempt to exterminate it by means of persecution: that persecution had been backed up by an attempt to ridicule Christianity and call in question its claims (especially in the last stage of the persecution in the East, under the Emperor Maximin). Hierocles, who had been governor of Bithynia, composed a work that compared the life of Jesus with that of the pagan sage and wonder-worker Apollonius of Tyana, and Porphyry, the famous and learned disciple of Plotinus (and something of a man after Eusebius’ own heart with his bent for scholarly erudition), composed a massive attack on Christianity in fifteen books, which concerned itself not simply with general points but made much of contradictions in the sacred record of the Christians. Eusebius’ Preparation is aware of this new angle of attack and attempts to meet it, often enough by crushing it with learning. He also composed separate work against Hierocles (this survives, though Hierocles’ work does not), and against Porphyry (both Porphyry’s attack and Eusebius’ reply are lost).
The rest of Eusebius’ works are biblical and doctrinal. He preserved the interest that he had shared with Pamphilus in preparing a reliable text of the Scriptures. When Constantine’s new city of Constantinople needed copies of the Bible for use in celebrating the liturgy in its many new churches, the Emperor wrote to Eusebius asking him to provide fifty copies of the Bible, well written and easy to read. Eusebius also wrote commentaries on the Psalms and Isaiah, works on problems posed by the Scriptures – the polygamy of the Patriarchs, the conflicting accounts of the Resurrection in the Gospels – and his ‘Gospel Canons’, which enabled one to locate and compare parallel passages in the four Gospels. He wrote a work (much of which is lost) on the significance of the Easter festival in relation to the Jewish Passover (it is worth noting, in passing, that Greek uses one word – pascha – where we use two – Easter and Passover – and so naturally associates Christian Easter and Jewish Passover, where we tend to separate them) and a work, usually called the Onomasticon, which is a gazetteer of biblical sites and is still today the most important source for the topography of the Holy Land. His doctrinal works include his part in the Defence of Origen, the last book of which Eusebius wrote himself after the death of Pamphilus, and two late works (Against Marcellus and the Ecclesiastical Theology) against bishop Marcellus of Ancyra, a supporter of Nicaea who was deposed by an Arian synod in Constantinople in 336 and whom the Arian party (including Eusebius) accused of Sabellianism.
Alongside all this literary work, Eusebius was for some twenty-five years or so bishop of the busy provincial city of Caesarea, and, as bishop of that see, metropolitan bishop of Palestine. We have no idea what kind of a bishop he was, but it seems unlikely that one so attached to Caesarea would have been neglectful of his pastoral charge. His declining to leave Caesarea to become bishop of the much more prestigious see of Antioch c. 327 cannot, however, be used as evidence of his affection for Caesarea, as it was clearly the Emperor’s wish that he should not accept the see of Antioch. But he stayed at Caesarea until he died and one may presume anyway that he would have been reluctant to leave the library there.
This survey of Eusebius’ works has manifested Eusebius the scholar, delighting in his extensive erudition and keen to put this erudition to use: helping the growing numbers of pilgrims to the Holy Land, helping Christians to understand the Scriptures, and indeed have access to reliable texts of the Scriptures, and placing on a sound, scholarly basis the credentials of the religion of the Incarnation. All these concerns were focused in what is without doubt his greatest work: The History of the Church.
THE HISTORY OF THE CHURCH
The History of the Church survives in its original Greek in several manuscripts; there is also a translation (often more a paraphrase) into Latin by Rufinus (c. 345–410), who added two further books that continued the story up to the death of the Emperor Theodosius (395). and a very early (probably fourth-century) Syriac translation on which was based a very literal old Armenian version that has also survived. No one in ancient times ever attempted to do Eusebius’ work over again: the later Greek Church historians (Socrates, Sozomen and others) all pick up the story where Eusebius left off, in a way acknowledging his position as the ‘Father of Church History’.
As we have it now, The History of the Church is in ten Books. The first Book is introductory in nature, filling in all the background we need to know, both theological and historical, to grasp the significance of Christ as the Incarnation of the Word of God. Books 2–7 give an account of the life of the Church from the Ascension of Christ (A.D. 30) to the outbreak of the Great Persecution (303). Book 8 and Book 9 concern the Great Persecution itself: Book 8, the persecution from the issuing of the edicts by Diocletian to the edict of recantation issued by the Emperor Galerius just before his grisly death in 311; Book 9, the renewal of the persecution a few months later in the East under the Emperor Maximin up to his recantation shortly before his death after his defeat by the Emperor Licinius in 313. Book 9 also includes an account of Constantine’s victory over Maxentius at the Milvian Bridge outside Rome in 312. Book 10 celebrates the Church at peace and mainly consists of the great oration or homily Eusebius gave at the dedication of the magnificently rebuilt basilica at Tyre (315/16) and a collection of imperial edicts which show that the Church is no longer just tolerated in the Roman Empire, but the object of imperial favour and patronage on a lavish scale. There then follows a brief account of the fall of Licinius and a few words celebrating the joyful state of the Empire under the Emperor Constantine. Clearly all of this cannot have been written at the same time: the last pages were written after the final defeat of Licinius by Constantine in 324, whereas Book 9 and most of Book 10 envisage a situation where Licinius and Constantine can still be celebrated together as comrades-in-arms, a situation that held from 312 until their first conflict in 316/17. As we shall see presently, some scholars have seen evidence of yet more stages in the composition of The History of the Church. Before we look at that question (not merely a tedious question of dates, but one that raises fundamental issues affecting the nature of the work), let us see what kind of a work The History of the Church is.
Books 2–7 are composed in a different style from Books 8–10: these last three Books are an impassioned account of the Great Persecution and a celebration (and documentation) of the Great Deliverance – though it several times becomes a list of names, there is plenty of action too. Books 2–7 are quite different: Eusebius hints (at the beginning of Book 1) that it is an expansion of his Chronicle, and so, on inspection, it appears to be. The basic structure of the work is the succession of Roman Emperors: all the material is fitted into their successive reigns. Within this division of material the succession of bishops in the four great sees of the pre-Nicene Church – Rome, Alexandria, Antioch and Jerusalem (or Aelia, as it was renamed after the Jewish War of 132–5) – provides a further set of subdivisions. This makes it quite clear what Eusebius has done: the basic framework is provided by the succession lists, collated with one another in the Chronicle (Appendix A must be something like the kind of list Eusebius made for himself), and into this framework is fitted all that he has to say.
Such a method of writing history is not, in fact, at all new: in this respect Eusebius is simply following classical precedent. The histories of Thucydides, Polybius, Josephus and others (and also history books in the Bible such as 1 and 2 Samuel and 1 and 2 Kings) are similarly annalistic: the narrative proceeds year by year, which makes for all kinds of oddities when the matter under discussion (e.g., foreign policy) cannot be so neatly carved up. So, for instance, if Eusebius has something to say about someone whose career spans several reigns, it is chopped up between the several reigns (e.g., Justin Martyr, who addressed his Apology to Antoninus Pius, was martyred under Marcus Aurelius, and is Eusebius’ source for information filed under yet other reigns). Equally, if Eusebius is going to say anything at all, it has to be found a slot in the reign of one or other of the Emperors, even if Eusebius has no real clue as to where it ought to go (so, for instance, he dates Pionius’ martyrdom a century too early because, having dealt with the martyrdom of Polycarp, he goes on to list the rest of a collection of accounts of martyrs he has to hand). More important, though, is to notice what kind of material Eusebius inserts into his historical framework. Here he deserts classical precedent and remains essentially a chronicler (or an archivist). Whereas a classical historian told a story, and made up details such as a general’s address to his troops on the basis of plausibility (and the historian’s view of the character of the individuals involved and the policy they were pursuing), Eusebius hardly ever makes up anything. He quotes and summarizes. In Book 2 and Book 3 it is mainly Josephus, the great Jewish historian, whose account (mainly from the Jewish War) Eusebius pillages for the first century; in Book 4 it is Hegesippus, Justin and the Martyrdom of Polycarp; in Book 5 the Martyrs of Lyons and Vienne, Irenaeus, a dossier on Montanism (the main sources for which are ‘Anonymous’ and Apollonius), a dossier on the Quartodeciman controversy and a work on heresy in Rome called (though he does not tell us) the Little Labyrinth. Book 6 is mostly based on his and Pamphilus’ Defence of Origen and the rest of Book 6 and Book 7 draw on the letters of Dionysius of Alexandria (this list of sources is by no means complete). Josephus was a historian, the accounts of martyrdom are historical (though in the form of letters from one church to another), but the rest of Eusebius’ sources are apologetic works or attacks on heretics; only Dionysius has the curiosity and garrulousness to give us history, or rather reportage, raw material for history. Eusebius was doing something new: no one before him had attempted a history of the Church, and earlier historians had written a very different type of history from that Eusebius attempted, which is, as we have seen, not only annalistic but really the extended notes of a chronologer.1 Eusebius was not exaggerating when he said that he was the ‘first to venture on such a project and to set out on what is indeed a lonely and untrodden path’ (I. 1).
It is worth looking at what Eusebius says he had set out to do. He is, he tells us, going to record the ‘lines of succession from the holy apostles’, the ‘many important events recorded in the story of the Church’, the ‘outstanding leaders and heroes… in the most famous Christian communities’, the ‘men… who… were ambassadors of the divine word’, the ‘names and dates’ of heretics, the destruction of the Jewish race after ‘their conspiracy against our Saviour’, the persecutions the Church suffered, and finally ‘the martyrdoms of later days down to my own time, and at the end of it all the kind and gracious deliverance accorded by our Saviour’ (I. 1). If we look at each of these in turn, we shall be able to form some idea of what Eusebius was trying to achieve and the strengths and limitations of his project. (Eusebius mentions yet another theme at III. 3. 3, the history of the canon of Scripture: see under ‘canon’ in the ‘Who’s Who’.)
‘Lines of succession from the holy apostles’: as we have seen, into the basic framework of the succession of the Roman Emperors, Eusebius inserts the lines of succession of the bishops in the principal sees of the Christian Church. These lines of succession had been drawn up earlier, and Eusebius simply makes use of them: Hegesippus had made a succession-list for the Church of Rome, and Irenaeus gives a succession-list for the same Church in his Against Heresies (it is Irenaeus’ list that Eusebius follows). These lists, as is evident from the way in which Irenaeus produces his list, were used as guarantees of the authenticity of the preaching of the Christian faith: they traced a line of succession back to Christ through one (or more) of the apostles (Peter – and sometimes Paul – in the case of Rome) who had appointed the first bishop in the place concerned. Orderly succession from the apostles was regarded as evidence of fidelity to the teaching of the apostles, and therefore of Christ who had appointed them (this idea is first explicitly found in Clement’s letter to the Corinthians, c. 96: see I Clement 42–4): it is not unlike the idea of succession (diadoche) in the philosophical schools, seen as guaranteeing fidelity to the teaching of the founder of the school. The Church came to lay great stress on such lines of succession during the struggle against gnosticism in the second century, as the gnostics claimed to authenticate their own secret traditions by producing succession-lists going back usually to one of the more obscure apostles (such as Matthias or Barnabas). Their original significance was not then historical but dogmatic (or apologetic), and even though they function as a historical framework for Eusebius, their value as a guarantee of authenticity is still important to him.
But what of the lists themselves? As far as Jerusalem is concerned, it is clear that the list Eusebius had up to the time of Narcissus (early third century) is no more than that: a list of names, presumably discovered in the library at Jerusalem, founded in the third century by Narcissus’ successor, Alexander. Only from the time of Narcissus onwards does Eusebius make any attempt to incorporate it into The History of the Church. The list of the bishops of Antioch seems also to have been not much more than a list of names that Eusebius has worked into The History of the Church by guesswork (helped by the fact that Ignatius, Theophilus and Serapion were more than just names): he never records the length of an episcopate, as he does in the cases of Rome and Alexandria. For Rome and Alexandria he seems to have had proper data: in the case of Rome several episcopal lists survive that we can check against Eusebius. The way Eusebius uses these lists is revealing. As he works his way through the ‘bishops’ of Alexandria, he rarely designates any of them ‘bishop’ until he reaches Demetrius at the end of the second century. It seems very likely that not until then was there anyone who could be regarded as ‘the bishop of Alexandria’: before Demetrius the succession-list perhaps gave the names of those men who were really the leaders of the congregation in Alexandria that was in communion with the church of Rome and other ancient sees of the Mediterranean world.1 (Eusebius seems to have taken his episcopal list for Alexandria from Julius Africanus, like Hegesippus an early toiler in the field of Christian origins whom Eusebius probably makes more use of than he cares to admit.) The Roman list poses other problems, for here the list itself (with minor variants of spelling) is pretty well attested. The problem for the first century or so is what it is a list of: for evidence that there was a single bishop leading the Roman Church is lacking for that period; indeed what evidence there is suggests a rather different picture. When Clement wrote to the Corinthian Church, he wrote not as bishop in the later sense but as one of the presbyters of the Roman Church entrusted with the task of writing on behalf of the whole Church to the erring Church of Corinth; similarly, Ignatius, writing perhaps a decade later to the Roman Church, does not seem to envisage a ‘bishop of Rome’, despite his enthusiasm for mon-episcopacy. With the exception of the early ‘bishops’ of Alexandria (and even here we may be reading more into Eusebius’ use of words than he intended), it seems that Eusebius has used the succession-lists to project back into the early Church, right up to apostolic times, the kind of episcopal government of the Church that he was himself familiar with (what is usually called monarchical episcopacy, or monepiscopacy). The other odd thing about Eusebius’ use of the succession-list for Rome is more venial: that for the last half of the third century he has clearly misread it – reading years for months and months for years – so that, overlooking the martyrdom of Xystus II, he has him reigning for another ten years, which upsets the chronology of the bishops of Rome for the rest of the century.
The next aim – to list ‘the many important events recorded in the life of the Church’ – is a bit puzzling, because Eusebius does not tell us much about such important events. Apart from martyrdoms and councils (and even in the case of the latter it is decisions he records, not what happened), hardly any events are recorded at all in Books 2–7. There are seldom any anecdotes (except in the case of Origen, and they are presumably due to Pamphilus’ including them in his Defence of Origen). It is really quite an uneventful history. The reason for this is not far to seek: Eusebius was a bookish man, and his history is peopled not by men of events, but by those who wrote books. It is much more a survey of Christian literature, with excerpts quoted that struck him as interesting. It is also true to say that there are few events because Eusebius has no idea of the progress of the Christian Church, or of the development of doctrine: nothing that happens contributes to anything; even the Incarnation only restores the primordial religion of the Patriarchs.
The ‘outstanding leaders and heroes… in the famous Christian communities’, the ‘men… who… were ambassadors of the divine word’: here Eusebius comes into his own, for his history is full of people. Many of these people we would know nothing of, were it not for Eusebius. If nothing else, when reading Eusebius one gets an impression of the whole host of men and women who constitute the Christian Church through the ages. If we inquire more deeply, it seems however that the picture is much more partial than this might suggest. Eusebius compiled The History of the Church by working in two great libraries, those at Caesarea and Jerusalem, the former founded by Origen and consolidated by Pamphilus, and the latter founded by Alexander, a great admirer of the theology that had developed in Alexandria and of Origen in particular. Reliance on these two libraries, built up by men with very similar outlooks, slants Eusebius’ history. The focus of interest is the Eastern Mediterranean world: from Alexandria up through Palestine to Antioch and Asia Minor. Eusebius knows very little about what went on outside this area. His knowledge of Christianity in Gaul (Irenaeus, and the martyrdoms at Lyons and Vienne with which he begins Book 5) is no real exception. The Christians in Gaul seem to have come from Asia Minor – certainly Irenaeus did – and at any rate had close links with Asia Minor: the letter describing the course of the persecution of the Gallic martyrs was addressed to the Christians in Asia (i.e., the Roman province, Asia Proconsularis) and Phrygia. But he knows very little about Rome and even less about North Africa. Tertullian, Hippolytus, Cyprian, Novatian (whose name he cannot even spell) are scarcely more than names to him. He mentions Sabellius in connexion with the Libyan Christians who found fault with Dionysius of Alexandria’s trinitarian theology, but seems unaware that he had been condemned at Rome by Callistus c. 220. And even though his focus of interest is the Eastern Mediterranean, he ignores everything other than Greek Christianity. He knows next to nothing about Syriac Christianity (Bardaisan is hardly more than a name), even though he gives a lot of space to the story of the conversion of king Abgar of Edessa, and he tells us very little about Jewish Christianity (i.e., that form of Christianity that continued to express itself in terms of Jewish traditions rather than Greek philosophy). Part of the reason for his telling us so little about Jewish Christianity is probably that chiliasm (or millenarianism) continued to be attractive to Jewish Christians: chiliasm seems to have upset Eusebius very much indeed. Another limitation in what Eusebius tells us about the Christians he refers to is that although he is particularly interested in literate Christians, and often gives lists of their works, he is not very interested in their ideas. Even his account of Origen gives us little notion as to what Origen actually taught, and that is not simply because by Eusebius’ time Origen’s ideas were exciting more and more anxiety. The main reason for Eusebius’ lack of interest in what individual Christians taught seems to be that he thought that if orthodox they must all have taught the same. The only real exception to this is the history of the canon, the formation of the accepted list of Christian Scriptures: here Eusebius does provide valuable material. Christian teachers were witnesses to an unchanging truth, so Eusebius had little interest in the detail of what they had to say. Pagan philosophers and heretics were different : they got it wrong, so there could be some interest in exploring the varieties of error.
This leads us to ‘names and dates’ of heretics. But though the varieties of error could be recorded (as he records the ideas of the philosophers at great length in his Preparation for the Gospel), it is mainly the ‘names and dates’ that Eusebius is concerned with. It is often very hard to get from the pages of Eusebius any clear idea of the teaching of the heretics. What he tells us about Paul of Samosata, for instance, has more to do with his overbearing and secular behaviour than with his ideas. The only heretics we learn much about are the Montanists, because he chooses to quote so extensively from his sources. Eusebius is more concerned to classify: Carpocrates the first gnostic, Tatian the first docetist, and so on.
The destruction of the Jewish race ‘after their conspiracy against our Saviour’ is fortunately not a pervasive theme. He regards the first Jewish War (66–73), with the destruction of Jerusalem, as a punishment for the crucifixion of Christ and for the continued persecution of His followers, especially James ‘the Lord’s brother’, and cites Hegesippus and a passage from Josephus (otherwise attested only by Origen) in support. He records that since the second Jewish War (132–5) the ‘entire race has been forbidden to set foot anywhere in the neighbourhood of Jerusalem’ so that ‘not even from a distance might Jews have a view of their ancestral soil’. Eusebius clearly regards it as a just punishment, but he does not dwell on it.
Eusebius distinguishes as themes the persecutions the Church suffered and the ‘martyrdoms of our own time’, a distinction that corresponds to the persecutions recorded in Books 2–7 and the account of the Great Persecution of his own time in Books 8–9. His account of the persecution of the Church in Books 2–7 has caused a misunderstanding that some still perpetuate. As we have seen, anything recorded has to be allotted a place in the reign of an Emperor: in the case of persecution (with a few exceptions) Eusebius arranges his material to suggest that some Emperors persecuted the Church, while others did not. It is a deliberately created impression. Persecution, as Eusebius knew it, was imperial: it was enforced by imperial edict and the imperial will. In the Great Persecution the West had suffered much less than the East because, even though Diocletian’s edicts were of universal force, the Caesar of the West, Constantius, the father of Constantine, had no wish to persecute Christians and only put the edicts into effect in a very limited way (the later edicts were not enforced at all). Hardly surprisingly, Eusebius believed that this was the pattern for all persecutions, and anyway the writings of the apologists contained the idea that only bad Emperors were persecutors. Melito had thought that only wicked. Emperors, like Nero and Domitian, had persecuted Christians: good Emperors, like Hadrian and Antoninus Pius had not.1Tertullian had thought the same, and the chapter of his Apology where he argues this is quoted from by Eusebius no less than four times.2 Again, Eusebius has projected back on to the early period of the Church the conditions he was familiar with in the early fourth century.
In fact, up to the persecution under the Emperor Decius (250–51) there had been no persecution of Christians ordered by the Emperor on an imperial scale. Nero’s persecution of Christians was confined to Rome; if Domitian singled out Christians for persecution (something not at all certain), it is doubtful if such persecution spread beyond Rome (John’s banishment to Patmos is an isolated exception); for the rest, persecution (as Pliny’s correspondence with Trajan makes plain) was a matter for the individual governor of a province. Some governors shared the widespread mistrust of Christians and were happy to use them as scapegoats, others (we may presume) did not. The Christians’ refusal to acknowledge the ancient gods was felt to be seditious, as it was under the protection of the ancient gods that Rome had expanded and prospered.1 The same picture emerges from the accounts of the martyrs: it is the governor who conducts the trial and it is the Christians’ stubborn refusal to sacrifice to the gods, or even to burn a pinch of incense to them, that leads to their deaths. A number of the accounts of the martyrs survive (occasionally a transcript of the trial, e.g., the Acts of the Scillitan Martyrs, or the Acts of Cyprian’s Martyrdom, more usually a letter from the Church where the persecution had taken place) and Eusebius tells us he had made a collection of them. He quotes extensively from some of them (notably the account of Polycarp’s martyrdom and that of the Gallic martyrs) and refers to many more. For the most part he allots them to the reigns of Emperors he considers to have been opposed to the Christian Church, though he recognizes that there was sporadic, local persecution inspired by the mob or by the machinations of the local authorities (III. 33). With Decius the situation changed. Everyone throughout the Empire was required to take part in sacrifice to the ancient gods: the Christian refusal to take part (though very many acquiesced) resulted in martyrdom. That persecution came to an end with Decius’ death. A more systematic attempt to weaken and destroy the Church was mounted by the Emperor Valerian: first, in 257, the clergy were arrested and all gathering together for Christian worship forbidden; the following year the clergy and any men of rank who refused to renounce Christianity were to be put to death. Eusebius’ account of these persecutions is mainly drawn from the correspondence of Dionysius of Alexandria. That persecution came to an end when Valerian was captured on an expedition against Persia and held by the king of Persia. From then on the Church was at peace until the Great Persecution broke out.
Eusebius’ accounts of the Great Persecution are quite different, because he lived through that persecution and is recording what he himself experienced. Apart from the account in Books 8–9 of The History of the Church there is his account in Martyrs of Palestine, which exists in two recensions: a longer recension, which survives now only in Syriac, and a shorter recension which survives in Greek in some manuscripts of The History of the Church. The Great Persecution began in 303 when, on 23 February, Diocletian issued an edict ordering the destruction of Christian church-buildings, the handing over of the Scriptures to be burnt, and the deprivation of the rights of Christians of rank; a second edict ordered the imprisonment of the clergy. November of that year saw the beginning of Diocletian’s vicennalia; in celebration of this he announced an amnesty for the imprisoned clergy (the ‘third edict’) on condition that they offered sacrifices. According to Eusebius, most clergy were set free, many having been forced to sacrifice. In 304 an edict (the ‘fourth edict’) was issued ordering a general sacrifice to the gods. In 305 Diocletian and his fellow Augustus, Maximian, abdicated. Persecution continued in the East under the new Augustus of the East, Galerius, and his enthusiastic Caesar, Maximin. In 311 Galerius, struck down with a fatal disease, issued an edict of recantation. The persecution seemed to have come to an end. But later that year Maximin renewed the persecution in his territory (Syria, Palestine, Egypt). With Constantine’s victory over Maxentius in 312 general toleration was granted throughout the whole Empire, and with Maximin’s defeat and death in 313 the ‘tyrant’ (as Eusebius calls him) who had so determinedly persecuted the Church was gone.
That sequence of events needs to be kept in mind as we look at Eusebius’ accounts of the Great Persecution. The long version of Martyrs of Palestine records the persecution in Palestine (mainly at Caesarea) month by month from 303 to 311 and gives the impression that the whole thing came to an end in May 311. The short recension, though it covers no more ground, refers to Maximin in such a way as to suggest that the later persecution, instigated by Maximin alone, is envisaged (indeed it refers to Maximin in a way that would be seditious were he not safely dead). As it stands, the short recension is without beginning or end. But in the course of it there is a reference back that is explicable only if it is taken as referring to a passage at the beginning of Book 8 of The History of the Church (Martyrs of Palestine 12, referring back to VIII. 2. 2ff.); the short recension ends just as it would be expected to start quoting the edict of recantation, which is in fact quoted at the end of Book 8. Book 8 and Book 9 seem to belong together in that 8 seems to be aware of events that follow in 9. Further, the ‘appendix’ to Book 8 (which is preserved in some manuscripts and not in others) is clearly the final section of something, as it gives an account of the fates of the four men who were Emperors when the first edict of persecution was issued in 303. Various solutions to all this have been proposed. It seems plain that the longer version of Martyrs of Palestine was written between May and November 311. The short version is either an appendix to Book 8recording in more detail what happened in Palestine for the period covered by Book 8 (the edict of recantation not being repeated, because it has already been given);1 or more radically (and more credibly) the short recension, preceded by the present beginning of Book 8 (up to 2. 3) and followed by the edict of recantation and the ‘appendix’ to Book 8, is in fact the original form of Book 8. This was presumably abandoned and replaced by the present Book 8 because the account of the first stage of the Great Persecution in Martyrs of Palestine, an account confined to events in Palestine, seemed parochial and thus out of place in The History of the Church.2
In bringing Martyrs of Palestine into the discussion of Eusebius’ treatment of the Great Persecution, we have inevitably raised the question of the successive editions of The History of the Church. It would seem that the present Book 8 and Book 9 represent a later stage in Eusebius’ account of the Great Persecution, an earlier stage having included the short recension of Martyrs of Palestine either as a first draft of Book 8 or as an appendix. Both these attempts must belong to c. 314. Book 10 is evidently a later addition to the already existing history (Eusebius says as much: X. 1.2) and, apart from X. 8–9 which were added still later after the fall of Licinius in 324, consists of material that existed independently of The History of the Church: Eusebius’ oration at the dedication of the new basilica in Tyre and a dossier of letters illustrating the now favoured (not just tolerated) status of the Church. These were presumably added before the war between Constantine and Licinius of 316/17 (as Licinius is still regarded as Constantine’s comrade-in-arms). We therefore have several editions: an early edition (c. 314) incorporating the short recension of Martyrs of Palestine in some way, another early edition consisting of Book 1–9, an edition (c. 316) going up to X. 7 and a final edition, as we have it, c. 324 (the Syriac version witnesses to a yet later revision – another edition? – which suppresses the reference to Crispus, Constantine’s son, in X. 9, after Crispus had been put to death in 326 by Constantine).
The big question, though, is what was the first edition? Eusebius says, in the text of The History of the Church as we have it, that he is writing a history of the Church up to the ‘martyrdoms of our own time and the kind and gracious deliverance of our Saviour’. That implies that the first edition mentioned above (c. 314) was the first edition (or, according to Lawlor, an edition consisting of Books 1–8, published in 311), for Eusebius’ history envisages the Great Persecution and the deliverance from it as its term. It is possible, however, that the sentence just quoted was added to a later edition and that Eusebius’ first edition of The History of the Church was written before the Great Persecution, that it was indeed written in the period of peace that the Church knew at the end of the third century. Such a view, that the first edition of The History of the Church, consisting of Books 1–7 only, belongs to the end of the third century (or the very beginning of the fourth), is rapidly becoming the accepted opinion of modern scholarship1 and has found its weightiest defender in Professor Timothy Barnes.2 The argument, in general terms (the detailed case cannot be discussed here), is that Books 1–7 are so different from Books 8–10 that they stand by themselves and that they bring the history of the Church up to c. 300 (or even earlier if one accepts that the last chapters of Book 7 have been touched up for later editions), which is inconceivable if Eusebius were writing a decade or more later. For instance, the ‘lines of succession from the apostles’ end in Book 7 at the beginning of the fourth century: they are not continued in Books 8 and 9, where the history of the Church is taken through persecution up to 313. Despite the fashion of recent scholarship, however, there are weighty arguments against the notion that the first edition of The History of the Church was written so early.3 Eusebius seems to make it quite clear that Book 6 is based on the Defence of Origen, written by Pamphilus with Eusebius’ collaboration when he was in prison in Caesarea between 308 and 310.4 But a more general point is this: although it is true that Book 7 brings the history of the Church up to 303, this need not be construed as a history of the Church up to the end of the third century; it could equally well be construed as a history of the Church up to the eve of the outbreak of the Great Persecution. The Great Persecution (and the miraculous deliverance into what Eusebius was coming to see was a Christian Empire) is the goal of his history. History, of course, continues after the Great Persecution, but that is another story, not the story Eusebius has set out to tell us. On such a view, Eusebius’ history was only conceived when he realized that the persecution of his own day was the Great and Final Persecution (and Great, because Final).1 Indeed it would seem most likely on this view that all the labour that went to make the edition of The History of the Church that ends at X. 7 belongs to the years 313–16, when Eusebius was bishop of Caesarea, able to call on the faithful labours of secretaries, copyists and ‘research assistants’. The History of the Church we have seen, is meticulously put together; not a great deal comes from the pen of Eusebius (even the summaries may have been done by his more trusted pupils).
The question about the date of the first edition of The History of the Church – whether after the end of the Great Persecution or at the end of the third century when such a persecution was not suspected – is really a question as to the fundamental character of the work. Is it (in the words of Westcott) a work which ‘gathers up and expresses… the experience, the feelings, the hopes of a body which had just accomplished its sovereign success, and was conscious of its inward strength’,2 or (as Professor Barnes puts it) ‘contemporary evidence for the standing of the Christian Church in Roman society in the late third century’?3 The argument threatens to become circular, depending on the importance for the development of the Christian Church attached to the conversion of Constantine. Those who think the Church was prosperous and important by the end of the third century find it quite conceivable that Eusebius could have sat down to compose the history of such an organization, and tend to see The History of the Church as part of the evidence; those who think that the Church remained weak without imperial favour find the idea of a history written c. 295 inconceivable.
Whatever the truth of that is, the edition of The History of the Church that Eusebius published c. 316 (up to X. 7) reflects an understanding of the place of the Church in the Empire that falls a long way short of what Eusebius later came to believe, when he came under the spell of the Emperor Constantine. It ends with a panegyric, not of the Emperor, but – amazingly – of Paulinus, Eusebius’ friend, the bishop of Tyre, ‘alone after the first and greatest High Priest’, who ‘having the whole Christ, the Word, the Wisdom, the Light, impressed upon his soul, has built this magnificent shrine for God Most High, resembling in its essence the pattern of the better one as the visible resembles the invisible’. This panegyric on the occasion of the rededication of the basilica at Tyre is one of the rare places in The History of the Church where we hear directly the voice of Eusebius. It presents an understanding of Christian worship that was not to last the century: the worship of the Church on earth led by the bishop in his basilica is a copy of the worship of the Church in heaven led by Christ Himself. We worship Christ as God made manifest to us, and through Him worship the Father of all; He directly and immediately worships God Himself. But the perfect worship of God among creatures is found in the soul, which the Son has created in His own image, as He Himself is the image of the Father. The soul was created from the beginning to be a ‘holy bride and most sacred temple for Himself and the Father’, but she fell away from this state into slavery and sin, whence she has been redeemed by the Word. The Word ‘first chose the souls of the supreme emperors’ and ‘then brought out into the open His own disciples’, ‘by their means He purged the souls which a little while before were fouled and heaped with rubbish of every sort and the debris of impious decrees’. Eusebius has been so dazzled by recent deliverance that the mystery of the Incarnation itself seems to pale into relative insignificance. It is difficult not to think that it is Eusebius’ subordinationism, which sees Christ less as God than as the first of God’s ministers, that is responsible for this. It was his subordinationism that put Eusebius amongst those who sided with Arius, and it is this same subordinationism that makes it so easy for him to rank next to Christ, Paulinus on this occasion and later the Emperor Constantine as ministers of the one God.
But there is another reason why Eusebius plays down the newness of Christianity and the newness of the Incarnation. ‘Newness’ in the hellenistic world meant newfangled, and therefore wrong.1 From the beginning Christians had defended themselves against the accusation that their religion was a newfangled superstition by arguing that Christianity was ‘as old as creation’. This is the burden of the first half of Book I of The History of the Church, the other part of the work where Eusebius speaks with his own voice: his own voice as culmination and summing-up of the apologetic tradition. The Incarnation of Christ is not new, the appearances of God (the ‘theophanies’) to the patriarchs and prophets of Israel – to Jacob who wrestled with Him ‘until the breaking of the day’ (Gen. xxxii. 24–30), to Moses in the Burning Bush (Exod. iii. 2–6) – were appearances in visible form of the Word of God, who was in the beginning with God and through whom God made the world (I. 2). But, because of the Fall and the increasing sinfulness of mankind, these communications of the Word were grasped only by a few. So God chose a nation, the Hebrews, and gave them a law which prepared a people amongst whom the Word of God could be incarnate and his teaching proclaimed to all. The law of the Hebrews ‘became famous and like a fragrant breeze penetrated to every corner of the world… Savage and cruel brutality changed into mildness, so that profound peace, friendship, and easy intercourse were enjoyed’ (I. 2. 23). For Eusebius, the political expression of this state of affairs was the Pax Romana, and in the early days of the Roman Empire Christ was born in Bethlehem in Judaea. The peace of the Roman Empire made possible the rapid spread of the Christian faith throughout the (Mediterranean) world. Eusebius returns again to the theme of the alleged novelty or strangeness of Christian teaching by arguing that Christians flourished ‘in fact if not in name’ amongst the patriarchs before Moses and Abraham and the establishment of Judaism with its Law that defined the sabbath, circumcision and food-laws. So Christ’s teaching is ‘none other than the first, most ancient, and most primitive of all religions, discovered by Abraham and his followers, God’s beloved [or: the friends of God]’, it is ‘not modern or strange, but… primitive, unique and true’ (I. 4). Christianity is the rediscovery of primordial truth, and The History of the Church records the way in which this rediscovery became universal.
The History of the Church is, then, the work of a scholar, but a scholar less interested in ideas than in facts, evidence, information. And people: so it has seemed that the most useful way of providing commentary on The History of the Church is by concentrating on the people mentioned by providing a prosopography, a ‘Who’s Who.’ The people Eusebius introduces us to – the people he relies on for his information, the people who fill the pages of The History of the Church – are the reference points for almost all the themes included in this history. Whatever hesitations one might have about Eusebius’ grasp of the religion of the Incarnation, one cannot deny that he saw that the history of such a religion would be about people.
Note on the Text
The History of the Church survives in a number of Greek manuscripts; the standard critical edition is that prepared by the great German scholar Eduard Schwartz, and published (with an edition of Rufinus’ Latin version prepared by Mommsen) in Die Griechis-chen Christlichen Schriftsteller, vol. 9, 3 parts (Leipzig, 1903–9). That text is reprinted, with an English translation by Kirsopp Lake and J. E. L. Oulton, in the Loeb Classical Library (2 vols., Cambridge, Mass., and London, 1926–32), which is the most convenient version of the Greek text easily available. Schwartz’s text was the basis of G. A. Williamson’s translation.
Translator’s Note1
The translator is faced with many problems; for the Greek of Eusebius is by no means easy. He employs an enormous vocabulary, and some of his words have meanings not met with in classical Greek. These meanings are not always to be found even in the largest lexicons and have to be deduced from the context; and some of the Greek words do not appear in lexicons at all. Other words vary in meaning, and it is not always clear which meaning is intended. Are martyres martyrs or witnesses? Are presbyteroipresbyters, priests, elders, or old-timers? Is philosophia philosophy, science, love of wisdom, profound study, earnest inquiry, or asceticism? And does logos mean word, message, book, system, doctrine, or the pre-existent Word? Other words are by their nature ambiguous. Do theophiles and theomises mean God-loving and God-hating, or God-loved and God-hated? Or do the words denote reciprocity of emotion – mutual attraction and mutual repulsion between God and individual men? These difficulties are due to defects in the Greek language: another difficulty is the fault of Eusebius himself; for he is guilty of quite needless obscurity. He is inordinately fond of long and involved sentences, and he lacks the skill of a Demosthenes to keep them under control. The first sentence of Book I is 166 words long, and we have to plough through 153 of them before we reach the one and only main verb. Sometimes there is no main verb at all, or the sentence is an anacoluthon, beginning in one way and ending in another. The reader may well lose his way in the morass!
In this translation I have endeavoured above all things to make clear what the writer is trying to say. I have broken up the huge sentences into fragments, as anyone must do who professes to be writing the English of today, and I have omitted numbers of the superfluous ‘padding’ words with which Eusebius fills out his lines. The multitude of quotations from the Bible presented a problem. Should I follow the example of my predecessors, and copy the wording of the Authorized or Revised Version? This would have saved trouble and have made it easy for the reader to recognize the passages quoted. But there were several objections. The difference between the language of 1611 and that of three hundred and fifty years later is very great; the difference between the Greek of Eusebius and that of the Septuagint and the New Testament is comparatively small. Again, while some of his quotations are set out as such, many are worked into his sentences and adapted to his constructions. Thirdly, the wording of the passages as he quotes them often differs from that of the Hebrew and Greek texts on which our standard versions are based, so that an accurate translation would involve the use of synthetic ‘old’ English. I therefore resolved that the Scriptural quotations must be put into the same kind of English as the rest; in other words, they must be translated afresh. I have however used the customary ‘Thou’ in prayers, as this usage is still generally followed, and in verse passages I have used conventional ‘poetic’ language. When Eusebius copies a long passage from a non-Scriptural work, he often indicates omissions by such formulae as ‘a little later he adds’; I have substituted a row of dots.
The division of the work into ten books was made by the author: the headings in capitals are mine. A list of contents appears in the manuscripts at the beginning of each book. Some of these lists are so long that no English reader would read them through, or remember them if read. I have thought it better to insert them at appropriate places in the narrative, and to distinguish them by the use of italics. Some that are inordinately long I have shortened, and where they come in too rapid succession I have grouped two or three together, hoping thus to divide each book into manageable sections.
Finally, I have tried to give intelligible titles to the works quoted by Eusebius: I have replaced the Apology, Stromateis, Hypoty-poses, and Hexaemeron of earlier versions by Defence, Miscellanies, Outlines, and The Six Days. On the other hand, as genuinely foreign words in an original text should never be translated, I have retained (in italics) all the Latin words transliterated by Eusebius.1