Church history (Eusebius)

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The history of the church ( ancient Greek Ἐκκλησιαστικὴ ἱστορία ; Latin Historia ecclesiastica ) is a completely preserved work of the church father and bishop Eusebius of Caesarea , written in Greek in the first quarter of the 4th century AD . It reports on early Christianity from the appearance of Jesus Christ to the victory of the Roman Emperor Constantine the Great in 324 AD and is a significant example of early Christian literature.

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The Historia ecclesiastica , which contributed much to Eusebius' fame and helped him to the title Father of Church History , is not in the narrower sense a general history of the early Christian Church from the appearance of Jesus to the author's own time, but a collection of many excerpts Source material on specific aspects of this topic. Eusebius was able to find the material in the libraries of Caesarea and Jerusalem. The content of the work includes a list of the bishops of the most important Christian communities such as Rome , Alexandria , Antioch and Jerusalem who have been in office since the apostles' time , taking into account their chronological fixation, the Christian teachers and authors, Gnostics and heretics , the persecution of Christians in the Roman Empire and - initially Following Flavius ​​Josephus - the sufferings of the Jewish people up to the destruction of Jerusalem and the Bar Kochba uprising . According to Eusebius, these catastrophes of the Jews were the divine punishment for their killing the Messiah , and they would no longer be the chosen people.

In the introduction, Eusebius emphasizes the pioneering work of his work, because earlier writers in the field of Christian church history had left only very sketchy reports of times they personally experienced, from which he wanted to process useful notes into a historically ordered overall presentation. According to his own statement, he had already compiled a short version of part of the material presented in church history in his earlier written chronicle , a synchronistic outline of world history. The chronological framework of church history was formed by two lists of the bishops of Alexandria and Rome available to Eusebius, in which the term of office of these spiritual dignitaries was recorded, as well as the year of the respective Roman emperor in which they took office for the early bishops. The first parts of the Alexandrian and Roman list are likely to come from the Chronicle of Sextus Iulius Africanus . The chronological unit forms the reign of an emperor, within which the related narrated material is arranged.

In the succession of Hellenistic philologists like Apollodor , whose methods Eusebius used, the history of literature occupies a large space in his work. Apollodor’s chronograph had already given a brief account of literary and political events. Following the example of Hellenistic scholars, Eusebius determined the time of Christian authors and cataloged their works. He also gave literary treatments of parts of the Bible , such as a long excerpt from Dionysius of Alexandria , which discusses the authenticity of the Revelation of John .

While the distribution of material in the first five books of church history is reasonably balanced, the sixth book is largely devoted to Origen and the seventh predominantly to Dionysius of Alexandria. From the eighth book onwards, Eusebius gave a presentation of the Diocletian persecution and the events that followed. However, he again did not present a general history of his present, but initially limited himself to citing imperial edicts against Christians as well as depicting the outbreak of persecution and various martyrs . The persecution was a divine punishment for the contentiousness of the Christian bishops. The chronology of what happened is often unclear. Lactantius ' De mortibus persecutorum offers a parallel tradition . In the 9th and 10th books, Eusebius shows himself to be a historically not very objective reporter of the history of Emperor Constantine, whom he describes in a panegyric way.

In contrast to earlier non-Christian historians, Eusebius brought many excerpts from his informants, even if he did not achieve the scientific standards applied in later times, for example by not distinguishing between primary and secondary sources and the source texts he viewed more in the form of a paraphrase than literally reproduced. He relied more on Orthodox writers and did not hand over catalogs of works of authors classified as heretical, but the Orthodox literature that they evoked. Many significant passages from early Christian writings that were otherwise lost have been preserved through Eusebius' work, which often represents almost the only source for older church history.

History of origin, tradition and aftermath

The classical philologist Eduard Schwartz made a significant contribution to the elucidation of the origins of Eusebius' church history , and from 1903–1909 he produced a three-volume edition of the Greek text. He assumed that Eusebius published a total of four editions of his work that revised and expanded the final parts. The first edition, comprising eight books, was written in 312, when after the Edict of Tolerance of 311, the previous situation of persecution of Christians was essentially over. The author wanted to write a historical apology for Christianity, which culminated in the triumph of the church over the state power that persecuted it. In the rapidly changing political and religious situation of the following years, another three editions were created, to which the last two books were added. Eusebius wrote the last edition soon after Constantine's achievement of sole rule in 324.

The German ancient historian Richard Laqueur , in his book Eusebius , published in 1929, as a historian of his time, took the view that Eusebius had not yet presented the persecution of Christians under Diocletian and Galerius in the first edition of his church history ; rather, this first edition had already been published in 303 in seven books. Only an eighth book added in 311 reported about the Diocletian persecution, the material of which was supplemented after 317 and distributed to the current books 8-10. According to more recent research, the work could have been published for the first time around 290, so that it would have gone through a long process of creation before its final version.

Eusebius' church history had a considerable aftermath and was often copied soon after it was written. There are about seven of the oldest surviving manuscripts of the Greek text, dating from the 10th to 12th centuries. The sometimes large deviations of the manuscripts from one another are due to different text formulations in Eusebius' different editions of his work. Rufinus of Aquileia freely translated the writing 403 into Latin in a not exactly outstanding way and continued it until the death of Emperor Theodosius I in 395. Through this translation the medieval Occident gained knowledge of the Eusebian work. In the opinion of Eduard Schwartz, a significantly better translation of church history was that into Syrian , which perhaps took place as early as the 4th century. Today it is only partially available, but the gaps can be filled by a faithful Armenian translation of the Syrian version. Overall, the state of the history of the Church is very good. Socrates Scholasticus , Sozomenos and Theodoret created further developments in church history .

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  1. ↑ Eusebius of Caesarea, Church History 1, 1, 4-5.
  2. ↑ Eusebius of Caesarea, Church History 7, 25.
  3. ^ David S. Wallace-Hadrill:  Eusebius of Caesarea . In: Theologische Realenzyklopädie (TRE). Volume 10, de Gruyter, Berlin / New York 1982, ISBN 3-11-008575-5 , p. 540.
  4. ^ Eduard Schwartz: Eusebios 24. In: Paulys Realencyclopadie der classischen Altertumswwissenschaft (RE). Volume VI, 1, Stuttgart 1907, Col. 1406 f.