Originally Posted by AM

p.138
"We have defined some of the essential elements of ecclesiastical historiography:
1) the continuous interrelation of dogma and facts;
2) the transcendental significance attributed to the period of origins;
3) the emphasis on factual evidence;
4) the ever present problem of relating events of local churches to the
mystical body of the universal church."



Part II
p.138

"Simple and majestic Eusebius of Caesarea claims for himself the merit of
having invented ecclesiastical history. This merit cannot be disputed.

"Sozomenus though that Eusebius had been preceded as an ecclesiastical historian
by Clemens, Hegesippus, and Julius Africanus. None of these names can really
compete with that of Eusebius."

Clemens the alleged author of the Gospel of Peter - not an ecclesiastical history.
Sextus Julius Africanus - was a chronographer
The more mysterious Hegesippus -- appears to be an anti-Gnostic apologist 2nd CE

p.139
"Preparatio evangelica is one of the boldest attempts ever made to show
continuity between pagan and Christian thought."


"[Eusebius], the witness of the last persecution and the advisor and apologist
of Constantine was in a vantage position to appreciate the autonomy and strength
of the institution that had compelled the Roman state to surrender at the Milvian
Bridge in 312. Though anxious to preserve the pagan cultural heritage in the new
Christian order - indeed very anxious, as we shall soon see, to use the pagan tradition
for his Ecclesiastical History - Eusebius knew that the Christians were a nation,
and a victorious nation at that; and that their history could not be told except
within the framework of the Church in which they lived. Furthermore, he was well
aware that the Christian nation was what it was by virtue of its being both the
oldest and the newest nation of the world."

Originally Posted by AM

p.140
"Apostolic succession and the doctrinal orthodoxy were pillars of the new Christian
nation; its enemies were the persecutors and the heretics. Thus ecclesiastical
history replaced the battles of ordinary political history by the trials inherent
in resistence to persecution and heresy.

**** paraphrased:
It is obvious that in developing this conception Eusebius had before him
the Old Testament (Struggle against persecutors had its precedent in the Books of Maccabees)
Flavius Josephus (idea of a holy nation,also in Bible), and
the Acts of the Apostles (classic document of the spreading of Christianity).


"One of the important factors of Christian historiography is that there was no
continuation to the Acts of the Apostles. They remained a document of the heroic
age of Christianity, to be put together with the Gospels. More than two hundred
years later Eusebius made a new start on a completely different basis: he was not
primarily concerned with the spread of Christianity by propaganda and miracle,
but with its survival of persecution and heresy from which it was to emerge victorious."

"Novelty -- "heresy" in the Christian sense is absent from the Bible and Josephus.


"One kind of account in pagan historiography Pagan historiography could help Eusebius
considerably. That was the history of philosophical schools - such as we find in
Diogenes Laertius.
****
(1) the idea of succession was equally important in philosophical schools and
and in Eusebius' notion of Christianity. The bishops were the diadochoi
of the Apostles, just as the scholarchai were the diadochoi of
Plato, Zeno, and Epicurus.
(2) Like any philosophical school, Christianity
had its orthodoxy and its deviationists.
(3) Historians of philosophy in Greece used antiquarian methods and quoted documents
much more frequently and thoroughly than than their colleagues, the political historians.

p.141
re: both Eusebius and Diogenes Laertius ...
"Direct original evidence was essential to establish the rightful claims of orthodoxy
against external persecutors and internal dissidents. Here again we can be certain that
Jewish influences were not without importance for Eusebius. The idea of scholarly
succession is fundamental to rabbinic thought, which had developed in its turn under
the impact f Greek theory."

"It was Hellenic scholarship that Eusebius drew upon to shape the new model of
ecclesiastical history. In this he was faithful to the Hellenistic tradition of
his teachers and to his own programme in the Praeparatio evangelica.

The immense authority which Eusebius gained was well deserved.
He had continuators but no rivals."


p.141
"Eusebius' History of the Church ideally reflected the moment in which
the Church had emerged victorious under Constantine - a separate body
within the Roman Empire. With all his gifts Eusebius could not shape
his historiography in such a way as to envisage situations in which
it would be impossible to separate what belonged to Caesar from what
belonged to Christ."

There was a very real duality in Eusebius' notion of eccesiastical history:

p.141/142:

"on the one hand eclesiastical history was the history of the Christian nation
now emerging as the ruling class of the Roman Empire. On the other hand it was
the history of a divine institution not contaminated by political problems."

"How to deal with this divine institution's very earthly relations with other
institutions in terms of power, violence and even territorial claims?

"How would the continuators of Eusebius deal with the politics of the emperors,
the plotical intrigues of the bishops?"

"If we had the Christian History which the priest Philip of Side wrote
about 430, we would know more about the significance of the predominance
of the Eusebian model. It is evident that Philip of Side tried to go
his own way and to avoid imitating Eusebius..."

Originally Posted by Huon

Here is the story of Pope Callistus I (218-223), bishop of Rome, and Saint Hippolytus.

Source :

http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/03183d.htm

Our chief knowledge of this pope is from the antipope (and nevertheless Saint) Hippolytus of Rome (d. about 236) who wrote the "Philosophumena". According to the "Philosophumena" (c. ix) Callistus was the slave of Carpophorus, a Christian of the household of Caesar. His master entrusted large sums of money to Callistus, with which he started a bank in which brethren and widows lodged money, all of which Callistus lost.

He took to flight. Carpophorus followed him to Portus, where Callistus had embarked on a ship. Seeing his master approach in a boat, the slave jumped into the sea, but was prevented from drowning himself, dragged ashore, and consigned to the punishment reserved for slaves, the pistrinum, or hand-mill. The brethren, believing that he still had money in his name, begged that he might be released. But he had nothing, so he again courted death by insulting the Jews at their synagogue. The Jews haled him before the prefect Fuscianus, and Callistus was sent to the mines in Sardinia.

Some time after this, Marcia, the mistress of emperor Commodus (180-192), sent for Pope Victor (189-198) and asked if there were any martyrs in Sardinia. He gave her the list. Marcia having received from the emperor the required pardon, sent a eunuch, the presbyter Hyacinthus, to release the prisoners. Victor sent Callistus to Antium with a monthly allowance.

When Zephyrinus became pope (198-217) after Victor, Callistus was recalled and set over the cemetery belonging to the Church, not a private catacomb; it has ever since borne Callistus's name. He obtained great influence over the ignorant, illiterate, and grasping Zephyrinus by bribes. We are not told how it came about that the runaway slave, bankrupt usurer, (now free by Roman law from his master, who had lost his rights when Callistus was condemned to penal servitude to the State) became archdeacon and then pope (218-223).

The antipope Saint Hippolytus (d. about 236) was a presbyter of the Church of Rome. In the reign of Pope Zephyrinus (198-217) Hippolytus came into conflict with that pontiff and with the majority of the Church of Rome, primarily on account of the christological opinions which for some time had been causing controversies in Rome. Hippolytus had combated the heresy of Theodotus who denied the manifestation of the Paraclete, and refused, in consequence, to admit the Gospel of St. John, wherein it is announced. Hippolytus opposed the doctrines of Sabellius, who saw in the concepts of the Father and the Son merely manifestations (modi) of the Divine Nature (Modalism, Sabellianism).

When Callistus was elected pope (217-218) on the death of Zephyrinus, Hippolytus immediately had himself elected antipope by his small band of followers. He accused Callistus of having fallen first into the heresy of Theodotus, then into that of Sabellius; also of having through avarice degraded ecclesiastical, and especially the penitential, discipline to a disgraceful laxity.

He continued in opposition as antipope throughout the reigns of the two immediate successors of Callistus, Urban (222 or 223 to 230) and Pontianus (230-35), and during this period, he wrote the "Philosophumena". He was banished to the unhealthful island (insula nociva) of Sardinia at the same time as Pontianus. After both exiles had died on the island of Sardinia, their mortal remains were brought back to Rome and interred, Pontianus in the papal vault in the catacomb of Callistus (!) and Hippolytus in a spot on the Via Tiburtina (second class burial place).

Originally Posted by Huon

Here is a quote that I found on an interesting site :

http://www.mountainman.com.au/essene...ano%20post.htm

Pagan and Christian Historiography in the Fourth Century A.D.
* This essay first appeared in A. Momigliano, ed.,
The Conflict Between Paganism and Christianity in the Fourth Century,
The Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1963, pp. 79—99

So, according to Momigliano, quoted by mountainman, there were, during the second and third centuries (that is, long before 312, the Boss, and Jojo Eusebius) some christian historians who "added the lists of the bishops of the most important sees to the lists of kings and magistrates of the pagan world".

Surprise, surprise !

Originally Posted by AM

At the beginning of the fourth century Christian chronology had already passed its creative stage. What Eusebius did was to correct and to improve the work of his predecessors, among whom he relied especially on Julius Africanus (14). He corrected details which seemed to him wrong even to the extent of reducing the priority of the Biblical heroes over the pagan ones. Moses, a contemporary of Ogyges according to Julius Africanus, was made a contemporary of Kekrops with a loss of 300 years. Eusebius was not afraid of attacking St Paul’s guesses about the chronology of the Book of Judges. He freely used Jewish and anti-Christian sources such as Porphyrios. He introduced a reckoning from Abraham which allowed him to avoid the pitfalls of a chronology according to the first chapters of Genesis. He seems to have been the first to use the convenient method of presenting the chronology of the various nations in parallel columns. None of the earlier chronographers seems to have used this scheme, though it has often been attributed to Castor or to Julius Africanus. He made many mistakes, but they do not surprise us any longer. Fifty years ago Eduard Schwartz, to save Eusebius’ reputation as a competent chronographer, conjectured that the two extant representatives of the lost original of Eusebius’ Chronicon — the Latin adaptation by St Jerome and the anonymous Armenian translation — were based on an interpolated text which passed for pure Eusebius. This conjecture is perhaps unnecessary; nor are we certain that the Armenian version is closer to the original than St Jerome’s Latin translation. Both versions reflect the inevitable vagaries of Eusebius’ mind to whom chronology was something between an exact science and an instrument of propaganda.

But we recognize the shrewd and worldly adviser of the Emperor Constantine in the absence of millenarian dreams. Eusebius, and St Jerome who followed him, had an essential part in discrediting them. Of course, they did not stamp them out. Millenarian reckonings reappear in the De cursu temporum which Bishop Hilarian wrote at the end of the fourth century (15). They also played a part in the thought of Sulpicius Severus about that time(16). As we have already said, the disasters of the end of the century made a difference to dreams, as they made a difference to the other realities.

Thanks to Eusebius, chronography remained the typical form of Christian instruction in the fourth century. It showed concern with the pattern of history rather than with the detail.

The Christians indeed were not alone in having a problem of historical education. The pagans had their own problem. But we can state immediately the difference between pagans and Christians in the teaching of history. The pagans were not concerned with ultimate values in their elementary teaching. Their main concern was to keep alive a knowledge of the Roman past. After the social and political earthquakes of the third century a new leading class had emerged which clearly had some difficulty in remembering the simple facts of Roman history (17). This explains why Eutropius and (Rufius?) Festus were both commissioned by the Emperor Valens to prepare a brief summary of Roman history. Eutropius was the first to obey the royal command. But the seventy-seven pages of his Teubner text must have proved too many for Valens. Festus, who followed, restricted himself to about twenty pages. He was not modest, but literal, when he commended his work to the gloriosissimus princeps as being even shorter than a summary — a mere enumeration of facts. The new men who, coming from the provincial armies or from Germany, acquired power and wealth, wanted some knowledge of the Roman past. They had to mix with the surviving members of the senatorial aristocracy in which knowledge of Roman history and antiquities was de rigueur. The establishment of a new senate in Constantinople, by adding another privileged class, complicated this educational problem. The senators of Constantinople, picked as they were from the municipal upper class of the East, were not likely to be uneducated, but they were not particularly strong either in the Latin language or in Roman, history. These people too needed breviaria. Eutropius was soon translated into Greek by a friend of Libanius and began his momentous career in the Byzantine world. There can be few other Latin authors able to boast of at least three successive translations into Greek.

In their characteristic neutrality, the pagan breviaria presented no danger to the Christians. They were so devoid of religious content that they could not give offence. On the contrary, the Christians could easily exploit them for their own purposes. Eutropius was very successful in Constantinople where the aristocracy soon became predominantly Christian. The Christian compiler known as the Chronographer of 354 incorporated in his own work a pagan recapitulation of the history of Rome — the so-called Chronica urbis Romae (18). When St Jerome decided to continue Eusebius’ Chronicon to 378 he used pagan writers such as Aurelius Victor and Eutropius, not to mention the Chronica urbis Romae which he probably knew as a part of the Christian chronography of 354. All this, however, only emphasized the fact that the Christians had no compilation, comparable to Eutropius and Festus. If breviaria were not needed during the fourth century when the Christians felt very sure of themselves, they appeared less superfluous towards the end of the century when the pagan version of Roman history gained in authority. Sulpicius Severus, who had absorbed pagan culture in Gaul, was the first to realize the deficiency and to fill the gap just about A.D. 400. He combined Christian chronographers and the Bible with historici mundiales, the pagan historians. His purpose was still the dual one of the earlier Christian chronography: ‘ut et imperitos docerem et litteratos convincerem’. Later, about 417, Orosius followed his example when he was requested by St Augustine to produce a summary of the history of Rome in support of his Civitas dei. Orosius gave what from a medieval point of view can be called the final Christian twist to the pagan epitome of Roman history (19).

*

Epitomes are only on the threshold of history. So far we have considered books which were meant to remind the reader of the events rather than to tell them afresh. But an important fact has already emerged. Whether in the form of chronographies or, later, in the form of breviaria, the Christian compilations were explicit in conveying a message: one can doubt whether the majority of the pagan compilations conveyed any message at all. Sulpicius Severus and Orosius fought for a cause, and it is to be remembered that Sulpicius Severus expressed the indignation felt by Ambrosius and Martin of Tours against the appeal to the secular arm in the Priscillianist controversy. Consequently, it was very easy to transform a pagan handbook into a Christian one, but almost impossible to make pagan what had been Christian. Later on we shall consider one possible exception to the rule that the Christians assimilate pagan ideas, while the Pagans do not appropriate Christian ones. The rule, however, stands: it is enough to indicate the trend of the century — and, incidentally, to explain why the Christians were so easily victorious. Just because the trend is so clear, we can perhaps conjecturally add yet another case of the easy transformation of pagan historical breviaria into Christian ones. All is in doubt about the first part of the Anonymus Valesianus —which is a brief life of Constantine under the name of Origo Constantini imperatoris. But a fourth-century date seen highly probable; and it also seems clear that the few Christian passages are later interpolations from Orosius. If so, the Origo Constantini imperatoris is a beautiful example of a short pagan work which, was made Christian by the simple addition of a few passages (20). The Christians could easily take it over because of the relatively neutral character of the original text. The pagans for their part kept away from Christian explosives.

Christian initiative was such that it did not hesitate to appropriate Jewish goods also. Pseudo-Philo’s Liber antiquitatum Biblicarum was originally a Jewish handbook of Biblical history. It seems to have been written its Hebrew for Jews in the first century A.D., it was later done into Greek, and, to all appearances, in, the fourth century, it was changed into a Christian handbook and translated into Latin (21).

The question then arises whether the Christians became the masters of the field also on the higher level of original historical writing and whether here, too, they confirmed their capacity for assimilating without being assimilated.

If the question were simply to be answered by a yes, it would not be worth asking. The traditional forms of higher historiography did not attract the Christians. They invented new ones. These inventions are the most important contributions made to historiography after the fifth- century B.C., and before the sixteenth century A.D. Yet the pagans are allowed by the Christians to remain the masters of traditional historiographical forms. To put it briefly, the Christians invented ecclesiastical history and the biography of the saints, but did not try to Christianize ordinary political history; and they influenced ordinary biography less than we would expect. In the fourth century A.D. there was no serious attempt to provide a Christian version of say, Thucydides or Tacitus — to mention two writers who were still being seriously studied. A reinterpretation of ordinary military, political or diplomatic history in Christian terms was neither achieved nor even attempted. Lactantius in the De Mortibus persecutorum is perhaps the only Christian writer to touch upon social and political events. He does so in a conservative and senatorial spirit which must be embarrassing to those who identify the Christians with, the lower middle class, but he never seriously develops his political interpretation: he is not to be compared as an analyst with, Ammianus Marcellinus or even with the Scriptores Historiae Augusta.

The consequence is plain. No real Christian historiography founded upon the political experience of Herodotus, Thucydides, Livy and Tacitus was transmitted to the Middle Ages. This is already apparent in the sixth century when a military and political historian like Procopius was basically pagan in outlook and technique. When in the fifteenth, and sixteenth, centuries the humanists rediscovered their Herodotus, Thucydides, Livy and Tacitus, they rediscovered something for which, there was no plain Christian alternative. It is not for me to say whether an alternative was possible: whether an earlier Tacitus christianus would have been less foolish, than the post-Reformation One. What I must point out is that the conditions which made Machiavelli and Guicciardini possible originated in the fourth century AD. The models for political and military history remained irretrievably pagan. In the higher historiography there was nothing comparable with the easy Christianizing of the pagan breviaria.

Here again Eusebius was the decisive influence. How much he owed to predecessors, and especially to the shadowy Hegesippus. we shall never know, unless new evidence is discovered (22). But it is fairly clear that Hegesippus wrote apologetic, not history. Apart from him, there is no other name that can seriously compete with Eusebius’ for the invention of ecclesiastical history. He was not vainly boasting when he asserted that he was the ‘first to enter on this Undertaking as travellers do on some desolate and untrodden way’ (23).

Eusebius, like any other educated man, knew what proper history was. He knew that it was a rhetorical work with a maximum of invented speeches and a minimum of authentic documents. Since he chose to give plenty of documents and refrained from inventing speeches, he must have intended to produce something different from ordinary history. Did he then intend to produce a preparatory work to history, hypomnema? This is hardly credible. First of all, historical hypomnemata were normally confined to contemporary events. Secondly, Eusebius speaks as if he were writing history, and not collecting materials for a future history.

It was Eduard Schwartz who in one of his most whimsical moments suggested that German professors of Kirchengeschichte had been the victims of their poor Greek. They had not understood that Ekklesiiastike historia did not mean Kirchengeschichte, but Materialen zur Kirchengeschichte. Eduard Schwartz, of course was fighting his great battle against the isolation of ecclesiastical history in German universities, and we who share his beliefs can hardly blame him for this paradox. But a paradox it was (24).

Eusebius knew only too well that he was writing a new kind of history. The Christians were a nation in his view. Thus he was writing national history. But his nation had a transcendental origin. Though it had appeared on earth in Augustus’ time, it was born in heaven ‘with the first dispensation concerning the Christ himself’ (1.1.8). Such, a nation was not fighting ordinary wars. Its struggles were persecutions and heresies. Behind the Christian nation there was Christ, just as the devil was behind its enemies. The ecclesiastical history was bound to be different from ordinary history because it was a history of the struggle against the devil, who tried to pollute the purity of the Christian Church as guaranteed by the apostolic succession.

Originally Posted by mountainman

Why for example does Arnaldo Momigliano described christian origins as transcendental? Are we aware of the meaning of this word with respect to the field of ancient history? Hello? Transcendental? Imaginary?

Originally Posted by Momigliano

Eusebius knew only too well that he was writing a new kind of history. The Christians were a nation in his view. Thus he was writing national history. But his nation had a transcendental origin. Though it had appeared on earth in Augustus’ time, it was born in heaven ‘with the first dispensation concerning the Christ himself’ (1.1.8). Such, a nation was not fighting ordinary wars. Its struggles were persecutions and heresies. Behind the Christian nation there was Christ, just as the devil was behind its enemies. The ecclesiastical history was bound to be different from ordinary history because it was a history of the struggle against the devil, who tried to pollute the purity of the Christian Church as guaranteed by the apostolic succession.

Originally Posted by Momigliano

Clemens Alexandrinus, Julius Africanus and Hippolytus of Rome, belong to the second and third centuries...

Originally Posted by mountainman

Readers must understand that it is likely that the new testament was foisted on the empire as a Constantinian initiative.

Originally Posted by bacht

Great question. It applies also to the Jewish bible. The only comparable field I can think of is the occult.

Originally Posted by bacht

Isn't it possible that Constantine's contemporaries were ready for a teaching like this?

Originally Posted by mountainman

My claim is that there is evidence remaining today of the resistance and opposition to Constantine in the fourth century, and that this evidence is the non canonical literature which, as a corpus, my thesis presents as having been writtn by these same afflicted people - the greek academics of the temple cults of the empire (such as the temples of the HEaling gof Asclepius) which are represented in the field of ancient history, with vast numbers of unambiguous citations during the period from 500 BCE to 500 CE.