spin

Well, you've had thread after thread about it. Constantine and Eusebius confabulating to create a religion for purely political purposes. Eusebius and a bunch of hack writers it seems were responsible for everything about christianity before the council of Nicea in 325 and despite that there was so much infighting between factions at the council.

Please vote and feel free to add your comments or complain about the poll. If anything is unclear, I'll be happy to try to clarify, but I would like not to say much more about the topic: you've already had lots from me.


spin

Peter Kirby

So many options for a yes or no question!

My answer, in any case, is no!

regards,
Peter Kirby

post tenebras lux

Depends how you define 'invent', I suppose.

Invented from totally new whole-cloth, or invented as in 'Croatian electro-jazz is a new invention' (even though jazz musuc is not new, electronic music is not new, and croatian music certainly isn't new)?

Perhaps if you explained which part of christianity you feel is the kernel of christianity, I'd be able to say wether I think Eusebius invented that part.

spin

As I understand the concept, Eusebius and Constantine with others constructed the religion as a new entity from Jewish literature, platonic thought and whatever else in the kitchen one felt could make it work.

HTH.


spin

post tenebras lux

Such that it was recognisably different from any of its precursor ingredients? Then the answers 'sure, yes'.

But your own opinion seems to be 'You must be joking'. Is that the case?

Peter Kirby

I'll try to help Spin.

Post Tenebras Lux, the key word in the question is Eusebius, not "invented". Spin doesn't care, in this context, for your opinion on "whether Christianity was invented". The question is about what role the fourth century ecclesiastical figure named Eusebius of Caesarea had.

There are basically three types of people in this discussion: the clueless, those with a clue, and mountainman (aka Pete Brown), who lazily takes clues in from an input bin on the web discussion boards to an output bin of "refuted clues" on his webpage.

regards,
Peter Kirby

post tenebras lux

I feel it would be close to impossible to tease out what happened due to 'the role of' Eusebius from what happened due to his role as Constantine's sidekick and from what happened due to Constantine himself. My 'yes, sure' answer would have to include Constatine with Eusebius.Excuse me Pete, but did you get out of bed on the wrong side this morning, or do you think it's big and clever to be so snide? I thought this was the BC&H forum and that wellpoisoning was frowned upon here.

Peter Kirby

Post Tenebras Lux: No.

regards,
Peter Kirby

mountainman

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 breviara.

Here again Eusebius was the decisive influence. How much he
owed to his predecessors, and especially to the shadowy
Hegesippus, we shall never know, unless new evidence is
discovered. But is is fair clear that Hegessipus wrote apologetic
not history. Apart from him, there is no toher name that can
be 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 the undertaking,
as travellers do on some desolate and untrodden way".

Eusebius, like any other educated man, knew what proper
history was. He knew that it was a rhetoric 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.

--- Arnaldo Momigliano, 1960
--- Pagan & Christian Historiography in the 4th century.

Roger Pearse

Do I recall correctly that Eusebius only met him once? (At Nicaea). We are familiar with Eusebius of Caesarea, because his works have such historical importance to us, but I sometimes wonder if Constantine even knew who he was.

All the best,

Roger Pearse