Huon

What do we know for certain about Eusebius of Caesarea, the author of a Church History ?

Not much, if we read the Catholic Encyclopedia :
b. about 260; d. before 341.

Was he a prisoner, or was he not ??

Looking at CCEL :
http://www.ccel.org/ccel/schaff/npnf...i.iii.i.i.html

Sozomen : born in the last quarter of the fourth century; died probably in 447 or 448.
Socrates : born at Constantinople towards the end of the fourth century.
Athanasius : born c. 296; died 2 May, 373.
Theodoret : born at Antioch in Syria about 393; died about 457.
St. Jerome : born about the year 340-2; died 30 September, 420.

Conclusion : The only possible person who could have known Eusebius is Athanasius. Acacius wrote something which was (unfortunately) lost. Nobody, not even Athanasius, cared. At the beginning of the Vth century, nobody had serious data about this Eusebius.

Now, how old are the oldest manuscripts of the Church History ?
Roger Pearse has a page about the manuscripts of the Church History, but I could not find their dates.

Could it be possible that Eusebius is simply a pen name for a work group of the second half of the IVth century ? After all, mountainman says that he has shown that all the authors and characters mentioned in Eusebius's Church History are fictional and their works pure fabrications.

mountainman

Dear Huon,

What I have shown is that the words of Arius of Alexandria when treated as a strict historical comment on the historical jesus, and the conviction of Emperor Julian's that the fabrication of the christians was a fiction of men composed by wickedness, is evidence which is consistent with the zero canonical christian archaeological evidence prior to the fourth century, and which is consistent with the turbulent political events of the fourth and fifth centuries, including the Origenist controversy, the Arian controversy, the Nestorian controversy and the controversy over the nature of Julian's invectives. When the signature of satire and parody is identified and recognised by objective academics as extant in the new testament non canonical texts (most of the acts and the gospels) then it will become clear that while the NT canon was fabricated by 324 CE, the apochryphal tractates were authored as a subsequent polemical seditious reaction by the same greek speaking academics of pythagoras and plato, ascetic priests of the temple cults which Constantine had destroyed in the year 324 CE. As a corollary to the thesis, the ascetic priest (perhaps of Asclepius) Arius of Alexandria, is one and the same person as the author Leutius Charinus, and composed many of the earliest NT apochryphal tractates, for which satire of the canon, his works were considered heretical (because he made a satire/parody/burlesque of the canon) and were sought out by the authodox for destruction, as was his person. He was a master satirist, and he gave Constantine alot of stick for a little man. Constantine wanted him dead, and the writings to stop. The Acts of Pontius Pilate, embedded in the Gospel of Nicodemus was a total embarrassment for the authority of the canon. As was the Nag Hammadi tractate TAOPATTA (The Acts of Peter and the Twelve (or was it thirteen, or was it eleven) Apostles) NHC 6.1. My thesis has it that NT origins are confined between the years of 312 and 336 CE (when Arius died). Take another look at what people say about the Historia Augusta thought to be fabricated during the epoch of Constantine ... collegiate historians, lavish forgeries, etc, etc. My bet is that this was tendered also by Constantine and Eusebius, but was later not supported by subsequent continuators of the later fourth and fifth centuries.



Best wishes,


Pete

Toto

Is there anything in Pete's post that addresses the question in the OP?

One thing we do know about Eusebius is that he was the head of a scriptorium. So you could view the works attributed to him, or possibly attributed to him, as a corporate effort.

renassault

mountainman, what about non-Christians who have written about Christianity prior to 325 AD like Celsus? Nor have you shown how the C-14 dating is wrong on everything. Turbulent situations do not mean a fabrication of Christianity, nor does Julian's comment about Christianity mean he meant it was forged in 325 AD; if anything the comment by him that Galileans had invented it proves he considered Christianity from Israel and thus it is certainly not something the authorities would have immediately taken for their empire's religion.

Roger Pearse

The page is here. The dates are in the right-most column.

The earliest now-extant ms of the Greek text is 10th century. A copy of the Syriac translation exists which was written in 462 AD (according to the colophon). An Armenian version is extant in mss from the 17th century. It is unclear whether a Coptic version existed. I regret that I have no information on the mss of the Latin version by Rufinus.

All the best,

Roger Pearse

Huon

Roger, thank you for your precisions, and felicitations for your work on this page.

So, the oldest now-extant greek manuscript of the Church History is tenth century.
IIIFFF we are asking for a very hard evidence about this date (462), we could also dismiss it, since it COULD have been added to one of the copies, between 462 and a later century.

SSSOOO, a super-sceptic could say (with a little amount of bad faith) that Eusebius is a rather late fabrication, and that the Christian religion was invented during, say, the first half of the VIth century, as a copy of the (older) Arian religion, which was supported by some successors of Constantine...

Why don't we find here any of these super-sceptics ? I wonder. :huh:

avi

I initially thought of this a week ago, or so, when I was trying, in vain, to explain why I disagreed with use of the word "falsify" regarding MM's hypothesis that Constantine created the New Testament. I had written, at that time, that an illustration of "falsification" would be to write:

Pete believes that Tiberius created the New Testament.

Well, that got me to wondering, how do we know that Tiberius didn't create Christianity?

Anyway, back to your point, which I find evocative, how do we know anything, absent proper documentation? 6th, 8th, 10th century?

What do we do about Athanasius? Were his writings, like those of Eusebius, forged, and falsified, years after his death, perhaps in the same 6th century?

mountainman

Dear Huon,

In his treatise "Against the Christians" the Emperor Julian actually make a small and brief reference to the name of Eusebius, calling him wretched and riciculing his claim that the Hebrew sages wrote poetry in hexameters centuries before the Greek poets. Julian wrote c.362 CE.

Additionally, concerning the christian religion itself, independently from Eusebius, during the brief years 361-363 CE Julian wrote that he was convinced the fabricaion of the christians was a work of fiction, and legislated that they be known as "Galilaeans". Besides all this, we have much basilica architecture and an explosion of epigraphy and papyri evidence which essentially guarantees the christian religion to have ben present on the planet in the early fourth century. Besides, most ancient historians accept the testimony of Ammianus Marcellinus as an authentic statement of history, and he mentions the christians, during the rule of Constantius c.351 CE. Add to this the two C14 dates, and the coinage of the fourth century emperors and we are definitely constrained to saying it had to have existed in the epoch of Constantine.

So what do we know about Eusebius? Richard Carrier tells us this:


Best wishes,


Pete

mountainman

According to the attributions in the prologue of The Acts of John this apochryphal text was authored by the subject Esuebius:

Was it usual for Eusebius to state he was the author of the
acts of the apostles? And if Eusebius did not in fact write
this, what purpose is served by the real author in his direct
attribution of authorship to our dear friend Eusebius?

What other possibilities exist?
OVER.

Does anyone think Eusebius is being set up?
That the attribution is in parody/satire/fun?
Or did in fact our Eusebius author this work?


Did Gibbon "write further on Eusebius"?

From Edward Gibbon's A Vindication
of Some Passages in the Fifteenth and Sixteenth chapters
of the History Of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, he mentions at Chapter VIII. Eusebius. and writes ....


Can anyone inform me whether or not there was a future occasion
in which Gibbon made a further "examination of the historical
character of Eusebius"? Did Gibbon ever return to this subject?
We do know that Gibbon made the Index Librorum Prohibitorum









Best wishes,


Pete

Huon

Oh ?

Perhaps I did not understand the word "made". Until today, I believed that the Index was a collective work of the Vatican...