Maklelan

Yes, I've seen this notion alluded to a number of times on this board. I'm curious where you all get the idea that Eusebius is a unilaterally illegitimate historical source. I've formally studied early Judaism and Christianity on two continents and in three different countries, and I've never seen that idea promoted anywhere near the mainstream. It simply doesn't have currency in the academy, irrespective of ideological affiliations. Do you guys really think that Eusebius just fabricated this incredibly vast and complex web of historical events and people and then calibrated it to fit the events presented in other historical texts? This idea is particularly bizarre in light of the disparate writing styles and lexica witnessed to in the quoted texts and the ignorance they display of events subsequent to their putative dating, but prior to Eusebius' day. Ex eventu compositions from that time period simply don't manage that kind of chronological sensitivity and self-awareness.

Toto

The mainstream seems to consider Eusebius as a less than totally reliable source, because of his bias and his credulity.

There is one member of this board who goes well beyond this and thinks that Eusebius was a master forger and the author of the entire canon (mountainman) but he has not persuaded anyone else AFAIK.

Roger Pearse

You're quite right, of course. Eusebius has his limitations, but they are not of the kind put forward by the headbangers.

The reason why Eusebius attracts malicious allegations is a simple one: he is the major source of historical information for the period. Thus anyone seeking to rewrite history will inevitably find his account inconvenient.

One of the early writers to do this was Edward Gibbon, who made use extensively of Eusebius for his account in "Decline and Fall", but also manipulated his footnotes to make it look as if Eusebius advocated dishonesty. Gibbon was attempting to play down the number of Christians executed by the state during the Great Persecution under Diocletian; and so had to find an excuse to ignore Eusebius.

The same process can be observed when politics comes into it, as it did in the mid-19th century. Much of the animosity directed against Eusebius in German sources of the period derives from the revolutionary movement of 1848. Hostility towards the Tsar and the Hapsburg Emperor meant that various writers sought to undermine the ideological basis for both polities -- the concept of Christian Empire, originating with Constantine. In order to achieve this end, they portrayed Constantine as a pagan, and, since the account of Eusebius is hardly consistent with this, and the documents that he quotes rebut the charge, they cynically proceeded to attack him as dishonest, and to allege that he forged the documents in question. (All this from Cameron & Hall's 1994 version of Eusebius' "Life of Constantine") But apparently one of the most "controversial" edicts of Constantine from the "Life" has since been found in Egypt in the papyri.

I would suggest that the whole process is a tawdry one. We don't do honest history by finding reasons to ignore the testimony of the ancients, so that we can push some theory or other. On the contrary, once we do that, we are writing fiction at best, or propaganda at worst.

All the best,

Roger Pearse

stephan huller

I am quite exhausted but I just wanted to mention that it isn't just the atheist crowd that take issue with Eusebius. Eusebius is certainly our most important source for information about the early Church but also quite specifically the Alexandrian Church and it is difficult to overstate how unfortunate this situation is for us. For Eusebius was most actively involved in one role above all others – the restoration of the reputation of Origen. As Jerome rightly notes, Eusebius went beyond merely reporting history but was actively involved in the reshaping the historical testimonies of the past.

Just look at the writings of Clement for a moment. It is not just that Eusebius fully accepts the authenticity of a work such as the Hypotyposes which seemed obviously spurious to the school of Arethas. Eusebius also failed to mention the existence of the very collection of letter of Clement of Alexandria known to John of Damascus several centuries later. These personal correspondences - which contained at least twenty one letters and likely many more - must certainly have made mention of Clement’s opinion of Origen all of which brings us back to our main point.

The conflict which developed between Rufinus and Jerome in the closing years of the fourth century brings to light how actively Origenists were attempting to rehabilitate the writings of their spiritual master. Rufinus accused Jerome of ‘smoothing over’ controversial passages of his Peri Archon for Latin readers and Jerome did the same of Rufinus’s translations of other works of Origen. Yet in the course of his defense Jerome seems to ‘let the cat out of the bag’ about similar efforts already undertaken a few generations earlier in the surviving Greek originsls. Citing passages from an early version of the Apology for Origen, Eusebius makes explicit reference to ‘widespread corruption’ of the writings of ‘the apostles, of Clement of Alexandria, and Dionysius bishop of Alexandria’ by ‘heretics’ also. Eusebius says that he demonstrates:

from his (= Origen’s) own words and writings how he himself complains of this and deplores it: He explains clearly in the letter which he wrote to some of his intimate friends at Alexandria what he suffered while living here in the flesh and in the full enjoyment of his senses, by the corruption of his books and treatises, or by spurious editions of them.

And Jerome adds by way of commentary that Eusebius:

subjoins a copy of this letter; and he who implores to the heretics the falsification of Origen's writings himself begins by falsifying them, for he does not translate the letter as he finds it in the Greek, and does not convey to the Latins what Origen states in his letter. The object of the whole letter is to assail Demetrius the Pontiff of Alexandria, and to inveigh against the bishops throughout the world, and to tell them that their excommunication of him is invalid; he says further that he has no intention of retorting their evil speaking

The point then is that Jerome pulls back the curtain on what was certainly a ‘heretical’ Alexandrian environment is the early third century, and one in which all surviving materials from that age were systematically ‘purified’ of heretical content.
While Origen is the focus of Eusebius’s rehabilitation efforts, it is quite clear that the writings of Clement were likely affected by this purification process. Jerome describes the subjective nature by which Eusebius and later Rufinus engaged in transforming original material. In order to disassociate Eusebius’s Apology from his Arian past, Jerome says that Rufinus deliberately misidentified the original author as the martyr Pamphilus. Jerome portrays both Eusebius and Rufinus as going through ancient texts and arbitrarily deciding what was written by ‘heretics’ and what was authentic acting as ‘contemporary Marcionites.’

Jerome cites Rufinus as explaining his editorial model as follows:

What are we to say when sometimes in the same place, and, so to speak, almost in the following paragraph, a sentence with an opposite meaning is found inserted? Can we believe that, in the same work and in the same book, and sometimes, as I have said in the sentence immediately following, he can have forgotten his own words? For example, could he who had before said, we can find no passage throughout the Scriptures in which the Holy Spirit is said to be created or made, immediately add that the Holy Spirit was made among the rest of the creatures? Or again, could he who defined the Father and the Son to be of one substance, that namely which is called in Greek Homoousion, say in the following portions that he was of another substance, and that he was created, when but a little before he had declared him to be born from the nature of God the Father?

Of course Rufinus does not allow for the possibility that a more orthodox editor like Eusebius might have been responsible for adding at least some of the material that Rufinus found so acceptable. Jerome, at least in this essay is more open to that possibility noting to Rufinus:

Eusebius who was a very learned man, (observe I say learned not catholic: you must not, according to your wont make this a ground for calumniating me) takes up six volumes with nothing else but the attempt to show that Origen is of his way of believing, that is of the Arian perfidy. He brings out many test-passages, and effectually proves his point. In what dream in an Alexandrian prison was the revelation given to you on the strength of which you make out these passages to be falsified which he accepts as true? But possibly he being an Arian, took in these additions of the heretics to support his own error, so that he should not be thought to be the only one who had held false opinions contrary to the Church.

The point is an important one – one which is often glossed over by scholars with an uncontrollable need for ‘certainty’ while studying Patristic texts which are by and large flawed and ultimately corrupt literary productions. We have to acknowledge at bottom that we do not possess the original editions of any text associated with a given Church Father. Clement’s writings are no exception. The most that we can hope for is that the school of Arethas strove to preserve the best possible manuscripts for posterity, ones which were free as possible from the kinds of insertions of later theological concepts which has utterly ruined the existing corpus of writings attributed for instance to Gregory Thaumaturgus. While in the most part we must agree that they succeeded in their efforts we cannot ignore the fact that there are subtle reminders in the existing Clementine corpus that the texts do nevertheless show some signs of later interpolations.

mountainman

Check the background of the 4th century "Historia Augusta" before you convince yourself of the provisional truth of this statement.

mountainman

This is false - there are many. Carrier claims "Eusebius was either a liar or hopelessly credulous". Philosopher Jay has written a book with a chapter heading entitled "Eusebius the Master Forger" and over 100 years ago Edwin Johnson wrote:


The second claim which is misrepresented below does not have the same corroboration ....


The claim is that Eusebius, possibly a man of Jewish descent, was not the author but the Editor-In-Chief of a specially reserved scriptorium, commissioned c.312 CE by the Pontifex Maximus Constantine to oversight a new and exiting imperial publication project, destined to produce a new centralised state monotheistic "Holy Writ" for the Roman Empire, precisely as Tanzar had done for Ardashir in the Persian empire less than a century earlier.



The vacuum of evidence for pre-4th century Christianity

Doug Shaver

What paleography can or cannot do has nothing to do with what I said about carbon dating.

Doug Shaver

And so . . . . Philosopher Jay and Edwin Johnson said it, you believe it, and that settles it?

Maklelan

But this is just an appeal to authority.

Such a theory could never even get off the ground.

I have a hard time taking an article like this seriously. The Tacitus manuscript is misrepresented, as the name Christus clearly appears at the beginning of the subsequent line. There was no change in that spelling, and scholars are split over whether or not the actual change in the manuscript was made by the original scribe or someone later. The corrective hand is pretty much a perfect match. The marginal reading is from a much, much different hand and is actually grammatically incorrect ("quos per flagitia invisos vulgus Christiani"?), and so can't really be considered a corrective gloss later inserted into the text. Is the author insisting that Tactitus' text is an accurate witness? Why not highlight the name "Christus," then? What of Pliny the Younger's witness? P.Oxy 3035 is also misrepresented, as the text does not say "Chrestian," but χρησιανον, or "chresian." There's no "t." If the early spelling with the eta changes things, then the lack of a tau changes things even more. The use of Chrestianos is just a play on words that was appropriated by many non-Christians (which is just what they wanted). This is nothing peculiar or suspect.

The discussion of the Shepherd of Hermas is also ridiculous. Not only is the article happy to give traditional dating to texts it thinks supports it case (but not to those that don't), but it has to cite an uncritical scholar from 70 years ago to promote the idea that there's some confusion with the text. The statement that the Son of God is distinguished from Jesus is flatly false. Hermas does no such thing. he just identifies the Son of God as a created being. The author just doesn't like the idea that Christ was at any point considered a created being, which betrays his Nicene dogmatism. The notion that Jesus was "uncreated" is a much later christological innovation. It wasn't problematic in the second century CE. On this question I suggest you read Michael Peppard, The Son of God in the Roman World (or via: amazon.co.uk), and specifically pp. 148–52. The text fits perfectly with second century Christianity.

The claim that not a single artifact of any medium from before the fourth century can be unambiguously identified as Christian is also false. There are numerous artifacts and texts dating to that time period. The Oxyrhynchus papyri, for instance, contain numerous pre-fourth century CE Christian texts. The article's dismissal of epitaph of Abercius, additionally, is quite uninformed. There's really no question today among scholars that it's Christian, and there's no lack of a clear identification. The first clue is that the text is virtually identical to the epitaph described in Symeon's Life of Abercius. Next, the explicit reference to Paul, a virgin who bore a great fish that continually feeds followers, the bread and wine, and the "seal" are all textbook second century CE Christian imagery. The "seal," by the way, is baptism, as described in Hermas, an unquestionably Christian text.

The notion that the appearance of the name Chreste in an inscription somehow challenges what we know about Jewish identity is also ludicrous (and rather confusing). To repeat my first comment, I find it quite difficult to take an amateurish and myopic article like this seriously. It ignores quite a bit of evidence and is full of pseudo-scholarship and dogmatism.

aa5874

Well, please be clear. A forger can fool even an experienced paleographer.

It is quite a mis-representation that paleography is superior to C14 dating. Dating by scientific means have at least ONE MAJOR ADVANTAGE--it tends to ELIMINATE BIAS or SUBJECTIVITY.

Now, we can see that Experienced Paleographers will come up with different ranges of dates for the IDENTICAL text under examination. There can be differences of over 200 years by EXPERIENCED Paleographers.

See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Papyrus_46
Paleography dating alone is UNCERTAIN