jgibson000

I have just re-read Momigliano and for the life of me I cannot find M saying what you "quote" him as saying.

Perhaps you'd be kind enough to cite the pages on which these assertions of M appear so that I can find what I've apparently missed.

JG

PhilosopherJay

Robin Lane-Fox is a fellow of New College, Oxford, and a University Lecturer in Ancient History. From Robin Fox Lane's Pagans and Christians (or via: amazon.co.uk), Knopf, 1986, pg. 339-40:

...Not only did the overachievers attract polemic and approval from fellow Christians: they helped to multiply the texts which supported their own practice. Their methods were very simple: where no authority existed, they invented texts and ascribed them to authors who never wrote them.

It is possible to put this practice in context and draw distinctions between its types. In the Hellentistic age, Jewish authors had already availed themselves of this literary form: the Christians were merely one more group in the field. Like their Jewish contemporaries, they lacked the critical concern for history and its sources which would have excluded these fabrications. There were a few doubters, but some very notable believers: despite its critics, wrote Tertullian, the Book of Enoch (composed c. 150 B.C.) must be genuine, as Enoch had lived in the days before the Flood.

Narrative fictions tended to name no author, the "Acts of Peter" or the Acts of Thomas," whereas bogus letters of discipline and "revelation" tended to claim a false authorship, the Apocalypse of Peter" or the "Teaching of the Apostles." In either case, the deceit had one primary aim: success. By withholding his name, the writer lent authority to texts which had none. The practice was not insignificant when the texts discussed points of religious conduct. It had bgun promptly, characterizing several of the New Testament's epistles and, on one view, some or all of the Gospels themselves. However we try to justify the authors' practice, at bottom they used the same device: falsehood.

In the churches, the strict regard for authority and the growing respect for "orthodoxy" gave added point to this type of invention. It was also propelled by the interests of overachievers. These authors wished to support their behaviour by texts of a spurious authority...


Warmly,

Philosopher Jay

jgibson000

[snip]

Umm... Jay. I note with interest after taking Pagans and Christians down from my shelves and looking at the context from which your quote is taken, as well as his discussions elsewhere in the book of Eusebius and his writings, that in appealing to Lane Fox to back up your claim, you have conveniently(?) ignored and conspicuously left out several facts:

(1) that in the quote you give us Lane-Fox is not speaking about the genre of Historia or the characteristics of the writings of historians and chroniclers such as Eusebius, but rather about writings produced by those who, in contrast to those baptized in infancy, had been baptized as adults and had renounced much in doing so, who believed in self mortifications and eagerly anticipated martyrdom (p. 339); but also

(2) that Lane Fox is speaking about the second and early third century, when persecution was a real specter hanging over the church, not the fourth, when Eusebius wrote, and after persecution has ceased.

You also ignore all that Lane Fox has to say about (a great deal of it in praise of the careful historiography of) Eusebius on pp. 604-609 of Pagans and Christians. (Why is that?)

So it is clear to me that despite what you are claiming here, Lane Fox does not back up your claim, neither in what you've quoted of him nor anywhere else in Pagans and Christians.

But there is one way to find out if I'm the one who is wrong here and that Lane Fox does indeed/would back you up:

Write him.

Post your claim about the characteristics of "Eusebius' age" to him, as well as your claim about Eusebius the proud and pious liar, and let Lane Fox know that you have appealed to him to back you up, and then ask him if you are right to do so.

He may be reached at:

robin.lanefox@classics.ox.ac.uk

In the meantime, I feel compelled to ask: When you read an authority's works, do you only see what you want to see?

Jeffrey Gibson

PhilosopherJay

Here is the original statement and question



Here is my answer.

Have I answered your question?

If we do not agree on what an answer to a question is, then it is pointless to ask or answer questions.

Sincerely,

Philosopher Jay

jgibson000

Are you actually saying that what Fox says is about the period when Eusebius wrote?

Perhaps you'd be kind enough to first let me know how you define "an answer to a question". Will any response qualify as such? Do you make no distinction between good answers and bad ones, between those that are, in the light of the question asked, satisfactory and those that are not? Is a response, the content of which is irrelevant to a question asked, and way off point, actually an answer to that question?

Please, Jay. This is beneath you. Do you really want to be known as someone who employs sophist's tricks to avoid admitting that you've engaged in selective quotation and that the matrial that you provided to support your claim about the time of Eusebius and the nature and character of 4th centuria historiography does no such thing?

JG

mountainman

Yes. And has it ever occurred to any of these scholars that, with
the possible exceptions of only a few lines in the Augustan History,
to be considered as later interpolations, the work is dated squarely
under the sponsorship of our dear friend Constantine.

And that therefore, whatever "dishonesty" is being assessed with regard
to the Historia Augusta is not mutually exclusive to whatever
dishonesty is being assessed with regard to the literature of Eusebius.

Simply put, that both the ecclesiastical and the augustan histories
implicate the work of one and the same collaborative sponsorship,
with similar modus operandi, particularly false documents supporting
a pseudo-history.


I will respond separately and in a day or two regarding M's citation
of Eusebius being considered an inventor of a new historiography
which incidently are sourced not in the book you mention above, but
in an article entitled "PAGAN and CHRISTIAN HISTORIOGRAPHY the
FOURTH CENTURY".

jgibson000

Dated by whom? Those who participated in Historia-Augusta-Colloquium: Bonn 1963?

How is this relevant to your claim that it was only Eusebius and no one else whom scholars have labeled "dishonest"?

Are you now saying that Eusebius wrote this work as well?


I look forward to it. I will get the book -- The Conflict Between Paganism and Christianity in the Fourth Century (which, BTW, was published in 1963) -- in which M's article appears to see for myself what M says.

In the meantime though, will you now answer the question I posed to you (namely, "if Eusebius did create new canons of historiography, then how does Jay know what Eusebius should or should not have done when he writes what he writes?") which you said you would answer "if and only if" I would answer your "How does the Swiss historian, Jakob Burckhardt know that "Eusebius
was the first thoroughly dishonest historian of antiquity."?

After all, I did what you requested I do.

JG

mountainman

Momigliano, for one, writes as if the work could have been generated
in the rule of Constantine. I have not the opportunity to have yet assimilated
other opinions.

The production of a pseudo-history and a set of particularly false
documents in the fourth century is necessarily implicated with the
assessement of "dishonesty". The production of a very suspect
ecclesiastical history, with diminishing integrity, in the fourth century
by Eusebius, with the citation of false documents, such as the letter
from the Gallic "christians" satisfies a casual comparison with this
assessment of the same "dishonesty", and should be investigated
IMO, in the manner that Philosopher Jay is proceeding.

It is clear that it is nowhere near impossible that the same literary
production (collegiate) regime which fabricated the Historia Augusta
in the fourth century, could well have been the very same regime
responsible for the production of the Historia Ecclesiastica.

Cool. I have transposed the article into text, despite the current
copyright "difficulties". If you'd like a copy, msg me.

Fair's fair. OK.

Noone "knows" unless they are a mystic, in which case, they usually dont
speak --- most people consider and examine postulates or hypotheses
for their relative consistency with all available and known data. IMO Jay
is working with indications that Eusebius is a "master forger", and seeks
to determine how this hypothesis fits with the available data.

This is how I approach Jay's hypothetical knowledge of what
"Eusebius should or should not have done when he writes what he writes?"
It is simply the consideration of an hypothesis that Eusebius was not a
straightforward author, of impeccable integrity, as might be the
hypothesis of many others in this field.

mountainman

Here are the citations/quotage from Momigliano's
PAGAN and CHRISTIAN HISTORIOGRAPHY the FOURTH CENTURY
by which I claim that M. cites Eusebius as an inventor. (pp.88-91)

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 master 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 that 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 Augustae.

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 A.D. The models for political and military history remained irretrievable 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. [1] But it is fairly clear hat 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 the undertaking, as travellers do on some desolate and untrodden way’. {2]

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 invention speeches, he must have intended to produce something different from ordinary history. Did he then intend to produce a preparatory work to history, an ?p?µ??µa? This is hardly credible. First of all, historical ?p?µ??µara 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 E????s?ast????sr???a did not mean Kirchengeschichte, but Materialien 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. [1]

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’ (?. i. 8). Such a nation was not fighting ordinary wars. It’s 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.

Having started to collect his materials during Diocletian’s persecutions, Eusebius never forgot his original purpose which was to produce factual evidence about the past and about the character of the persecuted Church. He piled up his evidence of quotations from reputable authorities and records in the form that was natural to any ancient controversialist. As he was dealing with a Church that represented a school of thought, there was much he could learn in the matter of presentation from the histories of philosophic schools which he knew well. These dealt with doctrinal controversies, questions of authenticity, successions of scholarchs. But he did away with all that was anecdotal and worldly in the pagan biographies of philosophers. This is why we shall never know whether Clemens Alexandrinus was fond of eating green figs and of basking in the sun; which are established points in the biography of Zeno the Stoic. t the same time Eusebius certainly had in mind Jewish-Hellenistic historiography, as exemplified for him and for us by Flavius Josephus. In Josephus he found the emphasis on the past, the apologetic tone, the doctrinal digression, the display (though not so lavish) of documents: above all there was the idea of a nation which is different from ordinary pagan nations. Jewish historiography emphatically underlined the importance of the remote past in comparison with recent times and the importance of cult in comparison with politics.

The suggestion that Eusebius combined the methods of philosophic historiography with the approach of Jewish-Helenistic historiography has at least the merit of being a guide to the sources of his thought. Yet it is far from accounting for all the main features of his work. There were obvious differences between the history of the Church and that of any other institution. Persecution had been an all-pervading factor of Christianity. Heresy was a new conception which (whatever its origins) had hardly the same importance in any other school of thought, even in Judaism. An account of the Christian Church based on the notion of orthodoxy and on its relations with a persecuting power was bound to be something different from any other historical account. The new type of exposition chosen by Eusebius proved to be adequate to the new type of institution represented by the Christian Church. IT was founded upon authority and not upon the free judgement of which the pagan historians were proud. His contemporaries felt that he had made a new start. Continuators, imitators, and translators multiplied. Some of them (most particularly Sozomen) tried to be more conventional in their historiographical style, more obedient to rhetorical traditions. none departed from the main structure of Eusebius’ creation with its emphasis on the struggle against persecutors and heretics and therefore on the purity and continuity of the doctrinal tradition.

Eusebius introduced a new type of historical exposition which was characterized by the importance attributed to the more remote past, by the central position of doctrinal controversies and by the lavish use of documents.

and to summarise by quoting p.92:

Perhaps we have all underestimated the impact of ecclesiastical history on the development of historical method. A new chapter of historiography begins with Eusebius not only because he invented ecclesiastical history, but because he wrote it with a documentation which is utterly different from that of the pagan historians.

These citations support the necessity of exploring the possibilities alluded
to in this thread by Jay; namely, that Eusebius may have forged the letter of
the Gallic "christians" purported to have been written in the rule of M.Antonius,
the author of "Meditations", a work of indisputable value, whose author Eusebius
depicts in a totally dissembled and inaccurate historical fashion. (For the
substance of these see my following post to Jay.)

mountainman

Hi Jay,

Earlier I stated I would post some additional material concerning the
totally dissembling method by which Eusebius treats the Roman Emperor
known as Marcus Aurelius, aka M. Antoninus, the author of the work
"Meditations", a work well-respected in the sphere os human commentary
(of course IMO).

Unfortunately, I cannot for the moment identify the source of the
following notes, because at the time I found this, I must have not
completed the task of finding out who wrote this. Nevertheless, it
serves as an independent analysis of wayward historical practice
conducted by Eusebius in respect of this AT-THE-TIME-IMO "well
known and respected 'philosophical emperor'.

Anyway, here is the text:

On Bk. IV. chap. 1O.

For the Pious, read Pius.

On Bk. IV. chap. 18, § 2.

For the Pious, read Pius.

On Bk. V. Introd. § I (note 3, continued). The Successors of Antoninus Pius.

Antoninus Pius was succeeded in 161 by his adopted sons, Marcus Aurelius Antoninus Verus and Lucius Ceionius Aelius Aurelius Commodus Antoninus. Upon his accession to the throne the former transferred his name Verus to the latter, who was thenceforth called Lucius Aurelius Verus.

In his Chronicle Eusebius keeps these two princes distinct,
but in his History he falls into sad confusion in regard to them,
and this confusion has drawn upon him the severe censure of all his critics.

He knew of course, as every one did, that Antoninus Pius had two successors.
In Bk. IV. chap. 14, § 1O, he states this directly,
and gives the names of the successors as "Marcus Aurelius Verus,
who was also called Antoninus," and "Lucius."
From that point on he calls the former of these princes simply
Antoninus Verus, Antoninus, or Verus, dropping entirely the name Marcus Aurelius.

In Bk. IV. chap. 18, § 2, he speaks of the emperor
"whose times we are now recording," that is, the successor of Antoninus Pius,
and calls him Antoninus Verus.

In Bk. V. Introd. § I he refers to the same emperor as Antoninus Verus,
and in Bk. V. chap. 4, § 3, and chap. 9, he calls him simply Antoninus,
while in Bk. IV. chap. 13, § 8, he speaks of him as the "Emperor Verus."
The death of this Emperor Antoninus is mentioned in Bk. V. chap. 9,
and it is there said that he reigned nineteen years and was then succeeded by Commodus.
It is evident that in all these passages he is referring
to the emperor whom we know as Marcus Aurelius,
but to whom he gives that name only once,
when he records his accession to the empire.

On the other hand, in Bk. V. chap. 5, § 1, Eusebius speaks of Marcus Aurelius Caesar
and expressly distinguishes him from the Emperor Antoninus,
to whom he has referred at the close of the previous chapter,
and makes him the brother of that emperor.

Again, in the same chapter, § 6, he calls this Marcus Aurelius Caesar,
just referred to, the "Emperor Marcus," still evidently distinguishing
him from the Emperor Antoninus. In this chapter, therefore,
he thinks of Marcus Aurelius as the younger of the two sons left by Antoninus Pius;
that is, he identifies him with the one whom we call Lucius Verus,
and whom he himself calls Lucius in Bk. IV. chap. 14 § 1O.
Eusebius thus commits a palpable error.
How are we to explain it?

The explanation seems to me to lie in the circumstance that Eusebius attempted to reconcile
the tradition that Marcus Aurelius was not a persecutor with the fact known to him as a historian,
that the emperor who succeeded Antoninus Pius was.
It was the common belief in the time of Eusebius, as it had been during the entire preceding century,
that all the good emperors had been friendly to the Christians, and that only the bad emperors had persecuted.
Of course, among the good emperors was included the philosophical Marcus Aurelius
(cf. e.g. Tertullian's Apol. chap. 5, to which Eusebius refers in Bk. V. chap. 5).
It was of Marcus Aurelius, moreover, that the story of the Thundering Legion was told (see ibid.).
But Eusebius was not able to overlook the fact that numerous martyrdoms occurred
during the reign of the successor of Antoninus Pius.
He had the documents recording the terrible persecution at Lyons and Vienne;
he had an apology of Melito, describing the hardships which the Christians
endured under the same emperor (see Bk. IV. chap. 26).

He found himself, as an historian, face to face
with two apparently contradictory lines of facts.
How was the contradiction to be solved?
He seems to have solved it by assuming
that a confusion of names had taken place,
and that the prince commonly known as Marcus Aurelius,
whose noble character was traditional,
and whose friendship to the Christians he could not doubt,
was the younger, not the older of the two brothers,
and therefore not responsible for the numerous martyrdoms
which took place after the death of Antoninus Pius.
And yet he is not consistent with himself even in his History;
for he gives the two brothers their proper names when he first mentions them,
and says nothing of an identification of Marcus Aurelius with Lucius.
It is not impossible that the words Marcus Aurelius,
which are used nowhere else of the older brother, are an interpolation;
but for this there is no evidence, and it may be suggested as more probable
that at the time when this passage was written the solution of the difficulty
which he gives distinctly in Bk. V. chap. 5 had not yet occurred to him.
That he should be able to fancy that Marcus Aurelius was identical with Lucius
is perhaps not strange when we remember how much confusion was caused
in the minds of other writers besides himself by the perplexing identity
of the names of the various members of the Antonine family.
To the two successors of Antoninus Pius, the three names,
Aurelius, Verus, and Antoninus, alike belonged.
It is not surprising that Eusebius should under the circumstances
think that the name Marcus may also have belonged to the younger one.
This supposition would seem to him to find some confirmation in the fact
that the most common official designation of the older successor of Antoninus Pius
was not Marcus Aurelius, but Antoninus simply, or M. Antoninus.
The name Marcus Aurelius or Marcus was rather a popular than an official designation.
Even in the Chronicle there seems to be a hint that Eusebius thought of a possible distinction
between Antoninus the emperor and Marcus, or Marcus Aurelius;
for while he speaks of the "Emperor Antoninus" at the beginning of the passages
in which he recounts the story of the Thundering Legion (year of Abr. 2188),
he says at the close: literae quoque exstant Marci regis
(the M. Aureli gravissimi imperatoris of Jerome looks like a later expansion of the simpler original)
quibus testatur copias suas iamiam perituras Christianorum precibus servatas esse.
But even when he had reached the solution pointed out,
Eusebius did not find himself clear of difficulties;
for his sources put the occurrence of the Thundering Legion after the date
at which the younger brother was universally supposed to have died,
and it was difficult on still other grounds to suppose the prince named Marcus Aurelius
already dead in 169 (the date given by Eusebius himself inhis Chronicle for the death of Lucius).
In this emergency he came to the conclusion that there must be some mistake
in regard to the date of his death, and possessing no record of the death
of Marcus Aurelius as distinct from Antoninus, he simply passed it by without mention.

That Eusebius in accepting such a lame theory
showed himself altogether too much under the influence
of traditional views cannot be denied;
but when we remember that the tradition that Marcus Aurelius
was not a persecutor was supported by writers
whose honesty and accuracy he could never have thought of questioning,
as well as by the very nature of the case, we must,
while we smile at the result, at least admire his effort
to solve the contradiction which he, as an historian,
felt more keenly than a less learned man,
unacquainted with the facts on the other side,
would have done.

Perhaps this is important.