Eusebius of Caesarea

Background

Eusebius (c. 260–339), bishop of Caesarea Maritima and heir to Origen's library there, is the father of church history. His Ecclesiastical History — ten books carrying the story from the apostles to Constantine — is the single most important source for pre-Nicene Christianity, preserving verbatim extracts of otherwise-lost authors (Papias, Hegesippus, Rhodo, Irenaeus' Greek). A courtier-historian of the Constantinian settlement and a hesitant participant at Nicaea, he writes as an advocate of the winning party — a bias the wiki's canon article prices in explicitly ("the retrospect problem").

Positions held in this wiki

• Canon Formation — New Testament — the retrospective cataloguer whose three-class scheme structures the whole debate: "First then must be put the holy quaternion of the Gospels; following them the Acts of the Apostles," then Paul, 1 John, 1 Peter (Eusebius, HE III.25.1–2); the disputed (antilegomena) — James, Jude, 2 Peter, 2–3 John — at the margin; the rejected (notha) below. The maximalist case rests on his testimony against interest: a large, stable acknowledged core beside a short disputed remainder — while his persisting uncertainty about Revelation ("the opinions of most men are still divided," HE III.24.18) is the counter-argument's best datum.
• The same article leans on the traditions he preserves: Papias on Mark as "the interpreter of Peter" who "wrote down accurately, though not in order" (HE III.39.15); Polycarp calling Marcion "the first born of Satan" (HE IV.14.7); Irenaeus' account of Marcion's two-gods doctrine (HE IV.11); and Origen's canon judgments (HE VI.25).

Key works in our corpus

• Ecclesiastical History — in corpus complete (all ten books, NPNF2 translation). Load-bearing loci for this wiki: III.3 (Pauline corpus and 1 Peter), III.24–25 (the canon catalogue), III.39 (Papias), IV.11 and IV.14 (Marcion and Polycarp), V.13 (Rhodo on Marcionite splintering), VI (life of Origen, including the Hexapla).
• Praeparatio Evangelica, Demonstratio Evangelica, Life of Constantine, Chronicle — not in corpus.

Principal critics

• Adolf von Harnack — the development view reads Eusebius' tidy recognition-narrative as the victors' retrospect of a second-century institutional creation (Canon Formation — New Testament, view 2).
• Bart D. Ehrman — presses the same point in its contemporary Bauer-thesis form: the "acknowledged" books are the winners' list.
• The canon article's own criterion problem: Eusebius rejects heretical gospels partly because their content is "out of accord with true orthodoxy" — circular if orthodoxy is defined by the books one accepts (HE III.25.7, as discussed there).

See also

• Irenaeus of Lyons — the second-century witness whose testimony he transmits and systematizes.
• Origen of Alexandria — his intellectual master; HE Book VI is effectively Origen's biography.
• Athanasius of Alexandria — the younger contemporary whose Festal Letter 39 closed the list Eusebius still left open at the edges.