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Eusebius' Ecclesiastical History, written in the early fourth century, continues to serve as our primary gateway to a crucial three hundred year period: the rise of early Christianity under the Roman Empire. In this volume, James Corke-Webster undertakes the first systematic study considering the History in the light of its fourth-century circumstances as well as its author's personal history, intellectual commitments, and literary abilities. He argues that the Ecclesiastical History is not simply an attempt to record the past history of Christianity, but a sophisticated mission statement that uses events and individuals from that past to mould a new vision of Christianity tailored to Eusebius' fourth-century context. He presents elite Graeco-Roman Christians with a picture of their faith that smooths off its rough edges and misrepresents its size, extent, nature, and relationship to Rome. Ultimately, Eusebius suggests that Christianity was - and always had been - the Empire's natural heir.
Known as the “Father of Church History,” Eusebius was bishop of Caesarea in Palestine and the leading Christian scholar of his day. His Ecclesiastical History is an irreplaceable chronicle of Christianity’s early development, from its origin in Judaism, through two and a half centuries of illegality and occasional persecution, to a new era of tolerance and favor under the Emperor Constantine. In this book, Michael J. Hollerich recovers the reception of this text across time. As he shows, Eusebius adapted classical historical writing for a new “nation,” the Christians, with a distinctive theo-political vision. Eusebius’s text left its mark on Christian historical writing from late antiquity to the early modern period—across linguistic, cultural, political, and religious boundaries—until its encounter with modern historicism and postmodernism. Making Christian History demonstrates Eusebius’s vast influence throughout history, not simply in shaping Christian culture but also when falling under scrutiny as that culture has been reevaluated, reformed, and resisted over the past 1,700 years.
Here is the fullest available narrative history of the reigns of Diocletian and Constantine, and a new assessment of the part Christianity played in the Roman world of the third and fourth centuries.
All ten books of Eusebius' famous church history are presented here complete in a superb and authoritative translation. Eusebius' Ecclesiastical History is one of the first comprehensive, chronologically arranged histories ever written about the Christian church, and it is consulted by scholars and historians to this day. Eusebius authored his history as the Roman Empire's influence upon the European continent waned amid insurgencies and surrender of Roman lands to other peoples. This also a time in which Christianity's influence upon Europe's peoples burgeoned and grew. As one of a very few learned and scholarly Christians of his era Eusebius enjoyed a rare privilege: access to the document archives of the early Christian church. Much of these archives have since been lost; Eusebius' use of these long lost texts is the only window which readers of today have to such records. Thus, a sense of mystery is present as events for which scant evidence still exists are told.
The world we engage with is a vibrant collage brought to consciousness by language and our creative imagination. It is through the symbolic forms of language that the human world of value is revealed—this is where religious scholar Michael Fishbane dwells in his latest contribution to Jewish thought. In Fragile Finitude, Fishbane clears new ground for a theological life through a novel reinterpretation of the Book of Job. On this basis, he offers a contemporary engagement with the four classical types of Jewish Scriptural exegesis. The first focuses on worldly experience, the second on communal forms of practice and thought in the rabbinical tradition, the third on personal development, and the fourth on transcendent, cosmic orientations. Through these four modes, Fishbane manages to transform Jewish theology from within, at once reinvigorating a long tradition and moving beyond it. What he offers is nothing short of a way to reorient our lives in relation to the divine and our fellow humans. Written from within the Jewish tradition, Fragile Finitude is intended for readers across the religious spectrum.
In Christianity, Empire, and the Making of Religion in Late Antiquity, Jeremy M. Schott examines the ways in which conflicts between Christian and pagan intellectuals over religious, ethnic, and cultural identity contributed to the transformation of Roman imperial rhetoric and ideology in the early fourth century C.E. During this turbulent period, which began with Diocletian's persecution of the Christians and ended with Constantine's assumption of sole rule and the consolidation of a new Christian empire, Christian apologists and anti-Christian polemicists launched a number of literary salvos in a battle for the minds and souls of the empire. Schott focuses on the works of the Platonist philosopher and anti- Christian polemicist Porphyry of Tyre and his Christian respondents: the Latin rhetorician Lactantius, Eusebius, bishop of Caesarea, and the emperor Constantine. Previous scholarship has tended to narrate the Christianization of the empire in terms of a new religion's penetration and conquest of classical culture and society. The present work, in contrast, seeks to suspend the static, essentializing conceptualizations of religious identity that lie behind many studies of social and political change in late antiquity in order to investigate the processes through which Christian and pagan identities were constructed. Drawing on the insights of postcolonial discourse analysis, Schott argues that the production of Christian identity and, in turn, the construction of a Christian imperial discourse were intimately and inseparably linked to the broader politics of Roman imperialism.
Eusebius of Caesarea lived at a crucial turning point in the history of the Christian church. He was an important witness to the polemical and apologetic attitudes that characterized much early Christian literature. The most voluminous writer of the early fourth century, he was also the first comprehensive historian of his community seeking a philosophy to explain the whole course of history from the beginning to his own time. This volume places Eusebius' work in proper perspective. The contributors, all recognized specialists in early Christianity, shed light on the person and circumstances of Eusebius himself. This collection of essays focuses on elements of the story that Eusebius tells — the story of the early church, its relationship to Judaism, or its confrontation with the Roman Empire — and explores gaps left by Eusebius. The writers offer a cross-section of current scholarly methods in the study of early Christianity and Judaism.
Eusebius’s groundbreaking History of the Church, remains the single most important source for the history of the first three centuries of Christianity and stands among the classics of Western literature. His iconic story of the church’s origins, endurance of persecution, and ultimate triumph—with its cast of martyrs, heretics, bishops, and emperors—has profoundly shaped the understanding of Christianity’s past and provided a model for all later ecclesiastical histories. This new translation, which includes detailed essays and notes, comes from one of the leading scholars of Eusebius’s work and offers rich context for the linguistic, cultural, social, and political background of this seminal text. Accessible for new readers and thought-provoking for specialists, this is the essential text for anyone interested in the history of Christianity.
The Demonic in the Political Thought of Eusebius of Caesarea explores how Eusebius of Caesarea's ideas about demons interacted with and helped to shape his thought on other topics, particularly political topics Hazel Johannessen builds on and complements recent work on early Christian and early modern demonology. Eusebius' political thought has long drawn the attention of scholars who have identified in some of his works the foundations of later Byzantine theories of kingship. However, Eusebius' political thought has not previously been examined in the light of his views on demons. Moreover, despite frequent references to demons throughout many of Eusebius' works, there has been no comprehensive study of Eusebius' views on demons, until now, as expressed throughout a range of his works. The originality of this study lies both in an initial examination of Eusebius' views on demons and their place in his cosmology, and in the application of the insights derived from this to consideration of his political thought. As a result of this new perspective, Johannessen challenges scholars' traditional characterization of Eusebius as a triumphal optimist. Instead, she draws attention to his concerns about a continuing demonic threat, capable of disrupting humankind's salvation, and presents Eusebius as a more cautious figure than the one familiar to late antique scholarship.