I feel inadequate to do this task with justice, as the first to venture on such an undertaking, a traveler on a lonely and untrodden path.  -Eusebius of Caesarea

Much of what we know today about the history of the early church (outside of Scripture) is owed to the tireless work of a bishop of the ancient city of Caesarea Maritima (which is still located on the western shore of Israel). Eusebius lived circa 275-339 and is known to us today as “the father of church history.”  He gave to us a ten-volume work recording the history of Christianity from its beginnings in the ministry of Jesus through the time of the apostles and the destruction of Jerusalem to the persecutions under various Roman Emperors, concluding with the conversion of the emperor Constantine and the effects of his conversion upon the Roman world.

Eusebius was not a perfect man. He was a great admirer of the theologian Origen, who, although adding much good to our understanding of Scripture, taught some unorthodox concepts. Eusebius was one of 318 bishops who presided at the Council of Nicaea in A.D. 325 which brought us the initial draft of the Nicene Creed. His commitment to Origen’s ideas and to peacefulness led him astray in some ways, resulting in his condemnation of the great champion of early Christianity, Athanasius, and Athanasius’ subsequent condemnation by Constantine and the first of his many exiles.

Eusebius, as a lover of peace, was willing to overlook some theological anomalies in order to maintain that peace he desired so ardently. His main purpose in writing his Ecclesiastical History was to demonstrate how the church of Jesus Christ, once a persecuted minority, had defeated paganism and false religion and triumphed so decisively. He detested any debating within the church because in it he saw a sign of disunity that would bring “shameful ridicule” on the body of Christ. He was right about this in many ways, and yet, in my own opinion, his desire for peace was taken to such an extreme that it ultimately allowed false teaching to permeate the church in Caesarea. Peace is almost always a good thing, but never peace at all costs. Late in his life Eusebius wrote a history of the reign of the emperor Constantine, which although giving us good information about this very important person in the history of the church, was so lopsided with praise for Constantine that it is very difficult to distinguish fact from fiction today.

Despite Eusebius’s faults, he was a man who loved Jesus Christ and his church. It appears that he never appropriated false teaching into his own life, even when he allowed it to be taught by others in the name of peace and unity. Without his relentless work gathering primary sources for his historical writings the world would remain ignorant of many important events that took place in the first three and a half centuries of the ancient era, events both religious and non-religious. Eusebius had to work from scratch, a task that very few historians have had to face. He did this difficult work not to create a name and legacy for his own posterity but to preserve a teaching that he held to be life changing for himself and for the world at large. Interestingly, after his death, Eusebius’s successor as bishop of Caesarea wrote a biography of Eusebius’s life. That biography has been lost. We know more about early church history now than we know about the very man who preserved that history for us. My guess is that Eusebius would have wanted it that way.

Many men and women of God have gone before us in the faith. All of them had feet of clay, as do we. We should remember, however, how indebted we are to their work and their example. Eusebius’s work reminds us that our faith is a faith concerning real events—events that took place in time and space here in this world—not in some imaginary realm. These events could be, and were, written down as real history by real historians. It is true; we come to Christ in faith, but not in blind faith. Eusebius’s work helps us see the reality of that faith.

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Grace and peace,

Pastor Jym