It is to this eminent Father that we are indebted for almost all we know
of the lost Christian literature of the time preceding the establishment
of Christianity by Constantine. He was born about 264 or 270, and was a
priest in the time of Diocletian.
During the persecution in that reign he retired to Egypt, where,
however, he was imprisoned, but speedily released. This gave rise to a
suggestion that he had apostatised. "Who art thou, Eusebius?" exclaimed
Potamon, Bishop of Heraclea, at the Council of Tyre, where Eusebius
violently conducted the "persecution of Athanasius," "to judge the
innocent Athanasius. Did'st thou not sit with me in prison in the time
of the tyrant? They plucked out my eye for the confession of the truth.
Thou comest forth unharmed. How didst thou escape?"
In 315 he became Bishop of Caesarea. His friendships were among the Arian
party in the Church, and his views, to say the least, inclined that way,
and Dr. Newman, in his "History of the Arians in the Fourth Century,"
speaks of him as "openly siding with the Arians, and sanctioning and
sharing their deeds of violence." This, however, did not stand in the
way of his sitting beside the Emperor Constantine, at the Council of
Nice, to anathematise and put down the Arians. He subscribed the
Nicene Creed, apparently with some reservations, as to the word
_consubstantial._ It is noticeable that his history breaks off abruptly
before the Council of Nice. Perhaps it was one of those matters he
thought best to suppress as little to the credit of the Church or
himself. Athanasius, Petavius, Baronius, Montfaucon, and Moller consider
him an Arian. Bull, Cave, and Hely, defend his orthodoxy.
On account of his Arianism he has been violently attacked by Cardinal
Baronius, who impugns the faith of the bishop, the character of the man,
and the sincerity of the historian. He makes out Eusebius to have been
simply an ambitious and cruel courtier; calls him a calumniator, a
panegyrist rather than an historian, and accuses him of falsifying the
edicts of Constantine.
Gibbon, in his sixteenth chapter, says: "The gravest of the
ecclesiastical historians, Eusebius himself, indirectly confesses that
he has related whatever might redound to the glory, and that he has
suppressed all that could tend to the disgrace of religion. Such an
acknowledgment will naturally excite a suspicion that a writer who has
so openly violated one of the fundamental laws of history has not paid
a very strict regard to the observance of the other; and the suspicion
will derive additional credit from the character of Eusebius, which was
less tinctured with credulity, and more practised in the arts of
courts than that of almost any of his contemporaries."* "No one," says
Scaliger, "has contributed more to Christian history, and no one has
committed more mistakes." C. B. Waite, ("History of the Christian
Religion," p. 28) goes further and says: "Not only the most unblushing
falsehoods, but literary forgeries of the vilest character darken the
pages of his apologetic and historical writings." G. Reber (p. 104)
says: "If we except Irenaeus, no writer has so studiously put himself to
work to impose falsehoods on the world as Eusebius."
* Dean Milman, in his Notes to Gibbon, vol. ii., p. 285;
1854, speaks of "the loose and, it must be admitted, by no
means scrupulous authority of Eusebius."
Constantine said of him that he ought not only to be bishop of Caesarea,
but bishop of the whole world. In his life of that emperor he amply
repays the flattery. That work is not an history but an extravagant
rhetorical panegyric upon the man who murdered his son Crispus, his
nephew Licinius, suffocated his wife Fausta, and who, to revenge a
pasquinade, was with difficulty restrained from the massacre of Rome,
and who used the altar of the Church, which promised absolution and
offered atonement for all sins, as a convenient footstool to the throne
of the empire. In regard to Constantine's murders, Gibbon says (chap,
xxviii.): "The courtly bishop who has celebrated in an elaborate work
the virtues and piety of his hero, observes a prudent silence on the
subject of these tragic events."
He makes Constantine to have been converted by the miraculous appearance
of a cross in the sky. It is a great question if his account of his
baptism is correct or if he was baptised in Rome by Pope Sylvester.
Indeed, it is a question if Constantine was anything but a Pagan at
heart until the end of his days.
The title of the thirty-first chapter of Eusebius's twelfth book of
"Evangelical Preparation," is a caution. It reads "That falsehood, may
be employed by way of medicine for those who need it." He ascribes to
Porphyry (a learned Pagan who had written against Christianity, but
whose works were destroyed by order of Theodosius) a forgery of his own
time, called "The Philosophy of Oracles," and then cites it as evidence
for Christianity. He gives a forged passage ascribed to Phlegon, where
that Pagan is made to speak of the darkness which happened at the death
of Jesus. If such a passage had been in existence it would have been
mentioned by Origen, who refers to Phlegon, but who in his comment on
Matthew xxvii., 45, concludes we must not be too positive that he spoke
of this darkness in Matthew. He also makes Thallus, another heathen,
bear testimony to the eclipse of the sun--another forgery.
At the very outset of his "Ecclesiastical History," he knocks us over
with a pretended correspondence which passed between Jesus, who, Jerome
says, knew not how to write, and Abgarus, king of Edessa.
This correspondence, wherein Jesus is made to cite the words of the
Gospel of John, written probably a hundred years after, long did duty
among Christian evidences, but is now given up by every critic of note
as a forgery. Addison was one of the last to quote it as genuine.
As it would occupy too much space to follow this Father through all his
misstatements, we shall confine our attention to his misrepresentations
of Josephus. One of the most notorious of these is the account of the
death of Herod Agrippa, grandson of the monster who is supposed to
have ordered the slaughter of all the male children in the inland town
"Bethlehem, and the coasts thereof," on account of an obscure prophecy.
In the 12th chapter of Acts it is stated that Herod, as the people
were calling him a god, was smitten by an angel and was eaten by worms.
Josephus says: "Agrippa, casting his eyes upward, saw an owl, sitting
upon a rope, overhead." Eusebius, in order to make Josephus agree with
the Acts of the Apostles, in transcribing the text of Josephus, struck
out about the owl and substituted an angel. Lardner says: "I know
not what good apology can be made for this." Nor do we, unless that
one-winged fowl is just as good as any other.
He makes Josephus' account of Theudas confirmatory of Acts v., 36;
while, in fact, it disagrees with that account so much as to give
commentators the utmost perplexity. He also, tries to reconcile Josephus
with Luke by confounding the taxing in the time of Herod with that after
the banishment of Arche-laus, who reigned for nine years after Herod's
death. Dr. Lardner's works (vol. i, p. 344) says: "I must confess I
ascribe that not to ignorance but to somewhat a great deal worse. It is
impossible that a man of Eusebius's acuteness, who had the New Testament
and Josephus before him, should think a census made after Archelaus was
the same with that before Herod died; but Eusebius was resolved to have
St. Luke's history confirmed by the express testimony of the Jewish
historian, right or wrong."
Such instances make us suspect Eusebius in regard to the celebrated
interpolation in which Josephus is made to give evidence to Jesus as the
Christ (Antiq. xviii., hi., 3). He at any rate first cited the forgery,
which was unknown to Origen, and distinctly asserts that Josephus did
not acknowledge Christ. Dr. Lardner tells us the style of the paragraph
is very Christian, if it be not the composition of Eusebius himself, as
Tanaquil Faber suspected.