2. Genre and Eusebius’ Ecclesiastical History: Toward a Focused Debate [1]

David J. DeVore

Eusebius’ Ecclesiastical History is universally acknowledged as a watershed in historiographical presentation, the most innovative history since the fifth century BC: it quotes previous texts promiscuously, avoids placing orations into characters’ mouths, incorporates literary history, and lacks causal relations between successive episodes. But it is a priori doubtful that the Ecclesiastical History either fell from the sky, distinctively formed and alien to classical tradition, or that its lines of participation in Greek historiographical genres are untraceable. The text explicitly participates in an 800-year, diverse tradition of Greek historia, competing with the Greek historiographical tradition. [2] The term historia, of course, could designate anything from a synchronic geographical survey to a novelistic narrative, labeling numerous subgenres and combinations of genres; nonetheless, Eusebius’ title pointed to at least one of these groups of texts as precedent for its form, content, and/or rhetoric. [3]

Scholars have submitted a wide range of opinions as to what kind of history the Ecclesiastical History is. In 1892, Franz Overbeck argued that it presented the Christian past “als die Geschichte des Christenvolkes . . . gleich den anderen Völkern.” [4] In his influential Pauly-Wissowa article published in 1907, Eduard Schwartz pronounced that the historia in Ekklēsiastikē Historia “bedeutet die Sammlung von überliefertem Material.” [5] Timothy Barnes characterized the text in 1981 as combining both “a novel kind of national history” and “inevitably also a literary or philosophical history.” [6] More recent assessments have described the Ecclesiastical History as “a ‘media history,’ a special genre on a new topic,” [7] or as “a transgeneric cross” between historiography and apologetics. [8]

This smattering of generic pronouncements brings into the open a mostly latent debate about the genre of Eusebius’ new history. [9] As occurs with latent debates, scholars’ views depend on categories that resonate in quite separate spheres of texts’ operations. Volksgeschichte and “literary or philosophical history” classify a thematic subject; Materialsammlung names a method of research as manifested in mode of presentation; “media history” acts as an analogy that foregrounds the text’s modes of influencing its target audience; and “apologetic historiography” emphasizes how the author intends the text to influence his readers.

Such a range of published views has the virtue of drawing numerous readings and insights from the text. [10] Yet scholars’ disconnections about which traits determine a text’s genre have occluded a focused debate on the kind of text that the Ecclesiastical History is. To take the categories employed in the generic pronouncements above: the same text can cover a people, take the form of a collection of sources, employ “medial” modes of influencing audiences, lack connections between units, and function to defend a social group—even though the scholars quoted above surely disagree with one another about many aspects of the Ecclesiastical History. [11] Discussion of Eusebian historiography has not yet forged a common set of questions or heuristic categories that can allow points of disagreement to emerge with clarity. Scholars, in short, are talking past each other.

Of course, the object of study itself resists easy classification: the Ecclesiastical History’s universally acknowledged originality does not make easy work of generic identification. [12] We could sidestep the genre question altogether. In a commendable recent survey of Eusebius’ historiographical influences, Sébastien Morlet judiciously avoided assigning a genre to the Ecclesiastical History. [13] Yet even in such a circumspect assessment, a tension surfaces: Morlet’s conclusion conjoins an acknowledgment of Eusebian originality with the historian’s concomitant influence from “[le] genre historiographique antique.” [14] Eusebius’ history was innovative, yet he drew his methods from a long and rich generic tradition. Historiography is considered a genre, yet the Ecclesiastical History is sui generis. Indeed, rather than discuss Eusebius’ use of historiographical subgenres, Morlet points almost exclusively to specific Judean and Christian historical narratives (the Deuteronomistic history and Chronicles in the Hebrew Bible, Josephus’ histories, the Acts of the Apostles) as Eusebian models, as well as some texts within “l’historiographique païenne.” [15] Can we explain Eusebian historiography only in terms of specific paradigmatic texts, and not trace the Ecclesiastical History’s participation in contemporary historiographical genres? Put another way: Eusebius had no way of knowing that others would write ecclesiastical history with his text as their model: ekklēsiastikē historia could have simply remained the title solely for his text, not the designation of a new genre. If Rufinus, Socrates, Sozomen, Theodoret, and the rest had not written, where would we locate the Ecclesiastical History within Greek historiography?

In this chapter I argue that the field of genre studies can help in articulating how the Ecclesiastical History participated in discourses circulating and proliferating at the time of its composition and aim to promote a more explicit discussion of the genre of the Ecclesiastical History. To do so I not only apply concepts through which such a debate may take place, but also stake out a position on the genre(s) of Eusebian historiography. As a theoretical foundation, I first summarize a theory of genre, that of the Australian literary theorist John Frow, to highlight what genre does in literary texts. Second, I apply five criteria for generic classification formulated by John Marincola, a leading scholar of ancient historiography, to the Ecclesiastical History in order to decipher some of the generic choices that Eusebius made. I conclude by outlining how Eusebius’ choices in these five aspects of his text signaled his participation in carefully selected strands of the Greek historiographical tradition and shaped his construction of Christianity.

All instances of human communication assume and convey meaning only as related to other instances of communication, as they fit into webs of similar kinds of communications. As Bakhtin famously argued, every kind of verbal communication, from a simple command from one individual to another all the way up to the modern novel, draws much of its meaning from its association with a recognizable class of speech. [16] To apprehend the genre of an enunciation, the speaker or recipient must determine certain formal, thematic, and rhetorical elements, as well as social situation and physical setting, that surround the enunciation. [17] The recipients of any enunciation can understand how the enunciation is meant to be received and can enter into dialogue with the speaker (or, as some might view it, with the enunciation) only by presuming the kind of enunciation that is expressed.

As Bakhtin recognized, societies collude to order their enunciations into particular generic groupings. These groupings contain latent networks of background information shared between speakers and audiences, which speakers can use to color and empower their enunciations, and upon which audiences must draw to interpret them. Drawing upon theoretical work in linguistics and cognitive science, John Frow has composed a perceptive synthesis of genre theory. Frow conceptualizes genre as a linguistic means of organizing information, one among the clusters of categories (“schemata”) by which humans organize their knowledge of the world.

Cognitive science shows that our brains channel new knowledge into compartments containing the clusters of our previous knowledge. Information is thus processed as if through networks. In order to make new knowledge meaningful within the structures of our already-constructed worldview, we cluster related bodies of knowledge together, storing information through “associative networks, ‘knowledge nets,’ the nodes of which are ‘propositions, schemas, frames, scripts, production rules.’” [18] Thereafter, once new knowledge has been integrated into our cognitive networks: If we conceptualize the cognitive processes of channeling, storing, and accessing knowledge as informational networks, then genres can be viewed as one of the network’s nodes, functioning as one of Frow’s “schemas, frames, scripts, production rules.” “Genre cues act rather like context-sensitive drop-down menus in a computer program, directing me to the layers and sub-layers of information that respond to my purposes as a speaker or a reader or a viewer.” [19] Thus, the recently fashionable concern with ancient practices of organizing knowledge must depend (at least in part) on an appreciation of the power of genre. [20] Furthermore, discussion of the Ecclesiastical History’s genre (rather than historical veracity or use of sources, as so often) encourages sensitivity to its fundamental role in the organization of knowledge in the late Roman Empire.

Frow’s articulation of genre as a frame for communicating information has several consequences relevant to understanding genre. First, genres will vary from reading community to reading community according to schemata available to and shared among each one. Any new literary work will show points of dialogue with kinds of speech salient in the author’s culture. In seeking to map out generic connections, therefore, we cannot assume any universal genres, but must look for the communicative schemata available to communities of authors and audiences. [21]

Second, unlike many prescriptive theories of genre, this theory of genre is fundamentally descriptive. [22] Genre becomes prescriptive only insofar as institutions within a society prescribe certain specific genres as normative. (To recognize such a practice is, of course, itself a descriptive act.)

Third, no literary genre is ever fully distinct from all other genres. As Bakhtin emphasized, speech genres in general, and individual texts in particular, absorb and incorporate many other genres into themselves. Similarly, if genres are the nodes of informational networks, then any network can create a node to channel information from any other network. [23]

Fourth, because speech genres result from individual societies’ shared and organically ordered kinds of speech, genres—especially complex ones instantiated in written texts—wield the potential to change considerably over time. [24] It is true that genres must appear somewhat stable in order for societies to order knowledge around them. Genres would thus seem to be a mechanism for cultural stability. But as semiotic entities, genres are inherently incapable of maintaining stability. [25] Accordingly, the transposition or deconstruction of old configurations and generic signs remain available to any agent as strategies for reworking a culture’s symbolic resources. [26] The historiographical tradition in which Eusebius participated had therefore undergone wide diversification, and thus offered many recognizable schemata through which he could impart his knowledge of the church.

Because genres are unstable and overlap with one another, the theory of genre employed here assumes that the schemata by which societies order their knowledge are in constant flux, a flux rooted in the reimagination and reconfiguration that each new text works upon the classes that it enters into. No text can “belong” to a genre, as if the genre is simply a class indistinct from all others. Whereas “belonging” indicates a fixed control that a classification exerts on a text, such control does not exist in practice, as texts are constantly reconfiguring each class’s boundaries. A more fruitful conceptualization of the relationship between text and genre is that texts “perform” the latent schemata available in genres, so that a textual performance creates a relationship of dialogue or participation with generic schemata. [27] Since literary texts encompass and recontextualize different kinds of speech genres, each new literary performance will transpose various available genres with one another. [28] Each text can therefore be said to participate in the various schemata: each new performance, in textual, visual, or social form, will therefore re-form, extend, and test audiences’ conceptions of their schemata, and thus change them. [29]

How should we identify the manifestation of Eusebius’ performances within the historiographical (and the wider Greek literary) tradition? Drawing on the later work of Gérard Genette, Frow points to the concept of generic cues (alluded to above): The determination of a text’s genre is largely the detection of these generic cues, the formal, thematic, and rhetorical gestures that signify dialogue with salient groups of known texts. The next section will apply one method for revealing some of Ecclesiastical History’s generic cues.

If “genre” refers to culturally contingent schemata for organizing communicated information, then we must locate the Ecclesiastical History within the genre(s) that were salient within Eusebius’ literary culture. The Greek historiographical tradition in which the Ecclesiastical History participated was rich and wide-ranging, and in it there was constant tension between the paradigmatic texts inculcated as models and the incentives of literary competition that encouraged innovation. [31] We therefore need criteria for assessing genre that reveal a text’s lines of connection with this historiographical tradition, viz. criteria that can expose its generic cues. Such criteria might serve as the common language needed to advance debate about the Ecclesiastical History’s genre.

Classicist John Marincola formulated just such a set of criteria a little over a decade ago, which seems not to have impacted the study of Eusebius as it could have. These criteria, Marincola writes, enable the scholar “to look at the totality of an historical work before forming conclusions about its nature and purpose.” [32] They are neither independent from one another, nor do they constitute a closed system: their use is heuristic, as ciphers for identifying the schemata that distinguish historiographical subgenres. Marincola’s criteria are: [33] (1) narrative or non-narrative, (2) focalization, (3) chronological limits, (4) chronological arrangement, and (5) subject matter. In what follows, I explain each criterion before applying it to the Ecclesiastical History.

What choices did Eusebius make in each of these areas of the Ecclesiastical History? The following exposition will reveal the outlines to Eusebius’ generic cues, allowing me in the final section of this chapter to draw a hypothesis about which genre(s) within Greek historiography Eusebius put into performance in the Ecclesiastical History.

Historians could “write an historical synchronic narrative or . . . a more diachronic descriptive method, or some combination of the two.” Chronography, Marincola notes, may have different narrative patterns from Zeitgeschichte, but they are both equally narratival; and while “descriptions of the lands or customs of a people are usually diachronic and ‘timeless,’” yet “these too can be concerned with causation and explanation, as seen most easily in Herodotus.” The Greek historiographical tradition offered several modes for narrating time and for explaining events, and the authorial decision of how to structure these (both for the text as a whole and for individual units) placed his text in a tradition immediately. [34]

For his part, Eusebius chose a narrative arrangement for the Ecclesiastical History, when he could have chosen to organize his history geographically—according to the events of each of the four apostolic sees, for instance—or thematically, like ethnographic historiai. Both modes of organization were common among Greek historians. [35] Eusebius’ narratival structure thus signaled participation in the more specific traditions of Greek narrative history, such as war monographs (like Thucydides’ Peloponnesian War or Josephus’ Judean War), histories of a specific people or place (like local histories, Xenophon’s Hellenica, Dionysius of Halicarnassus’ Roman Antiquities, Josephus’ Judean Antiquities, or Cassius Dio’s and Herodian’s Roman Histories), and “universal” (perhaps better termed “transnational”) histories (like Polybius’, Diodorus’, and Appian’s Histories).

On the other hand, Eusebius’ ecclesiastical narrative is notable for its sequential discontinuity. The reader rarely gets the impression that one event or personal notice has any causal relationship with preceding or coming events. This disjunction between events lies behind the repeated scholarly comment that the Ecclesiastical History is a “static history.” [36] It is necessary to note, however, that some subgenres of Greek historiography could shun causal connection between events. Certain kinds of local histories, including the “sacred histories” of temples, could avoid causal connectivity. [37] So too could Greek “lives” or biography, a genre with considerable overlap with history. [38] In short, Eusebius’ choice to write a narrative, but a discontinuous narrative, of the church’s past associated the Ecclesiastical History with certain strands of the Greek historical tradition.

Moreover, although the Ecclesiastical History is structured narrativally, many of its individual units are non-narrative. I refer here specifically to the many non-narratival “profiles” that Eusebius inserts to describe individual Christians, Judeans, “heretics,” and emperors. [39] In these profiles, the Eusebian narrator paints a generalized portrait of a character without regard for narrative sequence. [40] The character’s location of activity and/or ethnicity, ecclesiastical office or professional identification, connections with teachers, students, and other important individuals, written works (including sacred texts used), travels, virtues or vices, and circumstances of death appear frequently in these profiles. The Eusebian narrator will sometimes compile this data in his own voice, and sometimes through quotation of other texts. Take, for example, Eusebius’ profile of Julius Africanus: Here the Eusebian narrator introduces Africanus through a temporal indication that synchronizes Africanus with contemporary Christian luminaries. The profile is ordered around a list of Africanus’ written works, presenting some details about the arguments and debates he sets forth in these. Although mini-narratives—epistolary exchanges with Origen and (as can easily be inferred) with Aristides, a visit to the brilliant Heraclas—hover under the profile’s surface, in itself the profile gives no indication of any specific chronological sequence of these events, nor does it indicate any causal relationships among them. Africanus’ literary production garners praise (his Chronographies are ἐπ’ ἀκριβὲς πεπονημένα, he proves the harmony of Matthew’s and Luke’s genealogies σαφέστατα—as the Eusebian narrator had indicated by quoting this letter at length in HE 1.7). On this list of literary works the narrator hangs data pertinent to two themes: interactions with important contemporaries and the character’s researches into biblical history.

The Ecclesiastical History—particularly, but not exclusively, in books two through seven—deploys many such synchronic profiles of key individuals. It employs different structures for doing so, and sometimes (as in the cases of the apostle John, Irenaeus, Origen, and Dionysius of Alexandria) carries these profiles across several chapters. [41] While before Eusebius Greek narrative historians had paused their narratives to assess characters who participate in the narrated events, [42] it is difficult to find one who had so thoroughly interwoven characters’ profiles with the course of passing time. The Ecclesiastical History thus opens up a seam in the binary between narrative and non-narrative history: macroscopically narrative, its constituent units are regularly non-narrative. Eusebius’ use of the literary profile enables his history to straddle a border between two modes of historiographical organization.

Marincola defines this criterion, drawn from narratology, as “the focus or orientation or point of view from which one tells the story.” [43] The possible focalizers defined by Marincola range on a spectrum according to their size, from individuals, to cities, to nations, to the entire known world. Marincola further notes that the focalization often corresponds to the arrangement of the history, and in particular to its dating system (see “Chronological arrangement” below). [44]

The Ecclesiastical History is nearly always told as through the eyes of the “orthodox” Christian church (as bounded by Eusebius). As Marie Verdoner has recently argued in a superb article on the Ecclesiastical History’s implied audience, the Eusebian narrator not only assumes knowledge of Christian holy texts, but also accepts their sacred status; the narrator omits discussion of Christian doctrine out of an assumption that the reader knows it; and the narrator is so unabashedly partisan—lacking defensiveness!—on behalf of the Christians as to presume a positive opinion of Christianity on the part of the reader. [45] The narrator rarely allows the text to reproduce the perspective of non-Christians, the only common contexts for extra-Christian perspective being quotations of Judean authors and imperial edicts and rescripts. [46]

The Ecclesiastical History thus maintains an intra-Christian perspective on the events and personalities that it recounts. But as Marincola’s spectrum of focalizers indicates, a choice to limit a history’s perspective to the collective viewpoint of a single (even if translocal) community was nothing new in Greek historiography: national histories like Josephus’ Judean Antiquities and Cassius Dio’s Roman History display the same focalization. [47] It cannot be coincidence that the Eusebian narrator labels the church as a “nation” (ethnos, 1.4.2, 10.4.19; cf. 5.pref.2, 9.1.5); [48] his focalization through Christian eyes follows the conventional focalizations of other national histories narrated from the point of view of a member of the portrayed group, as in the Judean Antiquities. The “orthodox” Christian focalization of the text places the Ecclesiastical History right into the center of Marincola’s spectrum, mapping onto his category of perspective of a nation.

Historians could choose to write starting at (or even before) their subject’s origins, or could write only about more recent times, or could pick an intermediate period, or some time in between. The chronological boundaries reveal what Hayden White famously called the “emplotment” of a history: “. . . it cannot be denied that historians ‘read’ the events of their history in a certain way, and if, for example, an historian sees his subject as glorious, he might begin and end differently from one who saw the same events as comic and inglorious.” In other words, “the choice of what time period to embrace carries with it consequences for the patterning of meaning produced by that work.” [49] As Marincola notes, a longer, universal history can follow a tighter plot, but also feature “greater adornment,” than a longer, national history.

Eusebius’ chronological limits are fairly straightforward: he begins his continuous narrative from the reign of Herod and birth of Jesus at HE 1.5. True, after his preface (1.1) the narrator launches into some temporally transcendent theological prolegomena about the nature of Christ. But this does not stretch the narrative’s chronological boundaries in any original way, for Herodotus and Thucydides (both of whose histories Eusebius knew) [50] had each written introductory “archaeologies” of protohistoric events that set the narratival tone for their respective war histories (Herodotus 1.1–4, Thucydides 1.2–19; and note also the internal “Sicilian Archaeology” at Thucydides 6.1–5). Eusebius’ extended introduction has some of the same functions as these exemplary historiographical introductions. [51] On the other hand, the text’s chronological boundaries are properly the reign of Herod and the author’s own time. [52]

As Marincola suggests, the choice of chronological boundaries has consequences for the emplotment of the Ecclesiastical History. Eusebius’ starting and ending points seem commonsensical for a narrative of the institution of the church, as Christianity was known to have arisen with the life of Jesus. Yet there is a tension here, since Eusebius spent much of his “archaeology” arguing that Christianity was no revolutionary phenomenon. Several clever strategies enable the narrator to finesse the all-but-acknowledged novelty of Christianity (cf. 1.4.2). This “Christian Archaeology” (HE 2.pref.1) finds temporally deep roots for Christianity in claims that its founder had a transtemporal existence and a strong Auswirkung on the glorious Hebrews of the past (HE 1.2, elaborated more fully in Eusebius’ Praeparatio Evangelica 7), in prophecies (HE 1.3), and in the claim that Christians were the real heirs of the ancient Hebrews (HE 1.4). After the narrative proper begins, the narrator creates legitimacy for Jesus as leader of the Hebrews: since Herod had appropriated the selection of Judean high priests, the Judean high priesthood no longer had a claim to act as God’s earthly representative (HE 1.6). [53] The Eusebian narrator’s insertion of an “archaeological” prolegomenon and a strained narrative of the end of the Judean high priesthood constitute external analepses [54] that create “preincarnate” origins for the Christian nation. Both techniques, drawing on previous historiographical traditions, allowed Eusebius to have it both ways, beginning at the foundations of Christianity, but projecting his nation’s origins much further back in time.

Marincola points out how some Greek histories followed events annalistically, usually according to the sequence of holders of major offices. “One can also use kings or magistrates (κατ’ ἄρχοντας καὶ βασιλέας) to give structure, especially where these rulers themselves are the instigators or subject of historical actions . . . Another method of arrangement is to write according to area or category (κατὰ γένος), treating the events by theater of action within a multi-year time period.” [55] Each arrangement associated a new history with certain paradigmatic texts. And these arrangements were not mutually exclusive: even annalistic historians like Thucydides took their readers on thematic or analeptic digressions. [56]

Eusebius famously organized the Ecclesiastical History not by years, but by corresponding terms in office of Roman emperors on the one hand, and on the other of contemporary Christian bishops of (in order of their foundation) Jerusalem, Antioch, Rome, and Alexandria. The reigns of emperors and the episcopates of leading bishops act as milestones between which the Eusebian narrator plants narratives or profiles of certain specified kinds of content.

Marincola associates chronological arrangement with historiographical focalization (see “Focalization” above), noting that “an annalistic arrangement clearly worked well for histories with a single focalization.” [57] Despite his singular focalization, Eusebius rejected such an annalistic chronology. I would suggest five possible reasons for this. First, Eusebius had a historiographical precedent for structuring a history according to the term in office of the institutional head: the books of Kings and Chronicles in the Hebrew Bible, though in many respects the Ecclesiastical History diverges from these texts. [58] Second, unlike (say) Athenian archons, Spartan ephors, or Roman consuls, Christian bishops did not hold their office on annual, or otherwise fixed, terms, nor did churches traditionally count the number of years that bishops held their offices. It was therefore difficult for Eusebius to recover precise dates for his bishops’ years in office in the first place, let alone synchronize them with the events that he narrated. Third, as most of the scanty narratival flowers that Eusebius picked from his meadow of sources (HE 1.1.3–4) lacked precise dates, an annular dating was impossible, though the Eusebian narrator supplies annual dates repeatedly. [59] To fudge the problem of his sources’ chronological imprecision, Eusebius could date events to within a single emperor’s reign—and sometimes his sources made even this impossible and it is transparent that his dating of an event represents a guess. [60] Fourth, Eusebius’ relatively paltry number of narratives and profiles may have made an annual dating system less desirable in the first place. For example, Eusebius notes just two events during Hadrian’s twenty-one-year reign (the Bar-Kochba revolt at HE 4.6, and Hadrian’s rescript warning against seeking Christians out at 4.9). If the Eusebian narrator had dated each event to the year, the reader might easily have seen how few events Eusebius had to report. Fifth, dating according to emperors’ and bishops’ time in office made it easier to insert non-narratival profiles into the text: the narrator could simply say “at this time” [61] and begin his description of a key individual from the past, without having to date events involving that figure precisely.

While Eusebius’ chronology is vaguer than that of most previous narrative histories of similar, “national,” focalization, the arrangement nonetheless communicated an “orthodox” Christian perspective in part by foregrounding the institutional figureheads of the nation—just as the Atthidographers had foregrounded an Athenian perspective through their archon-dates, and Roman historians a Roman perspective by consular dating. [62]

As noted above, since Herodotus historia could include almost any aspect of the life of a person or people: “there are, of course, political and military deeds, but there are also cultural events and activities; the religious life of a state and its people, the customs of a people . . . ; and even the lives and characters of a state’s leaders, particularly important when a state is ruled by a single man or woman.” [63] Thematic content that we now separate into ethnography, “antiquarianism,” geography, biography (despite the declaration of Plutarch, Alexander 1), [64] political and war narratives, and even “paradoxography” (collections of marvels) all coexisted under the banner of historia in the ancient Mediterranean. Historians were always free to inject content from any of these thematic fields into their historiai.

More than just saying that he would narrate a history of a certain people, the Eusebian narrator famously (and, within the tradition of Greek historiography, idiosyncratically) [65] set forth the subjects of the Ecclesiastical History in the first, 167-word sentence of his history. In summary form, the topics are: [66]

1. The successions (διαδοχάς) of the holy apostles to the implied author’s time.
2. Events transacted throughout ecclesiastical history.
3. Leaders and officials (ἡγήσαντό τε καὶ προέστησαν) in the most important church communities (παροικίαις).
4. Ambassadors (τὸν θεῖον ἐπρέσβευσαν λόγον) of the divine Logos, orally or in writing.
5. Innovators and introducers of knowledge falsely-called.
6. The Judeans’ desserts for their plot against the Savior.
7. Attacks on the divine Logos (πεπολέμηται) by the nations (τὰ ἔθνη).
8. Martyrdoms in previous times and in the implied author’s own time.
9. The rescue of the church by the Savior.

The Eusebian narrator clings closely to this list of topics for the duration of the text. [67] Some of these topics seem to correspond to the subject matter of genres outside of, or at least marginal to, the domain of historiography: the reference to “knowledge falsely so-called” (ψευδωνύμου γνώσεως) echoes the title of Irenaeus’ Examination and Refutation of Knowledge Falsely-Called (ψευδωνύμου γνώσεως, itself an echo of 1 Timothy 6:20) and thereby evokes the genre of Christian heresiological refutation; [68] while the last three topics allude to summaries of persecution in Christian apologetic speeches and to Christian martyr narratives.

The preface speaks, moreover, of major events transacted, and of portraits of ecclesiastical leaders and ambassadors—all subjects that one would expect in the history of a state. Of course, Eusebius uses some specifically Christian language to introduce these leaders of the church: proistēmi in participial form was a common generic term for Christian clergy. [69] The reader could thus expect to find specifically Christian officials transacting specifically Christian modes of “governance” in this narrative. [70]

In addition, it cannot be coincidental that the Eusebian narrator drops the verb polemeō to introduce his last three, martial topics. This corresponds to the generic cue sent in what I would call the History’s“second preface”: Here the narrator contrasts himself with “other historians” who busied themselves with recording wars. A rhetorical tactic drawing on a then-prevalent dichotomy between the material and psychical realms underpins the critique of Greek Kriegsgeschichte: the narrator does not flinch at the subject of war, but elevates his characters’ struggles to a higher plane. Eusebius must have made a strategic decision (pun intended) to place this second preface immediately before his lengthy reproduction of excerpts from the Acts of the Martyrs of Lugdunum and Vienna. [72] In this text, martyrs resist the pains and threats leveled against them by Satan (HE 5.1.5–6, 14, 16, 25–27, 35), remaining staunchly loyal to God through tortures and public humiliation.

While the martyrs of Lugdunum exemplify this new kind of Eusebian Kriegsgeschichte, [73] they (as well as the lengthy quotation of the Martyrdom of Polycarp, which had come shortly before at 4.15) are merely the most prominent martyrs in the Ecclesiastical History. Every book, from Book 2 through Book 8, records multiple martyrdom narratives. [74] The martyrdom narratives are spaced fairly evenly throughout the text, so that readers encounter frequent reminders that the church was under constant attack. As in the Martyrs of Lugdunum and Vienna, the reader is coaxed into seeing Satan’s agency behind the attacks on the church. Accordingly, the Eusebian narrator twice quotes Dionysius of Alexandria’s cries against the demons behind persecutions, and supports this identification of the church’s enemy by locating demons behind Christians’ trials during persecutions in his own voice. [75] Both the narrator’s own voice and his evocations of other Christian voices paint a Christianity in regular combat; and both the narrator’s and other voices depict a diabolical enemy frequently attacking the Christian nation, until the very end of the text. [76]

Another crucial piece of Eusebian subject matter emerges in the preface, namely the text’s emphasis on the intellectual achievements and achievers in the church’s past. The clause noting ambassadors of the divine Logos “orally or in writing” prefigures the Ecclesiastical History’s emphasis on literary history, as noted earlier in relation to Eusebius’ profile of Julius Africanus: one of the most frequent kinds of content in the profiles noted above are catalogues of literary texts written by Christian (and Judean, and sometimes “heretical”) authors. In the same clause, it should not be overlooked that the verb πρεσβεύω, whose participial form is usually translatable as “ambassadors,” could also signify “engagement,” “study,” or “interpretation” of a corpus of intellectual texts. [77] The intellectual reminiscences continue in the next clause with disparagement of “innovators of knowledge falsely so-called”: this mention of teachers of false doctrines (met in Eusebius’ profiles of and narratives involving “heretics”) promised further intellectual-historical thematization.

Eusebius’ very first clause suggested an additional intellectual-historical theme. It is true that since the second century Christian heresiologists had appealed to successions of bishops, who purportedly received the teaching of their predecessors in a chain of transmission back to Christ’s apostles, to confirm their claim to the correct teachings of Christ. But in previous historiographical literature, diadochē had signified both successions of rulers and the successions of the leaders of philosophical sects. [78] Eusebius could hardly have been unaware that he was invoking historiographical traditions that stressed succession when he chose as the first five words of his Ekklēsiastikē Historia: τὰς τῶν ἱερῶν ἀποστόλων διαδοχάς.

The previous section has yielded the generic cues embedded in the Ecclesiastical History; this section will outline the Greek genres to which those cues point.

That the Ecclesiastical History’s subject matter incorporates numerous elements from other prominent Christian literary genres poses no problem for, and even enhances, the text’s self-situation as a history. [79] The Eusebian narrator quotes regularly from apologetic texts such as Justin’s and Tertullian’s Apologies, and, as Verdoner has recently shown, employs standard apologetic techniques both to defend Christianity and to settle certain scores on internal Christian debates. [80] Heresiological cues define the borders between Christians and their enemies that lurk within the church. [81] Citations of memoirs and textual commentaries yield anecdotes about historical individuals and allow the narrator to trace the sacralization of Christian holy books. Eusebius incorporates excerpts from each of these genres, prevalent in pre-Christian literature and all having an apologetic or polemical purpose, into his text. As a consequence, some modern scholars have labeled Eusebius’ History as “apologetic history,” a label that is accurate as far as it goes. [82] Greek historiography had always evoked, absorbed, entered dialogue with, and competed with other genres and remained no less historiographical. [83] But such pronouncements that Eusebius created a completely new genre must not obscure his participation in Greek historiographical genres.

Marincola’s criteria for assessing an ancient history’s genre have revealed that many of the formal and thematic cues that structure the Ecclesiastical History hearken to a genre narrating the temporally progressing course of events involving a particular nation, “national historiography.” This associated Eusebius’ History with other Greek histories that told the story of a particular nation, such as Dionysius of Halicarnassus’ Roman Antiquities, Josephus’ Judean Antiquities, and Cassius Dio’s Roman History. [84] Like these texts, the Ecclesiastical History is structured as a narrative. Like the Judean Antiquities, it includes some discontinuities within that narratival structure, as it must juxtapose events from the same time that involve the same nation, but that are not causally related. Its chronological boundaries match those of these histories exactly: all relate events from the founding of the social group up to either the present, or some carefully chosen point in time. [85] The Eusebian chronological arrangement mirrors those of the national histories: where Dio dated events by consular year, Dionysius by Roman kings’ and then consuls’ years in office together with Olympian dates, and Josephus’ Judean Antiquities, like the histories of the Hebrew Bible, by the reign of whatever monarch was head of the state ruling the Jews, [86] Eusebius ordered his events and personalities with emperors’ reigns and bishops’ episcopates. As in these histories, the Ecclesiastical History’s narration is focalized through the perspective of its subject people, the Christian church, with only rare deviations. Much of the History’s subject matter—events, leaders, and external conflicts—also parallels that of national historiography.

Picking up on this last theme, the war monograph receives special attention and dialogue from the Eusebian narrator. To insert content from the domain of Kriegsgeschichte into a national history was obviously nothing new, nor is Eusebius’ participation in this historiographical genre any new revelation: over a century ago Franz Overbeck argued that the persecutions and martyrdoms, as well as the fate of the Judeans, correspond to the martial themes of national histories. [87] Focus on the woes of the Judeans, in Eusebius’ presentation of the earliest foes of the Jesus movement, would provoke no surprise in readers of a national history. However, that the Eusebian narrator lines up martyrdom narratives to compete with earlier Greek Kriegsgeschichte was a bold and original literary stratagem. Whereas most national histories did not narrate a single, continuous war, [88] the Ecclesiastical History depicts one continuous conflict, the church’s struggle with Satan and his demons, which persists from HE 2.13 until the end of the first edition of the History. [89] So martyrdoms, rather than traditional hand-to-hand combat, would be the struggle through which Christian warriors would defeat antagonists and win everlasting glory.

Finally, perhaps Eusebius’ most original generic move was to insert topoi that foreground intellectual achievement into a national history of Christianity. It is difficult to find a pre-Eusebian Greek national historian who, for example, inscribed catalogues of authors’ written texts into his history, or invested rhetorical capital into praising characters’ intellectual achievements. [90] There was, however, a subgenre of historia that communicated such subject matter, which can be called intellectual historiography.

A number of scholars have suggested intellectual (or philosophical) historiography (or biography) as a model for Eusebian historiography. [91] Just one scholarly treatment of the question longer than five pages has yet appeared; the generic cues that point toward intellectual historiography are numerous and unmistakable. First, as was hinted above, the first five words of the Ecclesiastical History—τὰς τῶν ἱερῶν ἀποστόλων διαδοχάς—evoke one particular Hellenistic historical subgenre of philosophical historiography, a series of texts entitled Successions of Philosophers. [92] Eusebius’ use of concurrent successions of bishops to structure his history mirrored the successions of philosophers used by philosophical historians to confirm the continuity of the great philosophical schools.

Second, Eusebius’ profiles invite comparison with intellectual biography: “lives” of intellectuals were often quite short and succinct, offering the most crucial details about a philosopher’s life. One can compare the profile of Julius Africanus above to one of the shorter biographies of Diogenes Laertius (writing middle of the third century):

Diogenes Laertius begins with the homeland and teachers of Sphaerus of Bosporus. The connection to Zeno places Sphaerus in book 7 of the Lives and Opinions of the Famous Philosophers, in the “Stoic succession” (cf. Diogenes Laertius 7.37). The Laertian narrator stresses the biographical subject’s progress (προκοπήν), a key Stoic buzzword, similarly as Eusebius’ narrator had complimented Julius Africanus with the scholarly virtue of akribeia. Diogenes not only connects Sphaerus to his Stoic teachers (analogously to Eusebius’ association of bishops and teachers in diadochai), but also depicts him traveling to the court of another famous contemporary, king Ptolemy IV Philopator (r. 221–205 BC). Similarly, in HE 6.31, Eusebius’ profile of Julius Africanus had connected its subject with Heraclas of Alexandria by noting Julius Africanus’ journey to visit Heraclas. Diogenes’ anecdote about Sphaerus trying to save face and philosophical doctrine before Ptolemy, and then against Mnesistratus’ accusation, mirrors Eusebius’ citation of Africanus’ epistolary exchange with Origen, where (so the narrator implies) Origen corrects Africanus. A catalogue of Sphaerus’ writings concludes the Life; as HE 6.31 exemplifies, Eusebius also catalogues the writings of profiled individuals frequently. [93]

Third, I would underscore Eusebius’ use of the specific theme of literary history, in particular through the formal device of catalogues of written texts. As in Diogenes’ Life of Sphaerus, cataloguing a subject’s writings was a common strategy for intellectual historiographers. Sotion, the author of the prototypical Successions of Philosophers (ca. 200 BC), had included catalogues of texts written by the philosophers that he mentioned (frs. 6, 19, 24 Wehrli=Diogenes Laertius 2.85, 6.80, 8.7). Multiple catalogues of texts written by their subject authors had marked the philosophical lives of both Diogenes Laertius (passim) and Porphyry (Life of Plotinus 4–6, 24–26). Likewise, Eusebius’ cataloguing of literary texts fixed a Christian stake in the field of literary achievement.

Fourth, the above-noted perception that Eusebius wrote a “static history” also mirrors the structural practices of intellectual historiography. The intellectual histories that survive from near Eusebius’ time—along with Diogenes Laertius’ Lives and Opinions and Porphyry’s Life of Plotinus, we have Philostratus’ Lives of the Sophists, Porphyry’s Life of Pythagoras, which probably formed part of Porphyry’s Philosophical History, and Iamblichus’ On the Pythagorean Life—all marginalize or neglect the transformation of human groups and institutions, though Porphyry’s two Lives supply a meta-narratival arc in relating the lives of their respective biographical subjects. It was perfectly typical for texts focused on the deeds and character of particular individuals—especially an individual not involved with political affairs—to paint a static image of their subject matter. [94] Instead of narrating periods of change in a society, intellectual historiographers described the beginning and end of an intellectual’s life, and in between (or sometimes before and after these events) they would note friends, relatives, teachers, and other acquaintances, narrate anecdotes, present teachings and the habits of daily life, and quote texts written by or about their biographical subjects. Eusebius’ profiles, written as mini- (or in some cases not-so-mini-) “lives,” present virtually the same range of thematic content, using the same range of literary forms. [95]

I hope to have shown that genre studies are a useful tool for understanding and interpreting the Ecclesiastical History and to have suggested a useful theoretical framework for debate on the genre of this tricky text. Rather than employing static and universalistic generic categories, we should view genres as dynamic and contingent, and more specifically, as culturally specific schemata for organizing and presenting information within humans’ networks of knowledge. These schemata are constituted by certain formal, thematic, and rhetorical “cues,” embedded in each text or other media that point to the pathways between cognitive nodes. By deploying such cues, texts both participate in these genres, and reconfigure them for the use of future readers and writers.

Eusebius incorporated several genres, both historiographical and extra-historiographical, both pre-Christian and Christian, into his text: cues toward heresiology, apology, and martyr drama amalgamate and overlap with national, war, and intellectual historiography. The Ecclesiastical History thus sets previous historiographical genres into dialogue—and sometimes pits them into contests—with genres anchored in contemporary Christian discourse. [96] The innovative blend of these genres not only constructed a novel subgenre named after this seminal Ekklēsiastikē Historia (though Eusebius could not have expected this): since generic schemata draw associations between different realms of knowledge, Eusebius’ generic cues also became the ingredients for a new model of the Christian past. The product, if the generic associations presented here prove cogent, was a vision of a religious group whose past heroes constituted an ethnic nation, an intellectual sect, and an army against supernatural enemies.