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Christian History: Re-thinking Eusebius

Introduction

Transcript

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Shirley Paulson

Welcome, everybody, to the October 2025 Bible and Beyond Discussion. I’m your host, Shirley Paulson, and tonight we’re so pleased to have with us Dr. Lillian Larsen to chat with us on the Bible and Beyond Discussion. The title for tonight’s program is Christian History: Re-thinking Eusebius. And if you don’t know who Eusebius is yet, you will soon. And I think you’ll be glad to learn what Lillian has to share with us about Eusebius and these developing years of Christianity or Christianities.

We’ve talked about Westar seminars before, and now you get to meet one of the co-chairs of the recent biggest seminar, Christianity II. And if that’s not enough, Professor Lillian Larson is Professor and Chair of Religious Studies at the University of Redlands in California. She holds the Crawford Professorship of Christianity and has devoted her career to exploring the roots of Christianity. Her specialty is in the role of monasticism, especially monastic education and classroom practices. I’m so delighted to have you with us, Lillian. Thanks for being with us tonight.

Lillian Larsen

Thank you for having me, and thank you for the invitation.

Shirley Paulson

Oh, it’s just great. So just to remind everybody, we generally have a chance for people to ask questions, but I get to go first. I’m going to ask Lillian some questions for about the first half hour, and then you all get the microphone for the second half. So be thinking of your questions.

I just wanted to mention about the Westar seminar, what it actually did, that Christianity II Seminar was about what happened after the Nicene Council. So this is an appropriate kind of time for us to talk about it, because this is the 1700th anniversary of that event. And so now we’re going to be talking about what happened next.

And by the way, just so you know, we did a really nice podcast with Reverend Ben Wyatt, who is an Episcopal priest, who explained what happened at Nicaea and what was at stake then. So look that up on the Bible Beyond Podcast. Right now we’re going to ask Lillian to tell us a little bit about Eusebius.

And I have to say, until you got started with this seminar, I just kind of assumed that Eusebius is the one who told us the story of Christianity. And now you’re going to paint a different picture. So go ahead and tell us who he is and why you’re painting a different picture.

Lillian Larsen

So Eusebius is known as the Father of Church History. And perhaps we should be suspicious of anything that bears such a title—the Father of Church History—because it calls into question, where are the mothers? Where are the other voices in this conversation? And the fact is there are many.

And so the goal of this Christianity Seminar, Westar as a program or as an entity, has always focused on Christian scripture. And a number of years ago, I was asked, well, probably six to be exact, I was asked to co-chair the next Christianity Seminar. And I said, “Well, if you want me to co-chair on that, we can’t work on Christian scripture because I’m not an expert in that.” I am an expert. I teach it and all of that. But we have spent a lot of time talking about Christian scripture. And it seems to me that what we really need to be talking about is the period after Christian scripture. And you’ve heard this from others who’ve visited you.

If you were here when Jason BeDuhn was here, it was Jason BeDuhn and I that were co-chairs of the second seminar. And then I brought in Nina Livesey, who I think may also have been here to visit. And it was the three of us who co-chaired the seminar. And really the goal of the seminar was to bridge the conversation that starts with proto-Christian texts or Christian origin texts and think about the period that brings those texts into canonical authoritative voice.

And Eusebius is the person who ostensibly tells us the story of that intervening period from the close of Christian scripture to the beginning of the Roman Empire. And Shirley, you asked the question of why Eusebius is so important. One of the things I’ve been working on in my research lately on monasticism is the question of language. And in thinking about your question, I’ve wondered if part of the reason that Eusebius is so important is because he was writing in Greek, which is a language that many people can read. I just pulled off my shelf the Loeb Library edition of the Ecclesiastical History. And for an early Christian source to show up in the Loeb Library means it has to be pretty mainstream.

And so one of the things I’ve thought a lot about over the last years has been how much of what we think of as Christian tradition is a function of that tradition being preserved in Latin and Greek, which would have been languages that were available both to the early communities, but in fact, perhaps more importantly, to later scholars. At this point, scholars are proficient in Syriac and in Coptic and in other languages, and they have been, but not to the same degree and not in the same density as folks who can read Latin and Greek.

And so the fact that Eusebius was writing in Greek for a Latin emperor means that his work was more accessible than any number of other histories that are out there. And so it’s interesting to think about what difference language makes, something as simple as language or maybe something as complex as language.

But the other thing is that Eusebius claims to be the authoritative voice. And as with the Acts of the Apostles, I think this is the simple thing we can most compare this with. Just as with the Acts of the Apostles, we get this kind of authoritative voice and we believe it, even if we shouldn’t. Eusebius kind of has that similar tone of giving us the last word on what indeed happened.

And it’s only when we go in and we kind of poke around the edges of Eusebius and try to test Eusebius against other sources that are readily available, as with Christian scripture, we start to question whether maybe Eusebius isn’t telling us the whole story. But as with anyone who’s telling a story, they’re telling their version of this story, which is very much that Constantine’s rise to power was predetermined, that it was in God’s plan, that any questions about the Christianization of the Roman Empire were already part of the tradition and were just waiting to come into fulfillment.

And in many ways, what’s striking about this is how much Eusebius’ work matches what happened between Christianity and Judaism—of one tradition becoming the new and better version of the other. And because Eusebius’ was most widely available, it’s probably the text that is the most familiar. I could go on and on, but I think I’ll stop there.

Shirley Paulson

Yeah, well, that’s really helpful to get the big picture of why Eusebius is so important to this whole story. I’m curious about where you first get tipped off that maybe Eusebius wasn’t the most reliable historical source, since everybody assumed he was. Where did you get that?

Lillian Larsen

Well, as a scholar of late antiquity, so fourth through seventh centuries, it’s kind of common knowledge that Eusebius is just one of many, many voices. But it was not my idea to do Eusebius for this seminar. It was Nina Livesey’s. And Nina is a New Testament scholar. And so it was fascinating that Nina was the person who brought this. Both Jason and I work in a later period, and Nina is the person who works on Christian origins.

And it was really fascinating that Nina was the one who encouraged us to work on Eusebius. As soon as she suggested it, I thought, oh, that’s brilliant. Because in many ways, Eusebius needs the same deconstruction that has been addressed to Christian scripture.

And we have all the tools from the work that’s been done on biblical texts to do that same kind of work with Eusebius. And so one of the really exciting parts of this seminar was taking many of the topics that we have used to engage texts that are included in the canon or extra canonical texts from Christian origins and apply them to this later period.

And texts are texts. And so the same strategies that have been so effective in work with proto-Christian sources were as useful for working with these, what one might call proto-Roman Christian sources or something like that. Because Eusebius really is writing at the time when the Roman Empire becomes Christian.

Shirley Paulson

I think you should help us with some vocabulary here too. You’ve talked about proto-Christian. I don’t know that everybody knows what you really mean by that.

Lillian Larsen

Okay. So proto-Christian would be texts that are in the canon of the New Testament and associated texts around them. So the Gospels would be thought of as proto-Christian texts or Christian origin texts. It’s a workaround for the New Testament, which is kind of a problematic language, but it’s basically the text of Christian scripture.

Shirley Paulson

Okay, that’s helpful. And then the other term, you might explain what a seminar is. I’m not sure everybody knows what you mean by a seminar. And Westar seminars are a bit of their own.

Lillian Larsen

Yeah, yeah. So Westar, the Westar organization is an organization that began in the 70s. Something like that. And Westar as an organization has been focused and has done historically groundbreaking work on reading Christian scripture through a critical lens. And the role of Westar, the historical role of Westar, is like a who’s who list of some of the biggest names in New Testament scholarship. They haven’t all remained as part of the organization for its full duration, but as you look over the generations, there’s really a huge list of very, very important figures.

The model that Westar brought into the conversation that was different, I think, from other things that were happening at the time, and I think accounts for much of their great work, was a seminar model where they got a bunch of scholars together into the same room and put resources in place to keep those scholars in conversation for a period of one or two years. And those scholars worked on a particular topic for that amount of time. And so many of the publications of Westar are publications of a group of scholars that worked together on a particular topic for a lengthy period of time.

And so the seminar that just finished was in this genre of Westar seminars. This one went for five years, which is a very long time. And we met twice a year, once for each of those sessions. We picked one topic that we would look at and bring in expert voices to be part of this ongoing conversation of what can we learn about the emergence of Christianity as it aligns itself with the Roman Empire, which is really the period of history that Eusebius is writing within.

And Shirley, thanks for asking this question because I, in fact, pulled up our slide that we used as kind of a record-keeping document. So, what we did in this seminar was, over the period of five years, we covered a range of ten topics. We went through a series of topics, and each of these, I think, correlated with the kinds of questions that are engaged in studies of Christian scripture, and we applied them to this later document of Eusebius and then other documents that scholars brought to put in conversation with Eusebius’ work.

So the first session that we did five years ago—at the height of COVID, which was something we didn’t plan on!—was simply an overview of Eusebius as a historical figure. We went from there and looked at art and archaeology and architecture, and I noticed that you had Ally Kateusz on one of your screens, and so Ally was one of the presenters for that session. We then had a session on constructing Jewish and Christian differences, because while the New Testament seems to suggest that there’s a great divide between Jews and Christians, in fact, that probably only happens when the Empire becomes Christian and people had to choose whether they were going to be Jewish or Christian.

And so we spent some time with some really important work on that. We then talked about emergent Christologies, and if you were here the night that Jason BeDuhn was presenting…although many of us cite the Nicene Creed in church every Sunday…the Nicene Creed was a 400-year process before it actually became the document that is taken as kind of the center of Christian theology and teaching.

We spent a session kind of exploring what the creed looked like before it became officially the creed. We then worked on the household as a stage and carried over much of the great work that has been done on households in early Christian sources. We looked at rhetoric and philosophy and the role of rhetoric in shaping both later documents and the early documents of Christian scriptures. We looked at the less traditional portions of Christianity, and I think that you might have talked about with Jason BeDuhn in terms of Christianity moving east into Asia rather than solely west into Europe and the Western regions, which is very much what Eusebius tells us. But in fact, we have many, many sources that tell a very different story.

We spent a wonderful session on healing and health where really important questions were raised about:

• What happens if you don’t have corrective lenses? Can you read at the age of 40, or do you need someone to read for you?
• What happens if you don’t have health care? What can we imagine of a world without these things?

And then the final sessions were education and simply the formation of the textual tradition itself. But the seminar really, in fascinating wa, took Eusebius as the starting point and then kind of troubled that story of what we all take for granted or what we’ve all been taught as the history of Christianity and simply complicated that story by bringing a broader range of sources and thinking about what other kinds of information is available that we can use to contextualize Eusebius and think a bit more critically about what he’s telling us.

And again, I would emphasize that the work was really using the kinds of critical strategies that have been developed for working with texts in the New Testament and applying them to these later documents, which was really exciting.

Shirley Paulson

That’s amazing. You’ve done all that in five years, covering all that. It was just remarkable what was going on. Each one of those seminar events was just full and rich and thoughtful. It was just wonderful.

One of the most dramatic challenges, I think, to the presumed history of that time is the growing evidence that women were involved and even leaders. Can you tell us a little bit about what’s been uncovered on that subject?

Lillian Larsen

Yeah, so, similar to early Christian texts, it has taken women entering the conversation to begin to hear the voices of women. And once we started listening, of course, women are everywhere because they’re half of the population. The question then is why don’t we have their voices? And it’s interesting in the late ancient texts, which would be kind of the period that Eusebius is writing (the technical name for it is kind of “late antiquity”). And we have very candid accounts of male scholars commending women for being very smart and very studious and very adept at what they do in a scholarly way. We have stories about women reading scripture in ancient languages, knowing Hebrew and Greek. And the caveat is always, but they don’t claim that for themselves. They always give credit to their male protagonists or their male counterparts.

And so what’s interesting, particularly as we move into the monastic movement where women are either choosing not to marry in order to remain free from childcare and household duties, or are choosing to remain widowed after perhaps marrying an older individual and then that individual passes and the woman has access to the resources that that individual had. What we see are households of women. And this may have been happening. There are some who would argue that this is happening already in the earlier Christian period, but certainly by the fourth century we have households that are being led by women. And many of these are wealthy women.

It seems that education is a part of that picture. And many of these women are, if they have a male counterpart, it is not a familial partner, but another scholar or another leader. And we’re not quite sure what to make of this. But we do, in fact, have kind of a burgeoning body of source material about women that becomes part of this record. Unfortunately, even at this later stage, it’s not written by women. And so as in the earlier period, we have texts that men are writing about women. And then we have to kind of filter through how much of that might be true and how much of that would be a male perspective that’s keeping women at least somewhat under their authority.

One of the things that’s interesting about Eusebius, one of the first places we find women in these later Christian texts, is in a portion of Eusebius’ church history where he talks about a figure named Origen, who is someone who eventually was turned into a heretic. But we should probably be suspicious of that because Origen was a brilliant, brilliant teacher who didn’t quite align with what became Christian creedal teaching. And so at the point where the creeds came into place, Origen kind of got turned into a problematic figure, but probably in his own day was a brilliant mind. And he had women who were part of his circle, part of his circle of students, and who were copying texts and working with texts. And one might wonder whether that was something that got Origen in trouble.

So it’s interesting, as with almost any ancient text, we have to read around the edges and between the lines of these sources to get some sense of what women are doing. But it’s fascinating once we start to do that, as with early Christian texts, to realize in the text of Paul, that if Paul is telling women not to speak in church, then probably they are speaking. And similarly, in this later period, if there are mandates about what women should or should not be doing, they’re probably doing those things!

And we do know for a fact that there are households of women, which become the monasteries of the medieval period that are there from the 3rd or 4th century, perhaps even earlier. And some would argue that, in fact, the beginnings of the monastic movement [and I’m one of these people] may have started in those houses for women. Because if you were a woman in the ancient world and you didn’t have a male figurehead, you were incredibly vulnerable. So one question might be whether wealthy women who were inheriting wealth or had wealth in their own right and were not remarrying were perhaps creating spaces for other women to be safe and to learn and to be in a household setting.

Shirley Paulson

There’s another really big topic I hope we can kind of get into a little bit, too. The impact on our understanding of Jewish and Christian relations is where supersessionist ideas came from. How did Eusebius throw us off on that subject? Maybe you could start by explaining what supersessionism is and then what happened.

Lillian Larsen

Sure. So it’s hard to kind of envision being part of the world at this time. When Constantine declared that Rome was going to be Christian, it is probably the furthest thing from anyone’s mind that anyone could have imagined. And so if one grows up Christian, one that is all we’re taught that this was preordained and this was God’s hand in history. But if we were on the ground in the Roman Empire in the beginning of the 4th century, we would have been absolutely flabbergasted that Constantine would choose a tradition as odd and as problematic as Christianity for a variety of reasons as the state religion for the Roman Empire. At this point, the Roman Empire stretches from Spain to almost the Euphrates.

And it really is the million-dollar question of history why Constantine made that choice. It doesn’t seem like there was much political merit that he gained from it. But it would have been tremendously disruptive. And so if we put ourselves back in those shoes, we really have to kind of rethink everything. And up until the point where Constantine declared that Rome would be Christian as the state religion, it was the Jewish community that would have had the longer, more stable tradition. And they were never the …I think most people would agree, that the Jewish community was never completely safe, but they were protected because of their antiquities.

So they could worship their own, they didn’t have to engage in emperor worship, they didn’t have to be part of the imperial cult, they were allowed to worship in the way that they chose. And they had something of a protected status within the Roman Empire. That doesn’t mean they were safe, because we know that there were numerous revolts where the Jewish community was very deeply impacted. But for the most part, they had something of a protected status.

Christians may have benefited somewhat from that status, but they weren’t quite distinct enough, particularly as more and more non-Jews entered the Christian movement, which would have been happening incrementally from the very beginning, given the ways that Christianity defined itself as being a space where Jews and Gentiles could be together. So it’s hard to imagine what the world looked like at the point where this completely unexpected shift happened. But I think there probably still was some tension between the Jewish-Christian communities, and yet, and also probably a lot of coexistence.

So we can see from the archaeological remains in Alexandria, which had one of the largest Jewish communities, two-fifths of the city of Alexandria were Jewish, that Jews and Christians were all in the same neighborhoods. And it’s very hard to tell who was who. So we can imagine that you maybe went to synagogue on Saturday and church on Sunday. People were living in the same neighborhoods, they were sharing something of the same rituals, because so many of Christian rituals come out of Jewish rituals.

And so I don’t feel like I can answer this officially, but I wonder of this period, how much of what becomes a Christian message of being the new and improved version of Judaism is a function of gaining the upper hand once Rome becomes Christian, and suddenly gaining the upper hand after years of fighting perhaps for a voice or claiming a voice in a community where they were really kind of the kid brother that was a bit of a nuisance, but not a real problem. But once that kid brother becomes the Roman Empire, all that back and forth—and I’ve heard it described most often as kind of a sibling rivalry—all that sibling rivalry kind of becomes set in stone and is used as a way to remove what must have been, to some sense, kind of a competitive relationship. And suddenly Christians gain the upper hand in that which would have been completely unexpected. But the Christians ran with it and rewrote that story in a way that it became kind of divinely ordained that the Christians should in fact become the new Jewish community.

Shirley Paulson

So supersession then really refers to Christians thinking of themselves as being superior from and building on and bettering Judaism.

Lillian Larsen

Right, right. So we’ve got a really tragic history up through the Holocaust.

Shirley Paulson

So we’ve got about a minute left before we turn over the microphone. So we’ve got, I just want to ask you really quickly if you might talk a little bit about the diversity, I think, which is another major theme that I saw coming through the seminar, that there was such a diversity, there wasn’t just the Christianity we got later, but there was more going on. So can you talk about that for just a minute?

Lillian Larsen

Sure. I mean, what we have in Eusebius is a very, very, very narrow picture of what this early Christian period looks like or this later Christian period looked like, depending on where you start counting. And by this point in history, we have a really, really rich array of source material, much of which is preserved in languages that are not Greek and Latin, so it would not have been commonly read as part of the historical canon until relatively recently.

And so the communities that are outside of the world that Eusebius is—outside of the world that Eusebius is describing for us—would be the non-Roman Christian communities. And here too, again, I think part of what makes us think this is a monolith is linguistics. Anyone in the Roman context would have been conversant in Latin and they could all talk to each other. And all of these other communities spread across the globe to Eastern Asia or Ethiopia or Armenia would have been speaking in their own languages and would have been relatively insular in their transactions. So they might deal with one another in trade agreements…

And this is still true today. Coptic Christians still do their liturgy in Coptic; Ethiopian Christians still do their liturgy in Ethiopian; Armenian Christians still do their liturgy in Armenian. So, I personally, have wondered how much of the blanketing of that diversity of Christianity is not only theological, but may, in fact, be linguistic as well.

Then there are also theological differences like is Jesus really God, or is there a trinity, or what are the different values of the parts of that trinity? All which could vary quite dramatically across different arms within Christianity. But in order to access that, one needs to have access to the linguistic facet of that.

Shirley Paulson

Well it’s fascinating the way you’ve just opened up a huge, new picture of what was going on, rather than just one way of doing things forever.

So, right, we’re going to turn the mic over. Sara’s already ready to go. So go ahead, Sara. You can go first.

Sara Barnacle

I’m just reading the introduction to the Eusebius material in the book that was online today. And I’m sorry I didn’t get time to dig into it more. But I noticed right away that he’s talking about how the people with the love of imitation fell into lots of errors. And then he talks about how he picked the appropriate passages, like flowers from a meadow, to put together his work. And he also talked about the pure eyes of the mind, which I say is imagination. And so I’d say almost right from the start, he’s admitting that he’s not omniscient, or you know that he’s not. I don’t know—that it’s not cast in concrete what he’s saying. Is that so?

Lillian Larsen

So first of all, kudos for going and starting to read Eusebius. He’s super interesting. And I think you’re absolutely right that Eusebius isn’t telling us he’s the last word. He’s telling us that he’s selectively telling this story. It’s what we do with Eusebius as he becomes almost canonical as a record of this history. And perhaps it’s as much the readers who have access to Eusebius. And this is kind of when I say it’s linguistic—how much of this is determined by language? I do wonder if the fact that Eusebius is accessible in Greek and Latin to a reading audience from pretty much the moment he writes up through the present, is part of what makes his voice so dominant. And that’s a pretty simplistic answer. I think there’s a more complicated answer to that.

But the imagery that Eusebius is using of picking flowers from a meadow is actually very common imagery in the ancient world for creating a collection of wisdom of the best teachings that are out there. And as you suggest, it suggests that there’s a larger body of material to be selecting from and that he is very overtly naming that. And then I think part of the question is, What have we done with this text after the fact of making it an authoritative text? Perhaps as an author, Eusebius was… he starts with Acts and he kind of keeps going and is trying to tell a story to fill in the gaps between the Christian canon and this moment when Christianity is gaining the microphone and needs some way to account for their existence.

So, really great close reading.

Shirley Paulson

Yeah, thank you, Sara, for sharing that.

Okay, Pat, your turn.

Pat Nester

Yes, I am interested in the history of Rome from the point of view of its military successes. And a lot of Rome’s success has to be attributed to its military prowess. Did Eusebius comment on that? And what was the role of Rome’s military vis-à-vis Jews and Christians? Were they drafted into it? I know they drafted some Germans into the Roman military. But since it’s such an important component of the culture of the time, did Eusebius comment about it?

Lillian Larsen

That’s a great question. And actually, Shirley and I had talked about maybe talking about the military, so thank you for raising this, because we didn’t get there. So it’s interesting. I think there’s a traditional view that the earliest Christians were pacifists and would not have been involved in military engagement. And yet it’s clear that they were. And it’s a great question of whether they were drafted or whether they chose to be part of the military. We see this already as far back as the letters of Paul—that a lot of the Pauline communities are retired soldiers who have been given land grants to settle in Philippi, for example. And so certainly part of the stable base of what would have become the earliest Christian communities or what would eventually become Christian communities would have been in the military.

And there, as you suggest, they would have been following in the same patterns within Judaism. And so one of the ways that the Jewish community remained safe as a community that didn’t have its own kind of geographical base was to be part of the military. And within the military, they had a protected status, and it was one of the ways that they were able to gain a foothold in this vast empire that they were part of.

I’m not sure if Eusebius talks about that, and that’s a really great question. And we had a wonderful session where Chris Shea—has Chris Shea been here, Shirley?

Shirley Paulson

She was about two or three years ago, yeah.

Lillian Larsen

Chris Shea did a wonderful session on who would have been part of the Roman military. And she suggested that part of the spread of Christianity may have been through the military once the empire became Christian. And so I would encourage you to invite Chris Shea back to address that question because it was really, really fascinating.

Shirley Paulson

Right. And just so everybody knows, you can look on the website, Early Christian Texts website, and search for the names of these people and find their podcasts and their Bible and Beyond discussions so that you can find out what they’ve been talking about. If you look up Shea, S-H-E-A, you’ll find her conversation with us. She’s a classicist, and so she talked about the ancient Roman world for us when she was with us. So, yeah, it’s a good idea to have her come back and talk about these things.

Okay, thank you. Nice question, Pat. And let’s move on to Diana.

Diana Austin

Okay. Well, one thing, my understanding of one reason why Eusebius was so important in terms of the early history of Christianity is the role that he played along with Constantine’s mother in bringing him into Christianity. And probably that had a lot to do with this sense that it’s preordained. I just know how mothers work in terms of getting their kids to do something that they want them to do. And also that would probably explain the opportunities for Christians to be involved with the military, especially at this time with Constantine, because it wasn’t just one single victory that he had. He had a whole series of victories that he was able to accomplish before he did the big battle at that bridge outside of Rome. And so I just also think the role his mother played was amazing in terms of not only getting him involved and leading him along this path, and also she was the one I think that pointed out or at least set up the sites in the Holy Land to be venerated.

Lillian Larsen

So thank you. That’s a really great point. And the only tricky part of all of that history is that much of it was written by Eusebius. So Eusebius also wrote the life of Constantine, and much of what we know about Constantine comes from Eusebius. And so we have a bit of a tricky set of resources here in that Eusebius, who’s writing the official history, is also writing the official history of Constantine.

Diana Austin

Well, that makes sense to me because of the role that he played in supporting Christianity. I mean, it was between him and the mother that basically corralled him or wrangled him into the whole Christian format, which I think is amazing, how they did that in terms of projecting that whole concept of him being preordained and all that sort of thing. I could see how that would happen.

Lillian Larsen

I think we can see how that would happen. The tricky part is we don’t have other sources that we can use to compare Eusebius’ story about Constantine with other records of Constantine’s rise and shift to Christianity. And so while we have this rich resource in Eusebius, and I think in going back to the original question of why is Eusebius so important, it’s because we not only get the history of the church, the ecclesiastical history, but part of that is also the history of Constantine. And so it becomes really the official history of this shift from Roman religion to Christian religion.

But we also know from other sources that not everybody was on board. It took still another 50, 60, 70 years before the Christian canon to be kind of named a Christian canon. We know that there are a series of ecumenical councils that go into the 7th and 8th centuries, where many of the teachings that Eusebius names, as set in stone at this early period, were being debated over and over and over and over and over again. And so the difficult part there is that we’re getting all of that history through one voice. And Eusebius is also writing the history of Constantine in a way that supports his ecclesiastical history.

Shirley Paulson

We’re going to go on to Honor. Go ahead.

Honor Haase

Something keeps coming through to me in this, and I want to know if it’s accurate. It seems to me that you’re saying that Eusebius was less a historian than Madison Avenue for Constantine and whatever he was doing. And for me, advertisements are something that I take with several grains of salt, if not more. And I’m just wondering if you’re telling us that that’s how we should view Eusebius.

Lillian Larsen

Boy, that’s a really great comparison. We can’t know because we weren’t there. But I think it’s one way we can view Eusebius, is he giving us a rationale for why Constantine is in the position that he’s in. And doing that in such a way that he is perhaps, it’s something within an ancient text, it’s called an “apologetic”. And there’s even a field of theology called “apologetics” which is to kind of bolster a particular narrative.

And I love your suggestion, is this Madison Avenue? We know that in the ancient world, this genre of literature, of making figures that are somewhat larger than life, was very much the norm. And almost any political figure would be kind of written about in such a way. And so I think we have to at least have that in the back of our mind as a possibility when we read the ecclesiastical history and the life of Constantine.

If we read it within the genre of this type of text, Thucydides, who is named the Father of History because he wrote some of the earliest history that we have in Greek and Latin, says very clearly that history doesn’t have to be true, it just has to be plausible. And it’s explicit. He says—you know, like Eusebius—he says, “I was selecting, I was picking and choosing the events that I thought were the most important part of the battles. Of course, I wasn’t listening in on the conversation between this particular general and his wife, but I could imagine what they said. And so my report reflects how I imagine that conversation might have happened.”

And what’s striking is that folks are really overt about this, even as Eusebius is, that he’s kind of selectively putting together a history, which is to, I think, bolster a decision that would have been really unexpected in the context in which it happened. And then in later tradition, that kind of gets reversed in Christian theology, that Constantine…this happened because of the hand of God, which is also part of the supersessionist narrative of Christianity taking over from Judaism—that all of that was preordained and the Jews were meant to kind of disappear and the Christians were meant to take precedence. And that theology was alive and well up until the Holocaust, when Christians said, “Wow, we need to re-think what the relationship between these communities really ought to be. And the Jewish community is still here.” So they weren’t superseded by Christians. They’re still part of this conversation.

And so as we look at these texts from modernity, we really have to imagine what Eusebius might have been doing at that point. And there’s a variety of different ways to read the texts. And I love the fact that almost every one of you that’s asked a question has kind of taken a different reading of the text. And even just going and reading them online, I’m very impressed that you all took the time to go and read fourth century texts that are not super easy to digest.

Honor Haase

Can I add another question? Do you have any thoughts about Eusebius’ motives? I mean, was he supporting or buttering up his patron Constantine and his mother? Was he bolstering his own particular religious views?

Lillian Larsen

I would say all of the above. And I think that would have been the case for anyone who was being paid by the emperor to write history. You would know which side of your bread was buttered on and you would be careful to make sure that you were. But Eusebius is also an apologist for Christianity. And we know that the folks in the Greco-Roman world were shocked and not so happy that the empire had turned Christian. And there’s a lot of back and forth in the fourth century between what happens to folks who don’t subscribe to that religious tradition. The Christians were the Johnny-come-latelys in a very powerful empire that had had an emperor cult from its inception. And now 400 years in, we have this radical shift.

Shirley Paulson

We should move on to Pat again. Go ahead, Pat.

Pat Nester

Yeah, in doing a little bit of reading about Eusebius, it seems clear that he was kind of an apologist in the Arian controversy of the time. And I’ve never understood why that controversy generated so much heat and then was resolved in some strange way with Trinitarianism, I guess. But could you describe a little bit what Eusebius’ role was in that?

Lillian Larsen

So I think this is another great question, and I think this is one of the ironies of history, because the Arians did not win the day. And yet Eusebius became the quintessential church historian, even aligning himself with that faction. So basically all of those controversies that stretch for hundreds of years, or many of them, I shouldn’t say all of them, but many of them are the working out of really fundamental aspects of what becomes Christian theology.

And one of the biggest is who is Jesus, and can Jesus be God? Can a human be divine? The Arians come out on one side of that question, the Nicenes come out on another. We know who won the day because we now recite the Nicene Creed. But it takes a really long time, and I have an exercise that I do with my students where I have kind of reduced the questions from each of those councils into very simple questions: “What are the two sides of what’s being debated?” And again and again and again, it’s, “Can a human be divine?”

And as we were talking about earlier, the fact that there are a variety of Christian communities that make a very different decision and are still alive and well to this day suggests that there wasn’t any uniformity, even if the councils dictated that this was going to be the uniform position, that uniformity may not have played out on the ground.

And so I think this is where we can see Eusebius. And it’s fascinating to me that Eusebius, the spokesperson of the Roman Empire, or who becomes the spokesperson of the Christian portion of the Roman Empire, which may have been quite small at this point, is not part of what Constantine is trying to implement, which is a uniformity of belief. And nonetheless, he is the person who writes the history of the church that becomes the place where that counter tradition is preserved. So I think it’s really complicated.

And it could be that Eusebius just didn’t talk about it when he was… I mean, if we think of this in human terms, right? Maybe the emperor didn’t know that he wasn’t on board with, you know, what the emperor was trying to enforce in terms of doctrinal issues. What we can see is that that was not a settled question long beyond Eusebius and into the 4th and 5th and 6th centuries.

And when I teach this, I often suggest or present to students that I teach this in a World Religions class, that is what becomes Islam, a portion of one of those councils that Jesus is a wonderful teacher, Jesus is a prophet, but Jesus is not God, right? And if that becomes part of the faction of Christianity, that, you know, brings Christian theology into Islam. And I don’t know that for a fact, but I’ve wondered about that. Those debates continue.

And where we put Eusebius in that mix is a great question that I don’t have an answer to, but a really, really good question of how do we fit Eusebius in there as the official historian who doesn’t abide by the teachings of the community that he is the mouthpiece for. It’s a really interesting question.

Shirley Paulson

Well, we’ve got some really nice questions here tonight. Thank you, everybody. So, Sara, let’s go forward again.

Sara Barnacle

We’ve become pretty familiar with the concept of Jesus having the same divine titles as the Roman Emperor and, you know, the contrast there. And as we’re talking about the discussions around the Nicene Creed, do you know if they discussed that aspect as they were trying to determine what the church was going to be? Do you know if they actually talked about the way the Roman Emperor had had the titles of Son of God and, you know, the divine Augustus and things like that?

Lillian Larsen

Boy, another great question. I think by the 4th century, which is when Eusebius was writing…well, I’m thinking on my feet here, but maybe that was part of the debate. Maybe that’s part of the councils and the resistance to naming Jesus the Son of God is that, in fact, in a Roman context, that would have a very different connotation.

Sara Barnacle

Right. Do you know when the Roman Emperors stopped being considered that or did that just last till the end of the Empire?

Lillian Larsen

That’s another great question. I know that the imperial cult continues up until Christianity. And then Christianity becomes the imperial cult. And so I think it’s a really fascinating question of how does the worship of the Emperor get folded into those Christological councils, which start almost immediately after… The first council is 325, and the Christianization of the Roman Empire is loosely 315, or 317. And then it takes the rest of that century, as one would expect, for that to really take hold. And with Julian, the Empire goes back to being kind of Roman, Greco-Roman. But in the end, it becomes, by the end of the 4th century, it is Christian. And one could argue that it is Constantine who calls the councils, or calls the first councils.

And this is a fabulous question. Is it because there needs to be some alignment between the emperor cult and the Son of God?

Sara Barnacle

Somebody needs to release “The Constantine Files!”

Lillian Larsen

Someone needs to release the Constantine files, yes. Unfortunately, the ecclesiastical history is kind of like the Constantine files. And a lot of the work of this seminar was spent focusing on what else is there. What do we have that we can use to help us think more critically about this one Constantine file that has become such a dominant voice? And how do we put it within this context of an empire that doesn’t represent anything Christian at this point, perhaps, but becomes aligned with the Christian message?

Shirley Paulson

So Lillian, is there going to be a book about this—in our last two minutes?

Lillian Larsen

We are right now working on a book that is going to capture, as far as we can, the work of the seminar. And at present, we have, I think we have at least one or two, sometimes three or four for each seminar session. And for each of the 10 seminars, we have representation that will be included in this volume. And we’re really excited about it.

So we have some of the best scholars in the world who came and joined us for a two-day session twice a year. And the richness of the conversation was really amazing. One of the things that’s been super exciting has been that at the end of the seminar, we sent out an email and said, “Would you be willing to contribute your papers to a volume that would kind of capture the work of the seminar? And we’ve gotten a really nice response. And so some of that research will be actually in the volume from the scholars who contributed. And some of it, because it was a five-year seminar, some of that work has already been published. And so there’ll be reference to those publications within the book where people can go and do that reading in other spaces.

So Shirley’s in that book. And I think it will be an exciting chance to really think about many of the questions that you raised this afternoon (or afternoon, for me, evening for you) about how do we begin to kind of put this text—what has been a signature text—into a bigger, richer context?

Shirley Paulson

Oh my gosh, this has been a fascinating conversation. I knew it would be. This is why I’ve been asking Lillian to do this for some time. And I know I’m asking a lot of her, where she’s a very busy professor doing what she’s doing. And she took the time to be with us. And I’m really grateful that you would do this for us, Lillian. Thank you so much.

Lillian Larsen

So thanks for your great questions. You all made that work. It’s been wonderful.

Shirley Paulson

And you prepared as well by having us get into Eusebius. And so I really appreciate that too. So now please join me in a special thanks to Lillian for coming to be with us tonight and helping us with these new insights. Bigger picture of early Christianity. It’s amazing how this new research is changing our perspectives so radically already. Thanks so much Lillian for being with us.

Lillian Larsen

Thank you, Shirley, and thanks to all of you for your great questions. It was a pleasure. Lots of fun to be with you.