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field of reference. Its differences from these traditions, as well as its similari-
ties, are instructive. Needless to say, patristics also became a prime influence
on all subsequent Christian cultures and, as we saw in chapter 2, the field of
late antique studies.
To speak of Jesus’s ministry as Christianity’s “prophetic” phase seems ten-
dentious given the Gospels’ presentation of him, already at his baptism, as
the son of God. Whatever else this meant, it followed that his teaching car-
ried greater authority than that of the prophets, who had gone before him
and foretold his coming. Nonetheless, Jesus was regarded by some who en-
countered him as simply another in the line of prophets sent by God to warn
Israel.^88 For us, recognizing his prophetic aspect underlines the crucial expe-
rience, that of the founder, which a number of religions share, and renders
Christianity susceptible to a comparative approach, despite the unique
claims derived from its doctrine of divine incarnation. And in Islam Jesus was
revered, precisely, as a prophet. God could not have a son.
To this prophetic phase of Christianity Eusebius of Caesarea dedicates the
first of the ten books of his Ecclesiastical history, starting with a firm, theo-
logical statement of Christ’s divinity and underlining how, on the human
level, his coming had deep roots in the ancient and honorable race (ethnos)
of the Hebrews, whose prophets had foreshadowed it. Indeed, “the an-
nouncement to all the Gentiles, recently made through the teaching of
Christ,” is identical with “that first, most ancient and antique discovery of
true religion by those lovers of God who followed Abraham”—precisely the
same “primitive, unique and true” Abrahamic pedigree later claimed by Islam
as well. Eusebius resists, for sound theological and historical reasons, any un-
derstanding of Christianity as spontaneously generated. But at the same time
Christians are for him a “new race,” whose founder was born—as we saw
earlier—in the reign of Augustus the first Roman emperor, and just after the
end of “the Eg yptian dynasty of the Ptolemies.”^89
Eusebius situates Christianity’s prophetic phase both in the broader flow
of the history of empires, and at the outset of a fresh period inaugurated by a
new “people.” Later ecclesiastical historians assumed but did not restate this
scheme of things, simply picking up where Eusebius, or one of his successors,
had left off. The inestimable value of the Ecclesiastical history, though, is that
besides the prophetic beginnings of the new religion, it also delineates the
scriptural and exegetical/patristic phases. Into its basic framework of narra-
tive history plus episcopal lists for the major sees, it inserts detailed accounts
of the formation of the scriptural canon (a term Eusebius is the first to use in
this context^90 ), and of the major exegetical and other patristic writings pro-
88 Matthew 16:13- 16, Mark 6:14- 15; cf. Hebrews 1:1- 2, 3:1- 6.
89 Eusebius, Ecclesiastical history [3:35] 1.4.1–5.2.
90 Eusebius, Ecclesiastical history [3:35] 6.25.3; cf. L. M. McDonald and J. A. Sanders, “Introduc-
tion,” in their The canon debate (Peabody, Mass. 2002) 12–13.