of his narrative, as he enumerated the major themes of his work,
he highlighted a number of areas where his defence of the church’s
integrity would loom large.
Prominent among these themes were ‘the lines of succes-
sion from the holy apostles’ juxtaposed with ‘the names and dates
of those who, through a passion for innovation, have wandered
as far as possible from the truth’ (Ecclesiastical History1.1.1).
Here Eusebius was concerned with the cohesion of the church
and those internal dissensions that threatened to tear it apart. A
bishop himself, Eusebius was a staunch believer in and defender
of the authority of the institution of a church led by bishops to
act as mediator between God and humankind. Hence the Ecclesi-
astical Historysought to justify not only the church’s unique
claim to propagate God’s message, but also its right to crack down
on those who challenged its authority. His approach to this issue,
as the lines quoted above demonstrate, was twofold. In the first
place, he was a determined advocate of tradition, by which he
sought to shore up the integrity of the church by showing how
the bishops of his own day were the direct successors of the apos-
tles who had followed Jesus Christ. Second, and in opposition
to the bishops, he portrayed as upstarts and revolutionaries, with
no claims to this tradition, those who challenged the church’s
authority and teaching: in other words, those whom he castigated
as heretics (see chapter 5). Side by side, these narratives of
episcopal succession and heretical opposition served to validate
the church’s claims that it was the unique mediator, in an unbroken
line from the time of Jesus, of the Christian message to
humankind.
In addition to asserting the integrity of the church and
attacking those who sought to undermine it from within, Eusebius
emphasized as a third major theme in the Ecclesiastical History
Christianity’s struggles with those external forces that rivalled its
claim to be the true religion. The biblical traditions that the church
had claimed for its own could also be regarded as the property
of another religious group: the Jews. This rivalry between Jews
and Christians over the heritage of scripture had been exploited
THE HISTORICAL QUEST FOR EARLY CHRISTIANITY1
2
3
4
5
61
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
1711
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37 Folio