by some pagan critics who had sought to undermine Christianity’s
credibility by casting it as a deviant form of Judaism (Wilken
2003: 112–17). This made it imperative for Christians to prove
the validity of their claims over and against the Jews, to show
that it was Christianity (and the church), and not Judaism, that
represented God’s true plan for humankind. In the second and
third centuries, Christians had responded to this conundrum
by claiming that the Jews, by not recognizing Jesus as God’s
Messiah, had shown themselves incapable of interpreting their
own scriptures, a failure that provoked their abandonment by
God, who now favoured the Christians. Eusebius elaborated on
this theme, and he devoted a large part of his narrative to demon-
strating that the traditions of scripture belonged to the Christians,
not the Jews. He asserted, for example, that although the Old
Testament’s Hebrew patriarchs (Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob)
together with Moses and the prophets had lived before the
Incarnation of Christ, they none the less followed lifestyles that
were Christian in everything but name (Barnes 1981: 184–6). To
drive the point home, Eusebius promised that he would devote
considerable space in the Ecclesiastical Historyto ‘the calami-
ties that overwhelmed the Jewish nation immediately after their
conspiracy against our Saviour’ (Ecclesiastical History 1.1.2),
thus demonstrating that Judaism had been rendered obsolete by
the birth of Jesus.
The final theme to which Eusebius drew special attention
at the start of his narrative was ‘the widespread, bitter, and recur-
rent campaigns launched against the divine message, and the
heroism with which, when the occasion demanded it, men faced
torture and death to maintain the fight in its defence’ (Ecclesias-
tical History1.1.2): in other words, persecution and martyrdom.
Their prominence in Eusebius’ narrative might seem to imply a
hostile attitude to the Roman empire, but this was not the case.
The blame for persecutions is placed not on the institutions
of the empire, but on the individual emperors who instigated
action against the Christians (see chapter 6). Generally Eusebius
presented the empire as an institution that accorded the churchTHE HISTORICAL QUEST FOR EARLY CHRISTIANITY
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