Eusebius And The Jewish Authors

In the first part, Eusebius and the Jewish Authors examines the citation process in ancient Greek literature and in Eusebius’ Praeparatio evangelica and Demonstratio evangelica. In the second part, it analyzes his perception of Judaism and his methodology in appropriating Jewish quotations.

Drawing on history, philology, literature, archeology, and theology, this book offers new approaches to Eusebius' well and less known writings as well as to his unique contribution to late antique culture.

Eusebius of Caesarea lived at a crucial turning point in the history of the Christian church. He was an important witness to the polemical and apologetic attitudes that characterized much early Christian literature. The most voluminous writer of the early fourth century, he was also the first comprehensive historian of his community seeking a philosophy to explain the whole course of history from the beginning to his own time. This volume places Eusebius' work in proper perspective. The contributors, all recognized specialists in early Christianity, shed light on the person and circumstances of Eusebius himself. This collection of essays focuses on elements of the story that Eusebius tells — the story of the early church, its relationship to Judaism, or its confrontation with the Roman Empire — and explores gaps left by Eusebius. The writers offer a cross-section of current scholarly methods in the study of early Christianity and Judaism.

Based on a conference held Apr. 4-5, 2008 at Amherst College.

"Jewish-Christianity" is a contested category in current research. But for precisely this reason, it may offer a powerful lens through which to rethink the history of Jewish/Christian relations. Traditionally, Jewish-Christianity has been studied as part of the origins and early diversity of Christianity. Collecting revised versions of previously published articles together with new materials, Annette Yoshiko Reed reconsiders Jewish-Christianity in the context of Late Antiquity and in conversation with Jewish studies. She brings further attention to understudied texts and traditions from Late Antiquity that do not fit neatly into present day notions of Christianity as distinct from Judaism. In the process, she uses these materials to probe the power and limits of our modern assumptions about religion and identity.

When early Christians began to study the Bible, and to write their own history and that of the Jews whom they claimed to supersede, they used scholarly methods invented by the librarians and literary critics of Hellenistic Alexandria. But Origen and Eusebius, two scholars of late Roman Caesarea, did far more. Both produced new kinds of books, in which parallel columns made possible critical comparisons previously unenvisioned, whether between biblical texts or between national histories. Eusebius went even farther, creating new research tools, new forms of history and polemic, and a new kind of library to support both research and book production. Christianity and the Transformation of the Book combines broad-gauged synthesis and close textual analysis to reconstruct the kinds of books and the ways of organizing scholarly inquiry and collaboration among the Christians of Caesarea, on the coast of Roman Palestine. The book explores the dialectical relationship between intellectual history and the history of the book, even as it expands our understanding of early Christian scholarship. Christianity and the Transformation of the Book attends to the social, religious, intellectual, and institutional contexts within which Origen and Eusebius worked, as well as the details of their scholarly practices--practices that, the authors argue, continued to define major sectors of Christian learning for almost two millennia and are, in many ways, still with us today.,

The Jewish culture of the Hellenistic and early Roman periods established a basis for all monotheistic religions, but its main sources have been preserved to a great degree through Christian transmission. This Guide is devoted to problems of preservation, reception, and transformation of Jewish texts and traditions of the Second Temple period in the many Christian milieus from the ancient world to the late medieval era. It approaches this corpus not as an artificial collection of reconstructed texts--a body of hypothetical originals--but rather from the perspective of the preserved materials, examined in their religious, social, and political contexts. It also considers the other, non-Christian, channels of the survival of early Jewish materials, including Rabbinic, Gnostic, Manichaean, and Islamic. This unique project brings together scholars from many different fields in order to map the trajectories of early Jewish texts and traditions among diverse later cultures. It also provides a comprehensive and comparative introduction to this new field of study while bridging the gap between scholars of early Judaism and of medieval Christianity.

This study cast s some light on Eusebius and his times by tracing, or trying to trace, modifications in his views as expressed in the Church History. Everyone agrees that such modficiations can be found in Books VIIIÐX. This study seesk to find them in the first seven books as well. It does not make much difference whether we are illuminating the first quater of the fourth century or, in addition, the last years of the third century. In either case our sources for the history of Christianity are so meagre that closer analysis can only prove helpful. And whether or not one agrees with every detail of the portrait of Eusebius that begins to emerge, it is at least a picture of a human being, neither a saint nor intentionally a scoundrel. Eusebius' work is imprortant not just because of the documents he used but because of the ways in which he used them. These ways illuminate the history of the Christian Church in one of its most important transitions, a transition in which Eusebius himself played a prominent part. Ðadapted from the concluding chapter