History Of The Christian Church Ecclesiastical History

Known as the “Father of Church History,” Eusebius was bishop of Caesarea in Palestine and the leading Christian scholar of his day. His Ecclesiastical History is an irreplaceable chronicle of Christianity’s early development, from its origin in Judaism, through two and a half centuries of illegality and occasional persecution, to a new era of tolerance and favor under the Emperor Constantine. In this book, Michael J. Hollerich recovers the reception of this text across time. As he shows, Eusebius adapted classical historical writing for a new “nation,” the Christians, with a distinctive theo-political vision. Eusebius’s text left its mark on Christian historical writing from late antiquity to the early modern period—across linguistic, cultural, political, and religious boundaries—until its encounter with modern historicism and postmodernism. Making Christian History demonstrates Eusebius’s vast influence throughout history, not simply in shaping Christian culture but also when falling under scrutiny as that culture has been reevaluated, reformed, and resisted over the past 1,700 years.

All ten books of Eusebius' famous church history are presented here complete in a superb and authoritative translation. Eusebius' Ecclesiastical History is one of the first comprehensive, chronologically arranged histories ever written about the Christian church, and it is consulted by scholars and historians to this day. Eusebius authored his history as the Roman Empire's influence upon the European continent waned amid insurgencies and surrender of Roman lands to other peoples. This also a time in which Christianity's influence upon Europe's peoples burgeoned and grew. As one of a very few learned and scholarly Christians of his era Eusebius enjoyed a rare privilege: access to the document archives of the early Christian church. Much of these archives have since been lost; Eusebius' use of these long lost texts is the only window which readers of today have to such records. Thus, a sense of mystery is present as events for which scant evidence still exists are told.

Eusebius's account is the only surviving historical record of the Church during its crucial first 300 years. Bishop Eusebius, a learned scholar who lived most of his life in Caesarea in Palestine, broke new ground in writing the History and provided a model for all later ecclesiastical historians. In tracing the history of the Church from the time of Christ to the Great Persecution at the beginning of the fourth century, and ending with the conversion of the Emperor Constantine, his aim was to show the purity and continuity of the doctrinal tradition of Christianity and its struggle against persecutors and heretics.

"History of the Christian Church" is an eight volume account of Christian history written by Philip Schaff. In this great work Schaff covers the history of Christianity from the time of the apostles to the Reformation period. "Ecclesiastical History" of Eusebius, the bishop of Caesarea, was a 4th-century pioneer work giving a chronological account of the development of Early Christianity from the 1st century to the 4th century. The result was the first full-length historical narrative written from a Christian point of view. It was written in Koine Greek, and survives also in Latin, Syriac and Armenian manuscripts.