Eusebius
The Father of Church History
In referring to his work of writing a history of the church up to his own times, he says:
“We are attempting a kind of trackless and unbeaten path.”
Again he says of Philo Judæus that he was a very “learned man.” Among many other things which contradict this estimate, is the fact that Philo takes more than one hundred pages in showing how that dreams are sent from God.
Again, Eusebius does not say that the last works of Hegesippus, Papias and Dionysius of Corinth, contain anything concerning the canonical gospels; therefore, they contained none.
We give the opinion of a few well-known writers upon this “father of church history”:
In Draper’s Intellectual Development of Europe, p. 197, Bunsen and Niebuhr are quoted—the one (Bunsen) as saying that he purposely “perverted chronology for the sake of making synchronisms,” and the other (Niebuhr) declaring “he is a very dishonest writer.”
“Eusebius had a peculiar faculty of diverging from the truth.” (“History of Christian Religion,” p. 7.)
“The gravest of the ecclesiastical historians, Eusebius, himself, indirectly confesses that he has related whatever might redound to the glory, and has suppressed all that could tend to the disgrace of religion.” (Gibbon’s “Rome,” vol. 1, p. 493.)
“In one of the most learned and elaborate works that antiquity has left us, the thirty-second chapter of the twelfth book of his evangelical preparation, bears for its title this scandalous proposition: ‘How it may be lawful and fitting to use falsehood as a medicine and for the benefit of those who want to be deceived.’” (Gibbon’s “Vindication,” p. 76.)
“But Eusebius, the father of church history, capped the climax by fabricating the celebrated passage about “Jesus, a wise man, if it be lawful to call him such.” (“Anti-Christ,” p. 28.)
“He (Eusebius) has frankly told us that his principle in writing history was to conceal the facts that were injurious to the reputation of the church.” (Lecky’s “European Morals,” vol. 1, p. 492.)
“Eusebius, who would never lie or falsify except to promote the glory of God.” (Taylor’s Diegesis, p. 345.)
Eusebius pronounces a panegyric upon Constantine. The following is the list of Constantine’s murders as given by Robert Taylor:
Maximinian, his wife’s father
A. D.
310
Bassianus, his sister Anastacia’s husband
A.
,,
D.
,,
314
Licinianus, his nephew by Constantina
A.
,,
D.
,,
319
Fausta, his wife
A.
,,
D.
,,
320
Sopater, his former friend
A.
,,
D.
,,
321
Licinius, his sister Constantina’s husband
A.
,,
D.
,,
325
Crispus, his own son
A.
,,
D.
,,
326
And the church still continues to regard these two persons as holy men of God, raised up for a wise purpose—the one an open, wholesale murderer, and the other a cowardly, cunning and corrupt priest. The vast injury they have done the human race can never be computed. They poisoned the fountains of civilization, and all Christendom has been drinking its poisoned waters ever since. If there are anywhere in history two men who have done their fellow men more positive harm and wrong, I do not know them. Their names should be held up to eternal scorn.
Baronius, a sincere advocate of the Christian faith, calls Eusebius: “the great falsifier of ecclesiastical history, a wily sychophant, a consummate hypocrite, a time serving persecutor, who had nothing in his known life or writings to support the belief that he himself believed in the Christian system.”
Eusebius is the source from whom all have drawn their material. Of him Dean Milman in a note to Gibbon’s Rome says: “It is deeply to be regretted that the history of this period rests so much on the loose, and, it must be admitted, by no means scrupulous authority of Eusebius.” (Page 85.)