Violence and Authority in Eusebius of Caesarea's Ecclesiastical History

Abstract

'Violence and Authority in Eusebius of Caesarea's Ecclesiastical History', a thesis submitted to The University of Manchester by James Corke-Webster for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) on the 7th March 2013.The first Christian historian, Eusebius of Caesarea, wrote his pioneering Ecclesiastical History in the early 4th century, just after the western emperor Constantine's "conversion" to Christianity. It was a history born of Eusebius' present and designed for the future. Reading Eusebius and the Ecclesiastical History within the second sophistic movement, I argue that Eusebius' picture of Christian history appropriated the past to fundamentally re-imagine the essence of Christian authority. Eusebius' descriptions of past Christians used them as exemplars of a new model of Christian leadership designed for his 4th century context. Eusebius was writing in the first place for the Christian clergy; elite provincial Christians who shared the mores and stereotypes of their elite non-Christian neighbours. He therefore presented a model of Christian authority not based around the extreme violence of martyrdom and asceticism which had characterised the charismatic heroes of earlier 2nd and 3rd century Christian literature. It was based instead on a traditional elite rhetoric of temperance, learned through paideia and manifested in care for dependents. Around this thread Eusebius built his Empire-wide church.

Date of Award	1 Aug 2013
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	The University of Manchester
Supervisor	Kate Cooper (Supervisor) & Roberta Mazza (Supervisor)