The father of Church history left a life we barely know
Eusebius of Caesarea wrote the first great history of Christianity and a biography of Constantine, whom he once glimpsed marching with Diocletian's army. Yet the Life of Eusebius written by his successor is lost, and even his parents' names are unknown. Most of his own writing has vanished too.
He was probably born between 260 and 265 AD in or near Caesarea Maritima in the Roman province of Syria Palaestina, where he was baptised and taught. Around 314 he became bishop of Caesarea, and he died on 30 May 339. Much of what we know comes from 5th-century church historians such as Socrates, Sozomen and Theodoret, from Jerome, and from passing mentions by contemporaries including Athanasius and Arius.
Caesarea was a hub of Christian learning thanks to the theologian Origen, who on his deathbed left his private library, with his original manuscripts, to the city's Christians. Pamphilus, who arrived around the 280s, built that bequest into a great collection, gathering Bibles from across the known world, and ran a school on Origen's model. He taught Eusebius from his early twenties and gave him a deep admiration for Origen, though neither had met the man. So close was the bond that Eusebius was called Eusebius Pamphili, son of Pamphilus, perhaps marking him as his teacher's heir.
That library made his scholarship possible. He wrote studies of the biblical text, including a treatise on discrepancies between the Gospels, and the Onomasticon, an early gazetteer of places in the Holy Land named in the Bible. His Ecclesiastical History, Chronicle and account of the martyrs earned him his title, and he wrote a biography of Constantine, the first Christian Roman emperor, who ruled as Augustus from 306 to 337.
His influence on the Bible itself was quiet but real. Origen had gathered, often firsthand from his travels, information about which churches used which texts. Eusebius passed this on in his History, and it probably underlies the late-4th-century Easter Letter that declared which Christian writings were accepted, helping shape the New Testament.
Source: Eusebius
