Justified True Belief

(●) The bishop who wrote the church its first history, and saved the documents it would otherwise have lost. + Almost everything anyone knows about the first three Christian centuries passes through the hands of one man. When a modern book tells you that Mark wrote down what he had heard Peter preach, that James the brother of Jesus was thrown down from the pinnacle of the temple, that a Christian named Quadratus handed the emperor Hadrian a written defence of the faith, or that the emperor Domitian sent for the farming grandsons of Jesus’ brother Jude, looked at their calloused hands and let them go, it is repeating something Eusebius of Caesarea copied into his Ecclesiastical History out of books that no longer exist. He was a bishop on the Palestinian coast, a scholar, and the keeper of what was probably the greatest Christian library in the world, and he did something nobody had done before him. He wrote the story of the church out of its own papers, quoting them at length instead of summarising them, so that a reader could weigh the evidence and not merely take his word. Ten books, from the apostles to the emperor Constantine, and after seventeen centuries no one has been able to replace them, because the sources he used are gone and his copy of them is what we have. He is also the most compromised of the great fathers, and the honest telling says so early. He wrote in defence of Arius before the Council of Nicaea, he signed the creed that condemned what Arius taught, and he spent his last years helping to hound Athanasius, that creed’s fiercest defender. All three are true of the same man, and none of them is the reason his books survived.

(●) c. 260 AD: Born in Palestine, into a church that was legal nowhere and to parents nobody wrote down. + For a man who recorded the family details of hundreds of other people, Eusebius left almost nothing about his own. We do not know his parents’ names, his birthplace, or whether he was raised Christian or converted. The date is an estimate worked backward from the events he says he lived through and from his age at death, and scholars put his birth anywhere between about 260 and 265. Caesarea Maritima, the city he certainly grew up in or near, was worth being born in. Herod the Great had built it from nothing into the finest harbour on the coast, with an aqueduct, a theatre, and a temple to Augustus looking out to sea, and Rome had made it the capital of the province. Paul had been held there for two years while a governor waited for a bribe (Acts 24:26–27). Origen, the most learned Christian scholar of the age, had settled there in the 230s after Alexandria drove him out, and had brought his books. The church into which Eusebius was born was entering a long quiet. The emperor Gallienus had just called off the persecution of the 250s, and no emperor troubled the churches again for forty years. A boy growing up in that lull could be forgiven for thinking the worst was over.

(●) c. 290 AD: He attached himself to the presbyter Pamphilus, and to the library Origen’s books had begun. + Pamphilus was a wealthy presbyter of Caesarea who had studied in Alexandria and then spent his money on manuscripts. He collected them, corrected them against better copies, lent them out, and gave them away, and around the collection Origen had left he built what was probably the best Christian library anywhere. A later Spanish bishop, Isidore of Seville, reports in his Etymologies that Pamphilus had close to thirty thousand volumes, a number written down three centuries afterward and to be held loosely; what is not in doubt is that it was the working library behind everything Eusebius wrote. A presbyter, in the language of that century, is an elder of a local church, one of the men who taught and led under the bishop. Pamphilus became something more than that to his student. Eusebius signed himself for the rest of his life Eusebius Pamphili, Eusebius of Pamphilus, the form a freedman used for the master who had freed him or a son for a father, and he later wrote a three-book life of him that is now lost. They worked side by side for perhaps twenty years: copying, comparing manuscripts, and building the card index of Christian antiquity that the Ecclesiastical History would eventually draw on. It was a scholar’s life, quiet and cumulative, and it ended in a prison cell.

(●) 303 AD: The Great Persecution began, and it took the teacher he had worked beside for twenty years. + In February 303 the emperor Diocletian ordered the churches pulled down and the Scriptures burned. Later edicts arrested the clergy and then required everyone to sacrifice to the gods. It was the longest and most systematic attempt the Roman state ever made to end the Christian faith, and Palestine was one of the provinces where it was pressed hardest. Pamphilus was arrested in 307. He spent two years in prison, and in that cell he and Eusebius wrote together a Defence of Origen in five books, to which Eusebius added a sixth after his teacher’s death. On 16 February 310 Pamphilus was beheaded, along with eleven others taken with him. Eusebius wrote down what he saw. His Martyrs of Palestine is not a collection of pious legends but the report of a man who was there: he gives names, home towns, ages, the words spoken to the governor, the manner of each death. It is one of the few places in ancient literature where a persecution is described by a witness who expected his readers to be able to check him against their own memories.

(●) c. 313 AD: He came out of it alive, was made bishop of Caesarea, and finished the book nobody had attempted. + The persecution broke in stages, and it broke unevenly, because the empire in those years was not run by one man. Diocletian had parcelled it out among several emperors at once, senior and junior, each with his own territory, so an order that lapsed in one province could still be pressed hard in the next. Galerius, dying, issued an edict of toleration in 311. Maximinus Daia renewed the pressure in the East, and then lost his war and his life in 313. Constantine and Licinius agreed in that same year that Christians and everyone else should be free to follow the worship they chose. Within a decade the church went from illegal to favoured, and the men who had hidden their books were handed public money to build. Eusebius became bishop of Caesarea about 313 or 314 and held that see, the city and district a bishop answers for, for the rest of his life. He was not a great preacher or administrator by any account that survives, and the see was not the most important in the East; what he had was the library and the habit of using it. The Ecclesiastical History took shape across these years. He worked on it for a long time and revised it more than once as the political ground shifted under him, dropping praise of men who had fallen and extending the story to Constantine’s final victory in 324. He also came out of the persecution with something else: a reputation for having survived it, in a church that had just buried its heroes.

(●) 325 AD: Censured early in the year for defending Arius, who taught that the Son was the first of God’s creatures, he signed the Nicene Creed in the summer and wrote home to explain himself. + Arius, a presbyter of Alexandria, had begun teaching that the Son was the first and greatest of all God’s creatures, made before time out of nothing, so that "there was when he was not." That last phrase is the whole quarrel in six words: it means the Son had a beginning, that there was something rather than nothing before he existed, and that he therefore stands on the creature’s side of the line between God and everything else. His bishop condemned him, and the fight spread across the eastern church. Eusebius did not hold what Arius held. What he could not stomach was the language Arius’ opponents were using against him, which sounded to his ear like modalism, the idea that Father, Son and Spirit are three names for one figure rather than three who are genuinely distinct. So he wrote in Arius’ defence, and it cost him. At a synod in Antioch early in 325, a synod being a working meeting of the bishops of a region, he was questioned about his theology, would not agree to the strongly anti-Arian statement the bishops drew up, and was provisionally excommunicated, which is to say barred from the Lord’s Supper and from the fellowship of the other churches until his case could be heard. Two colleagues went out with him, Theodotus of Laodicea and Narcissus of Neronias, and the three were referred to the great council that was about to meet. So he came to Nicaea a few months later under a cloud, and was cleared there with the emperor’s approval. He offered the council the baptismal creed of his own church at Caesarea, the short statement of faith his people said aloud when they were baptised, and told that congregation afterwards that the bishops had worked from it, though scholars now generally judge that the creed the council issued rests on a different Syrian and Palestinian formula. What the council pressed in was one word he had not wanted: homoousios, "of one substance," saying that the Son is not a lesser derivative of God but shares the very being of the Father. Eusebius signed it. Then he wrote to the Christians of Caesarea explaining what he took the word to mean and why he had put his name to it, and that letter survives because Athanasius quoted it in full, many years later, to show what the council had actually decided.

(●) 335 AD: He sat as a judge at the council that deposed Athanasius, the Nicene Creed’s fiercest defender, and a bishop who had lost an eye in the persecution asked out loud how he himself had come through it unharmed. + Ten years after Nicaea the fight had not ended; it had changed sides. Athanasius, now bishop of Alexandria and the most determined defender of the creed, was summoned to a council at Tyre in 335 to answer charges brought by his enemies, and Eusebius was among the bishops who presided. Athanasius walked out, sailed to Constantinople, and stepped into the road in front of the emperor’s horse to demand a hearing, a scene Constantine himself describes in a letter about it. The council deposed him anyway, voting him out of the see he held, and Constantine sent him into exile in Trier, on the far side of the empire in what is now Germany. Epiphanius of Salamis, writing a generation later and with no affection for Eusebius, records a scene from that council. Potamon of Heraclea, who had lost an eye and been sent to the mines under the persecution, saw Eusebius seated on the bench and Athanasius standing before it, and demanded to know how Eusebius had come out of the same imprisonment without a mark on him. It is an accusation, made in anger by an interested party and preserved by a hostile author, and it is not evidence of anything Eusebius did. What it does show is what men who had paid the price thought of the man who had not. The following year he travelled to Constantinople for the thirtieth anniversary of Constantine’s reign and delivered the speech of praise that gave the Christian empire its theory of itself (T5).

(●) 339 AD: He died at about seventy-nine, leaving his life of Constantine unfinished. + Constantine died in 337, baptised at the last by a bishop of the party Eusebius belonged to. Eusebius set about a life of him and never polished it; the four books he left break off with the succession, and were put out after his own death on 30 May 339, or possibly 340. Acacius, his pupil, succeeded him at Caesarea and kept the library going. His books then went two ways at once. The theological ones lost their audience within a generation, because the church went on to say at Constantinople in 381 what Nicaea had said in 325, and Eusebius had spent his last years arguing for something less. The historical and scholarly ones never lost their audience at all. Jerome translated his chronology, Rufinus translated his history, later Greek historians wrote continuations of it, and the section numbers he invented for comparing the Gospels are still printed in the margins of the standard Greek New Testament today.

What He Taught

(T1) A history of the church should be built out of documents quoted at length, not out of memory. + Try writing the story of your own congregation over the last two hundred years. You would find that the people who could tell you the early part are dead, that what everyone "knows" turns out to trace back to one talkative man, and that the only thing you can really stand on is paper: minutes, letters, a photograph with names on the back. Now spread that congregation over an empire, add two centuries and eleven languages, and take away most of the paper. That was the task Eusebius set himself. Nobody had tried it. Christians had written defences of the faith, letters, accounts of martyrdoms, and lists of world dates, and Luke had written an orderly account of one generation for a man named Theophilus, and had said in his opening lines exactly why he was doing it (Luke 1:1–4). But the continuous story of the church, from the apostles to the writer’s own day, did not exist. The Greek historians offered no usable model either: they wrote wars and politics, and freely composed speeches for their characters that the characters had never given. His solution was to quote. Where an ancient historian would have paraphrased, Eusebius reproduces the document whole, names the author and the book, and lets the reader hear the source in its own voice. He distinguishes what he found written from what he was told, marks a report as a report, and says plainly where the evidence gave out and he could learn no more. He was not neutral and never claimed to be. What he did instead was make himself checkable, which is a different virtue and in some ways a more useful one, because the reader who distrusts his judgment can still use his evidence.

(Q) "I confess that it is beyond my power to produce a perfect and complete history, and since I am the first to enter upon the subject, I am attempting to traverse as it were a lonely and untrodden path." + Source: Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History I.1 (McGiffert translation). He is apologising in advance, in the opening paragraphs, for the gaps his readers will find. A few lines later he describes his method as gathering material from writers scattered across two centuries, "having plucked like flowers from a meadow the appropriate passages from ancient writers." The apology and the method belong together: he knew the record was patchy, so he showed his working.

(T2) The Christian books in circulation sort into three piles: the ones every church receives, the ones some dispute, and the ones nobody should read as Scripture. + A Christian teacher around the year 300 had more on his shelf than the twenty-seven books of the New Testament. There were gospels under the names of Peter and Thomas, an apocalypse under the name of Peter, a long book of visions called the Shepherd that many congregations read aloud, and a letter of Barnabas. Someone had to say, plainly and in one place, what the churches actually used. In the third book of his history Eusebius did. He gives three main headings and a fourth for outright forgeries. The acknowledged books are those received everywhere: the four Gospels, Acts, Paul’s letters, 1 John, 1 Peter. The disputed books are those many churches use and some question: James, Jude, 2 Peter, 2 and 3 John. The rejected books are the ones read in some places but not to be counted as Scripture: the Acts of Paul, the Shepherd, the Apocalypse of Peter, Barnabas, the Teachings of the Apostles. Beneath them all he puts the heretical forgeries, which he says nobody in the succession of church writers has ever thought worth quoting. Two things are worth noticing about the list. The first is that he is reporting, not deciding: he tells you what the churches receive, and where he cannot get a clean answer he leaves the question open, which is why Revelation appears in his account twice, once among the acknowledged books and once among the rejected, depending on whose opinion you follow. The second is the date. This is written before Nicaea and half a century before the earliest surviving list that matches our New Testament exactly, and the disagreements it records are all at the edges. The Gospels and Paul are not in dispute anywhere.

(Q) "First then must be put the holy quaternion of the Gospels; following them the Acts of the Apostles. After this must be reckoned the epistles of Paul; next in order the extant former epistle of John, and likewise the epistle of Peter, must be maintained." + Source: Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History III.25 (McGiffert translation). A quaternion is simply a group of four. He opens the chapter by saying that since the subject has come up it is proper to sum up the writings of the New Testament, and then works down from the books nobody questions to the ones he calls, a few lines later, "the disputed writings, which are nevertheless recognized by many," and after those, "the rejected writings" (T2).

(T3) The nations were being made ready for the gospel long before it arrived, and the Hebrew prophets show who arrived. + An educated pagan of the fourth century had a two-part complaint against Christians, and it was a good one. You have deserted the gods your ancestors worshipped, he said, the gods who hold cities together; and having deserted them you have not even joined the Jews whose books you carry about, since you refuse to keep their law. Traitors twice, to your own past and to your borrowed one. Eusebius answered both charges in a single work of two halves, running to thirty-five books between them. It is an apology in the old sense of that word, which has nothing to do with regret: an apology was a defence made in public, the way a man answers a charge brought against him in court. The Preparation for the Gospel takes the first charge: leaving the gods was reasonable, because their own poets and philosophers had already said so. The Demonstration of the Gospel takes the second: Christians read the Hebrew Scriptures as pointing beyond the law of Moses to the one the prophets promised, and the promises fit. His way of arguing the first half is what makes the book so useful now. Rather than characterise pagan religion, he quotes it, page after page, from the Phoenician histories to Plato to the philosophers of his own century, so that the reader watches the case being made out of the other side’s own writings. The cost of that method is that the book is enormous. The benefit is that whole pagan authors survive only inside it. One thread of his argument has not worn well: like Justin and Clement before him he held that the Greek philosophers had borrowed their best ideas from Moses, and few readers of any persuasion now think that is what happened. The wider claim, that a good deal of truth about God was reached outside Israel and that this was preparation rather than accident, is the same claim Paul makes to the philosophers of Athens (Acts 17:26–28).

(Q) "By the present treatise, which includes in its design the Demonstration of the Gospel, I purpose to show the nature of Christianity to those who know not what it means." + Source: Eusebius, Preparation for the Gospel I.1 (Gifford translation, 1903). The opening of the whole project, and a plain statement that the two works are one. In the next chapter he puts the pagan charge in his opponents’ own mouth, asking how men can fail to be in every way impious and atheistical "who have apostatized from those ancestral gods by whom every nation and every state is sustained" (T3).

(T4) The Son is truly divine, and yet second after the Father. + Light a second lamp from the flame of the first. The new flame is real fire, as hot and as bright as the old, and it is not a copy or a symbol of fire. But it came from somewhere, and the first flame did not. Something like that picture lies under the theology Eusebius inherited from Origen through the library at Caesarea, and it is why he was uneasy at Nicaea. Theologians call his position subordinationism: the view that the Son is genuinely divine and begotten before all ages, yet holds that divinity as something received from the Father, who alone is the unbegotten source and who in some sense comes first. The two words in that sentence that do the work are worth slowing down for. To be begotten is to come out of another’s own being, as a son comes from a father and as the second flame comes from the first, rather than to be made out of nothing the way a potter makes a jar; and "before all ages" means it happened before there was any time for it to happen in. To be unbegotten is to come from no one at all, and that, on this account, is true of the Father only. Eusebius calls the Son the second cause of the universe, the second Lord, the image of the invisible God, which is Paul’s own phrase (Colossians 1:15), and he means the words seriously in both directions: really divine, really second. When the Alexandrians pressed the word homoousios, "of one substance," what he heard was the suggestion that God had been divided into portions like a loaf, or that Father and Son were two names for one figure, and both of those he rejected. He signed anyway, on the understanding that the word ruled out the material picture rather than requiring it, and the letter he wrote home to explain the signature is worth reading before anyone calls him a liar. But the church went the other way, and it went there for reasons the New Testament pressed on it: the Word was not merely near God at the beginning, "and the Word was God" (John 1:1); the Son is not a bright copy of the Father but "the exact imprint of his nature" (Hebrews 1:3). Nicaea in 325 and Constantinople in 381 settled it. Marcellus of Ancyra, a bishop who had stood with the winning side at Nicaea and then pressed the oneness of Father and Son so hard that his critics heard the modalism Eusebius feared, gave him his last opponent, and Eusebius spent his final years writing against Marcellus in defence of the older, looser picture. Those are the books of his that the church stopped copying.

(Q) "the Only-begotten Son of God, or the Word Who is of the essence of God, the secondary cause of the Universe, or a spiritual substance, and the firstborn nature of God all-perfect" + Source: Eusebius, Demonstration of the Gospel V, Introduction (Ferrar translation, 1920). The words are part of a longer sentence describing the two ways of approaching Christ, above nature and within it. Every phrase in it is high: of the essence of God, firstborn nature of God all-perfect. And in the middle sits the word that would not survive the century, secondary. Elsewhere in the same book he calls the Son "the Second Lord, who is our Lord" (T4).

(T5) A Christian emperor rules the empire as a copy of God’s rule over the world. + Put yourself in the position of a bishop in the 320s. For as long as anyone in your church can remember, the emperor has been the man who signed the death warrants. Your teacher was executed under one. Now an emperor pays for your building, returns your confiscated property, summons your bishops to a council at public expense, and asks you to dinner. No Christian writer had ever needed a theory for that, and Eusebius supplied one. The theory is a chain of resemblances. There is one God, not many; there is one Word through whom God orders the whole creation; and there is now one emperor, ruling one empire, ordering it in imitation of the Word. The old world of many gods matched the old world of many warring kingdoms, and the peace of the empire under one ruler is the political shadow of the truth that God is one. On this account the emperor becomes something like a bishop of the outward life of the world, and Eusebius reports Constantine saying as much of himself. It is easy to see what this gave and what it cost. It gave a persecuted church a way to receive peace as a gift rather than a trap, and it gave the Christian East a political theology that lasted a thousand years. What it did not give was any place to stand when the emperor was wrong, and there is nothing in the picture that would let a bishop tell one so. Eighty years later, with the city of Rome sacked and the empire visibly failing, Augustine wrote the City of God to say that the two cities are not the same city and never will be, and Western Christian thought has mostly followed him rather than Eusebius.

(Q) "Lastly, invested as he is with a semblance of heavenly sovereignty, he directs his gaze above, and frames his earthly government according to the pattern of that Divine original, feeling strength in its conformity to the monarchy of God." + Source: Eusebius, Oration in Praise of Constantine 3 (Richardson translation, Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, second series, volume 1). Spoken at Constantinople for the thirtieth anniversary of the reign, with the emperor listening from the front. In the opening chapter he had already described Constantine as receiving "as it were a transcript of the Divine sovereignty" and directing the world’s affairs "in imitation of God himself" (T5).

(Q) "On this account we assented to the sense ourselves, without declining even the term One in essence, peace being the object which we set before us, and steadfastness in the orthodox view." + Source: Eusebius, Letter to his Church at Caesarea 5, preserved as the appendix to Athanasius, Defence of the Nicene Definition (Newman and Robertson translation, Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, second series, volume 4). He is writing home from the council to the congregation that would want to know why their bishop had signed a word he was known to dislike. Read one way this is an honest man accepting a formula once he has satisfied himself that its sense is safe. Read another way it is a careful man leaving himself room. Both readings were being offered in the fourth century, and the fairest thing to say is that the letter itself will support either.

What the Church Made of Him

(†) The church’s memory of its own first three centuries is largely his, and nobody has ever replaced it. + Within a century of his death his two great reference works had become the frame everyone else built inside. Jerome took the Chronological Canons, the columns of dates Eusebius had set side by side so that a reader could run an eye across Hebrew, Greek and Roman history in a single glance, translated them into Latin, and carried them down to his own day. That translation became the standard timeline of world history in the West for the next eight hundred years, and monastery chronicles all over Europe simply picked up where Jerome left off. Rufinus of Aquileia translated the Ecclesiastical History into Latin around the year 402 and added two books of his own to bring it up to date. In the Greek East the effect was the same. Three historians of the following century, Socrates, Sozomen and Theodoret, each began his own history at the point where Eusebius stopped, and Evagrius in the next century picked up where they ended, so that the story of the church runs unbroken from the apostles to the sixth century on the foundation he laid. The title he is usually given, the Father of Church History, is not a compliment about his character. It is a description of where the discipline starts.

(†) Whole authors survive only because he quoted them. + Open a modern book on how the Gospels came to be written and follow its footnotes for a while, and you will notice how often they stop at the same address. Much of the evidence in those discussions reaches us through his pages and nowhere else. These writers are alive today only because one bishop with a library thought their words worth copying out in full. - Papias, a bishop of the early second century, on how the Gospels came to be written: that Mark wrote accurately what he remembered of Peter’s preaching, though not in order (Ecclesiastical History III.39). Papias’ own five books are lost. - Quadratus, who handed the emperor Hadrian a defence of the faith around 125, arguing that those whom Jesus healed and raised had gone on living among people who knew them (History IV.3). The passage Eusebius quotes is the oldest surviving fragment of Christian apologetics. - Hegesippus, a second-century traveller who checked the succession of bishops city by city, and whose account of the death of James the brother of Jesus (History II.23) is otherwise lost. - Julius Africanus, on how the two genealogies of Jesus can be reconciled (History I.7). - Dionysius of Alexandria, whose careful comparison of the Greek of Revelation with the Greek of the Fourth Gospel (History VII.25) is one of the earliest pieces of literary criticism in Christian literature. - The letter of the churches of Lyons and Vienne describing the martyrdoms of 177, quoted at length (History V.1), and the earliest Christian quotation of the paragraph about Jesus in Josephus (History I.11). There is one more piece of his scholarship that most readers meet without knowing it. He divided the four Gospels into short numbered sections and drew up ten tables showing which sections have parallels in which Gospels, so that a reader could look up any passage and find its counterparts. Those numbers were copied into the margins of Greek and Latin Bibles for a thousand years, and they are still printed in the margins of the standard critical edition of the Greek New Testament.

(†) His two-part apology handed later Christian writers both their pattern and their pagan evidence. + The Preparation and the Demonstration set the shape of a kind of book that Christians went on writing for centuries: clear the ground by showing what is wrong with the alternative, then make the positive case from prophecy and from the life of Christ. Theodoret of Cyrus wrote his Cure of the Greek Maladies in the next century along much the same lines, and the long tradition of arguing from fulfilled prophecy runs down the road Eusebius paved. There is a second and stranger debt. Because he argued by quotation, his apology is now one of the main sources for the pagan writers he was arguing against. Large stretches of the Phoenician history of Philo of Byblos, of the Platonists Numenius and Atticus, and of Porphyry, the ablest critic Christianity faced in the third century, exist today only because a Christian bishop copied them out in order to answer them. The men who wanted to destroy the faith are read in the pages of the man who defended it.

(†) Where he fell short: a Son ranked beneath the Father, and a historian who had chosen a side. + The ledger has another column, and his own writings fill it. - The Son. He held to the end that the Son, though truly divine, is second and derived, and after Nicaea he wrote two books against Marcellus of Ancyra defending that ranking. The church judged otherwise, at Nicaea in 325 and again at Constantinople in 381, and the texts pressed hardest against him are the plainest ones: "the Word was God" (John 1:1), the Son as "the exact imprint of his nature" who "upholds the universe by the word of his power" (Hebrews 1:3), the one of whom it is said that "by him all things were created" and that "in him all things hold together" (Colossians 1:16–17). - Athanasius. He lent his name and his presidency to the council at Tyre in 335, which deposed the man who had defended the creed Eusebius had signed. Whatever the merits of the charges, and later generations judged them poor, a bishop who thought the creed true sat in judgment on its defender. - The advocate’s history. He tells his readers plainly, opening his account of the persecution, that he will not record the quarrels and bad conduct of church leaders in the years before it came: "it is not our place to describe the sad misfortunes which finally came upon them, as we do not think it proper, moreover, to record their divisions and unnatural conduct to each other before the persecution" (History VIII.2). He is writing to build up his readers, not to give them the whole picture, and he says so. It is honest of him to say it, and it is still a rule that keeps things out of the record. - Constantine. The Life of Constantine is a speech of praise as much as a biography, and Eusebius says he will record only what belongs to the emperor’s religious life. What that leaves out is considerable, including the execution of Constantine’s eldest son Crispus and of his wife Fausta in 326, which pagan writers of the time recorded and he does not mention. None of this is a reason to stop reading him, and the church never did stop. It is a reason to read him the way he asked to be read, by weighing the documents he lays out rather than by trusting the man who chose them.