Eusebius’ ‘Ecclesiastical History’, also known as Eusebius’ ‘Early Church Recordings’, is a true tour de force on the development of the early Christian Church from the second century to the fourth century AD. His account is so striking for a multiplicity of reasons, starting with the fact that the works is a chronicle of people, ideas, and events which filled the deep groove of esoteric challenge left by Jesus the Christ. I find no more convincing evidence of the raw power of Jesus than I do here, for his infleunce in these very early accounts proved to be incredibly fortituous and contagious. In Eusebius’ chronicles we are exposed almost first hand to what people were thinking and saying about Christ, and how they were acting, including becoming martyrs, in the wake of his presence. What this means is that Eusebius has preserved for us a non-fictional look into the time directly after Jesus’ departure, and in reading all these separate but not conflicting accounts of the early Christian pilgrims we get not only a fundamental understanding of the more immediate influence of Jesus upon the people of the Near East, but of the foundations upon which the Christian Church grew upon- not upon physical churches per se, but upon people whose faith was so unwavering that they were willing to face axes and lions to maintain the religion’s message. We thus see how the Christian Church was formed not upon stones and government regulations, but upon persecuted peoples who were so moved by Jesus’ message that they sprouted up between the cracks of the cruel fasces of thier era until the wave of religious growth overwhelmed the statecraft authorities.
This works takes us as far forward as the aegis of Constantine and the Nicene Council, and no further. The fact that C. F. Cruse has kept true to the original, unabridged language as far as is possible in a translation is refreshing. All too many religious scholars can not keep from injecting their slant or propaganda into the works they purport to be conveying ‘unabridged’. But C. F. Cruse sticks to the facts and to historicity, and has included some additonal information concerning the early martyrs- ‘the Martyrs of Palestine’, as some refer to them.
It is with chagrin that one must concede that the drama in the New Testament has become so second-nature to our understanding of Christianity that for many the Bible might seem like an old TV re-run. What Eusebius phenomenal ‘Ecclesiastical History’ does here is make fresh again the grandeur of Christ and his message by showing us new angles in a very historic sense, by following the movemnets and sacrifices of common individuals, and by relating accounts less ‘theatrical’ and more ‘real’. This is, after all, a non-fiction. The seriousness of the works and Eusebius’ in-depth reporting is truly stunning in its crucial insight into those incipient days of Christianity.