LITMIR.BIZ

Скачать книгу

of a demise of sacred history with the destruction of the temple, the further scattering of the Jews in the diaspora that intensified the dissipation of any concept of continuing political history, the canonization of Scripture that presented the Jews with a closed sacred past, the general disillusionment with historical processes attendant upon the failure of two major Jewish revolts against Rome, and the rabbinical orientation towards the law and its application and the rabbinical demands for total purity of life and separation from the world. Jewish historians in the Hellenistic and Greco-Roman world had borrowed the forms and interests of Hellenistic historiography and ethnography and utilized these for apologetic, propaganda, and polemical purposes. Josephus was a primary example. After the Bar Kokhba Revolt, these purposes seem to have lost their appeal. Jewish apocalyptic, with its special historical concerns, was reduced to only a glowing ember in the Hadrianic fires.

      The early Christian church inherited from Judaism a collection of Scriptures strongly oriented to history. This combined with the belief that God had finally and fully revealed himself in the historical person, Jesus of Nazareth, meant that Christians could not ignore past history; in fact it had to claim the history of the old covenant as its own. The apologetic desire to present Christianity as the true heir of Old Testament faith and the evangelistic-confessional proclamation of the church as the special object of God’s providence led to the attempt to view “theocratic” history in systematic form. This systematization of history took both chronological and philosophical forms, although even the chronological perspectives were undergirded with major theological claims. The earliest specimens of Christian interpretation and systematic treatments of history were more chronological than historiographic in form.

      The Christian chronographers had to summarize the history that the converts were now supposed to consider their own; they had also to show the antiquity of the Jewish–Christian doctrine, and they had to present a model of providential history. The result was that, unlike pagan chronology, Christian chronology was also a philosophy of history. Unlike pagan elementary teaching, Christian elementary teaching of history could not avoid touching upon the essentials of the destiny of man.30

      Little is known of the Christian chronographers and their works prior to the establishment of Christianity as the state religion in the fourth century CE. Among the most important of these pre-Constantinian Christian ‘historians’ were Clement of Alexandria, Julius Africanus, and Hippolytus of Rome. Their concerns were primarily apologetic—to counter the contempt of Christianity as a novelty; and their methods were primarily those of their precursors, the Greco-Jewish historians and Hellenistic chronographers.

      The work of Julius Africanus (about 170–245 CE), of which only fragments have survived, will illustrate the approach of these Christian chronographers.31 Africanus’s work, which was still available to Jerome (De viris illustribus, 63), consisted of five volumes. He treated the history of the world from creation until his own day and like practically all patristic writers saw chronology in eschatological perspectives. He allotted 6,000 years for the world’s duration and dated the birth of Jesus to 5500 anno mundi. Such time schemes or world ages were common in Jewish apocalyptic writings and are even found in rabbinic sources.32 Africanus did not share the view of his North African contemporary Tertullian, who claimed that “to be ignorant of everything outside the rule of faith is to possess all knowledge.” He worked out an elaborate synopsis of sacred and profane history, using as a fixed point the accession of Cyrus, and sought to collaborate his synchronisms with quotations from secular sources. He dated the flood to 2,262 after creation and apparently placed the exodus in the year 3,707. The first of these reckonings differs from the LXX, which places the flood 2,242 years after creation, and the date of the exodus was correlated with a Greek version of the flood assigned to the time of Ogygos, the legendary first king of Thebes. The date of Cyrus’s accession was derived from Diodorus of Sicily, who had stated that Cyrus became king of the Persians in the opening year of the fifty-fifth Olympiad. The Olympiad system was based on the quadrennial celebration of the Olympic games, with the first of these supposedly held in what would be our 776/775 BCE.33

      In Africanus, one sees a flicker of textual criticism, so essential to scientific historiography. In a letter to Origen, he outlined seven reasons for considering the story of Susanna as late and fictitious and thus as no original part of the book of Daniel. He also noted and discussed the differences in the Matthean and Lukan genealogies of Jesus. Africanus’s textual criticism and skepticism of sources, however, nowhere approached that of the non-Christians Celsus and Porphyry. In their attacks on Christianity, the former criticized the miraculous and absurd in the Bible and the latter denied the Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch, pointed out inconsistencies in Genesis, understood the book of Daniel against the times of Antiochus Epiphanes, and called attention to major disagreements in the Gospels.

      Eusebius of Caesarea, who died about 340 CE, utilized the works of his Christian and pagan predecessors in the study of chronography and produced an extensive chronology of world history. Although especially indebted to the work of Africanus, Eusebius frequently deviated from him and developed a new system for synchronistic tabulation. Unfortunately, Eusebius’s chronographic work has survived only in Jerome’s Latin translation and adaptation and in an anonymous Armenian translation. In his so-called Chronographia, he produced an outline of the history of five major nations: the Assyrians, Hebrews, Egyptians, Greeks, and Romans. In calculating the reigns of these nations’ rulers, he engaged in some critical discussions of the systems used for dating. The chronological differences among the Greek, Hebrew, and Samaritan texts were discussed with Eusebius generally opting for the LXX calculations. In his so-called Chronicon, Eusebius utilized a series of parallel columns for presenting the synchronism of the various empires. He took the birth of Abraham as his fixed point for reckoning and placed this in 3,184 anno mundi. The flood was dated to 2,242 and the exodus 505 years after the birth of Abraham. By choosing Abraham as the beginning point in his calculations, Eusebius thus partially sidestepped the LXX/Hebrew chronological problems, since the major differences are found in the early chapters of Genesis.34

      Eusebius did not produce his chronology in any hope of detailing the coming of the eschatological end-time, nor did he, like Africanus, work with any world-age scheme. Uncertainty about the times and seasons, he wrote, applies “not merely to the final cataclysm but to all times.” For him, “chronology was something between an exact science and an instrument of propaganda.”35 Eusebius’s career spanned the time that saw the church move from a persecuted sect to a state institution. His days were times of triumph for Christianity and Eusebius’s writings affirm this as the providential purpose of God whose action in human affairs was the real nucleus of the historical process.

      Eusebius was not only the ablest of the ancient Christian chronographers, he was also the father of ecclesiastical history. Eusebius was the first to produce a history of the church—which for him extended from the incarnation until his own day, in which the savior had wrought a great and final deliverance and destroyed the enemies of true religion. In approaching his subject, Eusebius confessed, in the first chapter of his Ecclesiastical History, that “as the first of those that have entered upon the subject, we are attempting a kind of trackless and unbeaten path.” In executing his narration of church history, Eusebius spoke of the fragmentary knowledge of the past and the evidence available.

      We are totally unable to find even the bare vestiges of those who may have travelled the way before us; unless, perhaps, what is only presented in the slight intimations, which some in different ways have transmitted to us in certain partial narratives of the times in which they lived; who, raising their voices before us, like torches at a distance, and as looking down from some commanding height, call out and exhort us where we should walk, and whither direct our course with certainty and safety. Whatsoever, therefore, we deem likely to be advantageous to the proposed subject, we shall endeavour to reduce to a compact body by historical narration. For this purpose we have collected the materials that have been scattered by our predecessors, and culled, as from some intellectual meadows, the appropriate extracts from ancient authors. (1.1)

      In carrying out this procedure, Eusebius made a lasting contribution to Western historiography.

      A new chapter of historiography begins with Eusebius not only because he invented ecclesiastical history, but because he wrote it with a documentation that is utterly different from that of pagan

Скачать книгу