Church History

Eusebius of Caesarea, Ecclesiastical History (complete)

Eusebius of Caesarea

Ten books, and most of what anyone knows about the first three centuries is inside them.

Catch rate: Not found in the wild
Base research: 176
Stat total: 340

Base stats

Every stat is a checkable fact about the actual book, not a designer's mood. Bars are drawn against the highest value any book reaches.

Stamina84

Contend84

Defend80

Popularity92

Total340

Why these numbers

The game's own explanation, as a reader sees it in the backpack.

Stamina 84

Ten books, complete, running from the apostles to Constantine — the whole of it, not the scraps you were carrying. Deep Stamina.

Contend 84

Eusebius argues by producing the paperwork. He was at Nicaea, he had the library at Caesarea, and he puts the documents on the table rather than telling you what they said.

Defend 80

A rich tradition in Greek, Syriac and Latin that agrees with itself — but Eusebius revised his own book at least twice as the empire changed around him, and the recensions do not match. Sturdy rather than immovable.

Popularity 92

It has been THE history of the early church for seventeen centuries, and it is a paperback in every bookshop now. It takes the floor first almost anywhere.

Cited for this book

Eusebius wrote the first history of the church. He quoted his sources at length and named them, even documents he disagreed with. He lived through the Great Persecution and watched friends die, and then saw the emperor call a council. Most early Christian writers we can name, we know because of these ten books.

Development

A book develops as it is read — the fragment becomes the work, the work becomes the corpus.

Church History→
Lv 38

Eusebius’ Corpus

Moves learned

By levelling up. A book that develops keeps what it knew and learns the rest on its new schedule.

Lv	Move	Type	Cat.	Pwr	Acc	PP
28	From the Documents	History	Argument	84	100%	10
34	The Canon List	Bible	Argument	82	100%	10
50	Speak Greek	History	Status	—	100%	5

The quotes behind its moves

How to read these. In Scholar’s Dream, books argue with each other. Each thing a book can do in a debate is a move, and most moves carry a real quotation — the words the book puts on the table when it uses that move.

Strong against lists the opposing books and arguments a move was written to answer. Used against one of them, it hits much harder than usual: ×2 means twice the normal force, ×4 four times. It is the game’s way of saying: this is the sentence that answers that argument. Open an entry to read why.

“having plucked like flowers from a meadow the appropriate passages from ancient writers, we shall endeavor to embody the whole in an historical narrative”
Eusebius, Church History I.1.5 (trans. McGiffert, NPNF² 1, public domain).public domain

From the Documents

HistoryArgument · power 84 · 100% accurate

In the gameEusebius copied his evidence in rather than summarising it — letters, imperial edicts, lists of bishops, whole treatises by men whose books are otherwise gone. Most of what anybody knows about the first three centuries survives because he pasted it into this one.

“this too has been disputed by some, and on their account cannot be placed among the acknowledged books… This will serve to show the divine writings that are undisputed as well as those that are not universally acknowledged.”
Eusebius, Church History III.25.6–7 (trans. McGiffert, NPNF² 1, public domain). (trimmed quote)public domain

The Canon List

BibleArgument · power 82 · 100% accurate

In the gameEusebius sorted the books in circulation into three piles and wrote the piles down: acknowledged, disputed, and put forward by heretics. The Gospel of Peter and the Gospel of Thomas are in the third pile, named, in the early fourth century. It is the earliest surviving list that does the sorting out loud.

Strong against

×2A View of the Evidences of Christianitya book · why?

Paley rests his case for the New Testament on Eusebius’s Church History, which records which books the early churches received.