Len’s Review of Early Christian Writings and Eusebius’ History of the Church

In case ya don’t know, I am now a truck driver and I live over the road. Instead of spending my down time in front of a computer screen, I’ve decided to build a personal library and read new books from various disciplines and themes. One of the themes is early Christianity, a subject on which we have surprisingly little primary source information.

In fact, Eusebius of Ceasarea wrote the only surviving historical record of the Church’s first 300 years, and traced the history of the Church from the Great Persecutions and ending with the conversion of Emperor Constantine.

As I came to finish this book, the key takeaways I got from Eusebius’ work was that the biggest challenges for the Church were persecutions by various Roman emperors, and of schisms and heresies from who Eusebius considers opportunistic people.

It was really impressed upon me that Christianity was and is a religion of martyrdom. Previous to this, I believed that the Romans themselves were ambivalent towards Christianity, akin maybe to Pontus Pilate’s own attitude toward Jesus. That wasn’t the case.

Christianity spread and grew as the Roman Empire steadily decayed, and while some scholars argue that Christianity was in fact the cause of Rome’s fall, I didn’t really get that impression from reading this account. Against the backdrop of a declining Rome, hysteria spread about Christians, and this was stoked by a handful of corrupt and wicked emperors who wanted to rid themselves of an evangelistic religion that was outside the power structure of the Gods of Classical Antiquity. The great persecutions were therefore a fulfillment of Jesus’ prediction that future believers would have to bear the same cross as he had.

Eusebius’ book was a really interesting read, with some parallels to today. For example, I found some of the ‘mad’ late emperors to be as cynical and power hungry as today’s Democrat party. I also found Eusebius’ description of the persecutions of the Church, where many lukewarm believers succumbed to the pressure at simply the first onslaught, eerily like how many of us handled the “vaccine” mandates in 2020. I’m still unvaxxed, by the way.

I think I will leave my reflections of Eusebius’ book at that. If you’re interested in the nature of Christianity, particularly of the Catholic Church and why it is the way it is, give this one a read.

Early Christian Writings are a good follow up to Eusebius’ work, particularly because much of what Eusebius writes about comes from these earlier accounts. The climax of the Early Christian Writings, in my opinion at least, was the report on the Martyrdom of Polycarp, the Bishop from Smyrna who refused to renounce Christianity to the regional governor, and was cruelly tortured in front of a frenzied colluseum crowd.