Who was the first church historian? Most Christians would immediately say the Gospel writer Luke. He also gave us the book of Acts, an account of the early church during the time of Peter and Paul. But after that there was no major effort to record the history of the church, at least not one that anyone is aware of, until around the year 325. Then Eusebius, the bishop of Caesarea in Israel, saw the importance of preserving the story of the early Christian church for us who would become believers in later generations. Think of the incredible task he set out to accomplish! Eusebius is going to cover over 300 years of church history. To get an idea of the challenge, picture this.

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Try This One in Your Mind
Suppose you are part of a people whose origins go back to around the 1690’s, almost a century before America was an independent nation. You are selected to tell in detail the story of your people. But there are problems. Your people were a despised and illegal group for most of that time. In fact, there were at least two full-scale government sponsored persecutions intended to exterminate your people. Many key leaders were captured and killed and their precious books burned. They had no official standing, no public festivals, no monuments built to commemorate your community. (The records for an oppressed minority are not usually easy to come by.) And to make your task more challenging, your people spread over most of the known world, living and growing within diverse cultures. Now then, how do you possibly put together the story? That is the kind of task Eusebius took on. Finally, peace had come to the church after Constantine became emperor. Now the story could be told. Eusebius was the one for the job. He had already prepared a chronology of the Bible and early church, trying to establish the dates of Christ's death and church events which followed. This was a difficult undertaking because many different calendars were in use at the time and he had to correlate events recorded under one system to events recorded under others.

He Preserved the Sources
Eusebius' history then is our most significant authority for three hundred years of early Christian history. We owe him a special debt because he quotes from many sources that no longer exist. We are blessed that he showed interest in a broad range of material. He traced the lines of apostolic succession in key cities. Thus we know how the church progressed in major cities. The church has always been nourished with the blood of martyrs. Eusebius incorporated stories of martyrdom into his account and these precious testimonies remain a powerful apologetic for the church as well as an inspiration for later generations.

The Controversies
Eusebius was interested in the controversy over which books should be in the Bible and he related various views of the matter. Because of this we know a good deal about how we got the canon of the New Testament. Eusebius was also interested in the woeful fate of the Jews, which he attributed to their rejection of Christ. He recounted their struggles in several passages. Eusebius also traces the threads of heresy. Through him we are aware of challenges to orthodoxy in the early centuries of the faith. Eusebius also shows how God preserved the church and poured his grace upon it.