HISTORIANS, ECCLESIASTICAL

HISTORIANS, ECCLESIASTICAL. The first ecclesiastical historian whose works survive complete is Eusebius of Caesarea (q.v.). His History of the Church covered the first three centuries of Christianity and is still an invaluable resource. He incorporated into it other works, now lost, such as those of the 2nd-c. church historian Hegesippus, who wrote on Jerusalem and Rome, and probably gave us the list of early Roman popes found in Epiphanius (Haer. 27.6). Subsequent Church historians writing in Greek included: Socrates (d. 439) and Sozomen (d. ca. 450), who carried Eusebius’s story through the Trinitarian controversies of the 4th c.; Theodoret of Cyrrhus (q.v.), who continued into the Christological debates through Chalcedon (q.v.); Zachariah the Rhetor (d. ca. 550), who took the latter controversies through the mid-6th c. from the monophysite side; and Evagrius Scholasticus (d. 593/4), who represented the Chalcedonian side through to the century’s end. Lesser writers include Philostorgius (d. 395) and Gelasius of Caesarea (d. 425) from the Greek side and Joh n of Ephesus (d. 586), who wrote in Syriac (q.v.).

Among the Latins, Lactantius (d. 330s) contributed an impressive history of the African Church’s persecutions under the Emperor Diocletian, while Rufinus of Aquileia (d. ca. 410) wrote perhaps the most impressive Church history by a Western writer until the Venerable Bede (d. 735) produced his remarkable History of the English Church. Augustine of Hippo’s (q.v.) City of God, while not a history per se, is nonetheless worth mentioning as the unique theology of history in the patristic age. Finally, Jerome compiled a bibliography of ecclesiastical writers and translated and updated Eusebius’s Chronicle, which is a summary of universal history with dates.

Church history continued to be written throughout the Byzantine era (q.v.). But since Church and state (q.v.) came to be practically identified during Byzantium’s medieval period, the histories produced are as much histories of the Empire as of the Christian Church. Examples are the works of Michael Psellos (11th c.) and Anna Comnena (12th c.).