Eusebius the Evangelist: Rewriting the Fourfold Gospel in Late Antiquity

Eusebius the Evangelist: Rewriting the Fourfold Gospel in Late Antiquity

Role

Jeremiah Coogan (Author)

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Description

Eusebius the Evangelist analyzes Eusebius of Caesarea’s fourth-century reconfiguration of the Gospels as a window into broader questions of technology and textuality in the ancient Mediterranean. The four Gospels of the New Testament (Matthew, Mark, Luke, John) share language, narratives, and ideas, yet they also differ in structure and detail. The sophisticated system through which Eusebius organized this intricate web of textual relationships is known as the Eusebian apparatus.

Eusebius’ editorial intervention—involving tables, sectioning, and tables of contents—participates in a broader late ancient transformation in reading and knowledge. To illuminate Eusebius’ innovative use of textual technologies, the study juxtaposes diverse ancient disciplines—including chronography, astronomy, geography, medicine, philosophy, and textual criticism—with a wide range of early Christian sources, attending to neglected evidence from material texts and technical literature. These varied phenomena reveal how Eusebius’ fourfold Gospel worked in the hands of readers.

Eusebius’ creative juxtapositions of Gospel material had an enduring impact on Gospel reading. Not only did Eusebius continue earlier trajectories of Gospel writing, but his apparatus continued to generate new possibilities in the hands of readers. For more than a millennium, in more than a dozen languages and in thousands of manuscripts, Eusebius’ invention transformed readers’ encounters with Gospel text on the page. By employing emerging textual technologies, Eusebius created new possibilities of reading, thereby rewriting the fourfold Gospel in a significant and durable way.

ISBN

9780197580042

Publication Date

11-11-2022

Publisher

Oxford University Press

Disciplines

Biblical Studies | Christianity | Religion

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Read the Introduction here in Scholar Commons.

Eusebius the Evangelist: Rewriting the Fourfold Gospel in Late Antiquity

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