Eusebius' Church history is doubtless one of the most discussed texts of late antiquity. It is all the more astonishing that new perspectives upon it can still be gained. Meike Willing shows how the bishop of Caesarea integrates his literary information about heresies into his general concept of historiography. Eusebius does not produce any critical discussion of heresy, but presents it as a phenomenon that is an illegitimate part of the history of the Church. As such it is a dwindling and foredoomed one. History is the story of a struggle between God and the devil, in which godly truth becomes ever more superior to diabolic heresy. Adopting the role of an accountant of history, Eusebius simply assigns the different heresies to his chronological lists of emperors and bishops and treats them as pure historical rather than theological issues. He states that once they existed, then they were refuted by orthodox Christians and then they disappeared. In contrast to the rise of the orthodox Christian Church the heresies become more and more obsolete in the course of history. They are nothing but phased-out models. That is why Eusebius does not deal with heresy in the final books of his church history, nor in the later editions of it. Although heresies were in fact important at the time when Eusebius was writing his Church history, he did not pay any attention to them. His view of history made him understand heresies as anachronistic and inconsequential when set against the overwhelming visible victory of the godly Logos and of the orthodox Church.
This book is a published version of a Göttingen doctorate in theology, supervised by Ekkehard Mühlenberg and submitted in 2007. It is a thorough study that provides new insights on one particular aspect of Eusebius' historiography. Moreover, it adds some nuances to the complex debate about orthodoxy and heresy in the early Church, because it underlines the traditional aspects of Eusebius' view of the heresies as well as pointing out the originality of his specific hereseographical concept.
