As James Corke-Webster notes in this reworked version of his doctorate written at the University of Manchester, Eusebius of Caesarea's Church history was ‘only one thread in the rich tapestry he wove in the course of his long, bookish life’. But when measured against his many other literary works, written in a variety of genres and over more than half a century, the Church history is probably the most influential, and certainly the most cited. This is in part because it is the first ‘history’ of the Church and with its plentiful citation of sources, provides the historian with potentially significant evidence about the origins and growth of the Church to the time of Constantine. This has had the consequence that much attention has been placed on the accuracy of the information contained within the history. Corke-Webster distinguishes himself from this approach, turning his attention to Eusebius the innovative author, who in particular circumstances and addressing a specific audience, constructed a work which sought, with artifice, to create a particular vision of the Christian Church within the Roman society of his time. It is Corke-Webster's aim to unveil the aims and purposes of Eusebius’ monumental work.

Corke-Webster begins with Eusebius himself. He emphasises his Caesarean background. Although somewhat of a backwater, the town gave him access to the greatest Christian library of the time, which made a work like the History possible, and to an intellectual heritage with strong Alexandrian influence, which would be reflected in a variety of ways, not least in Eusebius’ dependence upon Clement and Origen. At the time he came to write the History, Christians had experienced persecution under the Tetrarchy, and then clemency under Constantine. Christianity's position was in a state of flux, its movement to prominence only gradual and not yet established. In chapter ii Corke-Webster turns his attention to the Church history itself. He discusses the vexed question of its date (probably 313 onwards, assuming a number of editions) and audience. The latter was made up of an educated class, like Eusebius, consisting primarily of clerics but lay people also, ‘whose shared Christianity must not obscure a similarly shared elite Graeco-Roman heritage’. As such, these individuals needed assurance, as no doubt did pagans who might eventually come to read the work, that Christianity reflected their values, not least in the wake of the ‘Great Persecution’, where claims about Christian ‘criminality’ had been to the fore. In the same chapter Corke-Webster goes on to show how Eusebius undertook this task by attempting to respond to the kind of elite criticisms of Christianity found in Porphyry, but, interestingly, more particularly in the earlier work of Celsus, and how the genre of the History, part mixture of national history and philosophical biography, was suited to that task. ‘His collective biographical method indicates an interest above all in Christian character, constructed in line with a traditional Graeco-Roman rhetoric of intellectual temperance.’ Part ii of the monograph is made up of four chapters in which Corke-Webster shows, through a discussion of Eusebius’ presentation of a variety of types (Christian intellectuals, Christian ascetics, Christian families and Christian martyrs), how he carries out the task that he has set himself. Here great emphasis is placed upon the way in which Eusebius moderates what some viewed as the extreme and anti-societal attitude of Christians, often by adopting positions closer to Clement of Alexandria rather than to Origen, the two writers who were so important to him. In part iii he tackles Eusebius’ approach to the Church and the Church's relationship to Rome. Here some may find themselves in more familiar territory. So, in discussing the Church, Corke-Webster lays special emphasis on the way in which Eusebius projected a view of the Church as united from the beginning, a world-wide organisation, whose interconnectedness was promoted not least by the writing of letters. In creating such an idealised picture, Eusebius was not simply responding to views of the Church as divided, which had been there since Celsus, and were already hinted at in the New Testament, but also seeking to give voice to a vision of the Church moving forward. In discussing the Church's position within the Roman Empire Eusebius sought by various means to establish the fact that the Church was no enemy of the empire, or at least of those emperors who were generally held in high esteem: ‘Christianity had a rich, prominent, and positive legacy under Rome and had always been aligned with legitimate Roman authority.’ In such a painstaking reconstruction, Rome was also absolved of any blame for the mistreatment of Christianity. In such a vision, alignment of Church and Empire became easier at a time of transition.

Eusebius as the writer of the Church history emerges from Corke-Webster's formidably researched work as a highly creative and politically and culturally sensitive author. The educational elites whom he addresses, primarily Christian, but whose concerns would have mapped onto those of a non-Christian elite audience, would have found themselves in the presence of a religion which embodied their own assumptions and enthusiasms, which were thoroughly Roman. While Corke-Webster highlights what one might broadly call the apologetic aims of Eusebius (as well as the way his own view of things reflects Eusebius’ own position), he is also keen to stress the ways in which Eusebius argues for the superiority of Christianity – the intellectual and moral authority of its major protagonists together with their collective qualities admirably qualified them for a position of ultimate authority in the empire.

This is a hugely stimulating book written with clarity and acuity. Its concentration on Eusebius as a constructor of a ‘world’ rather than simply the writer of an informational text makes excellent sense. This task is carried out with often minute attention to detail and in a way that avoids the sometimes over-theorised tones of advocates of the linguistic turn. Corke-Webster is at his best when showing how Eusebius writes with an eye to a set of values, which were strikingly Roman as well as Christian; and he performs the task of showing how the Church history reflected wider cultural and ecclesiastical tasks at one and the same time (especially adroit is chapter iii on Christian intellectuals where Eusebius’ preference for institutional intellectuals over against free, charismatic ones, is unveiled). His claims that Eusebius took Celsus more seriously as a critic of Christianity than Porphyry, and that he was closer in temperament to Clement than Origen are argued convincingly, though some might wonder if Eusebius emerges as too strong a critic of the latter, whether in terms of Origen's opinions or of the quality of his refutation of Celsus. I wondered also whether more could not have been made of the History in relation to some of Eusebius’ other works, not least the Chronicon. Corke-Webster is clear that his study takes account of other works by Eusebius and these do indeed feature but I thought that they could have been more of a presence. As a regular user of Eusebius’ Church history I wondered also what Corke-Webster's reading implies about Eusebius as an historian (a term which means something different to us than it did to him). In his attempts to be what Corke-Webster calls ‘world-making’, did he traduce the history of early Christianity to a point where its main contours are no longer visible? Indeed in the light of this work, how might we even answer that question? Scepticism about the Church history has always been a part of the scholarly landscape and this book's view of its construction bolsters such an attitude further.

It is, of course, a formidable task effectively to encapsulate the aims of a work as lengthy as Eusebius’ Church history, and Cork-Webster is clear that his is not a comprehensive answer to that question. But what he has given his readers is a thesis which present and future students of Eusebius will not be able to do without.