Eusebius's Secret Mark Historia Ecclesiastica

 I want to pull a few threads together and suggest a fairly radical but, I think, coherent thesis: Eusebius originally brought the Church History down into the Constantinian “golden age” of his own party, and that original conclusion was later suppressed or replaced because it was too clearly aligned with what later polemicists would call “Arian” – that is, Alexandrian, Origenist, subordinationist – Christianity. The ten-book Historia Ecclesiastica that stops at Nicaea is a Theodosian edit of a Constantinian Alexandrian project.

The starting point is small and structural. In HE 1–2 the four gospels are simply there as fixed, canonical data. Eusebius can casually contrast “Matthew and Luke in their gospels” on the genealogies, harmonize “the evangelist” with Josephus, cite particular verses from Matthew or John, without ever raising the question how any of these books came to be written. They function as unquestioned scripture whose contents require reconciliation, not as literary projects needing origin stories.

The moment the composition question finally appears, it is not asked of Matthew, Luke, or John, but of Mark. In 2.15–16 Eusebius suddenly brings in Papias and Clement and narrates the making of “the gospel that bears the name of Mark.” Mark appears as Peter’s “interpreter” at Rome; the Roman hearers, impressed by Peter’s preaching, beg Mark to write up what they have heard; Mark does so and “hands over the gospel to those who had requested it”; Peter, on learning what has happened, neither forbids nor encourages it. Only here, and only now, do we get a real composition story for a gospel as a written work.

Eusebius then immediately tacks on the geographical codicil. The same Mark, with that same written gospel, is “the first to be sent to Egypt,” who “preaches the gospel which he had written” and “first establishes churches in Alexandria.” The very first gospel whose origin he bothers to narrate is simultaneously branded as the Alexandrian gospel, carried by the Alexandrian evangelist.

The asymmetry is glaring. He certainly knows the Papias notice about Matthew writing “in the Hebrew dialect,” but he buries it in 3.39, after he has already mapped out the “great churches” and anchored Alexandria’s apostolic origins in Mark. In Books 1–2 Matthew is something you harmonize; Mark is something you historicize – and that historicization is inseparable from Rome and Alexandria, Peter and the Alexandrian episcopal line.

By the time he finally offers his famous gospel synthesis in 3.24, the damage is done. There, in one retrospective paragraph, he supplies motives and chronology for all four: Matthew and John, of the apostles, actually write; Mark and Luke, disciples of Peter and Paul, crystallize their preaching; John, last of all, composes a “spiritual” gospel to supplement the others. But a reader moving straight through the work has not encountered four neat, parallel origin stories from the beginning. He has first encountered Mark, and only Mark, as the gospel with a concrete composition narrative tied to Rome and Egypt; then a modest authorial sketch of Luke based on Luke’s own preface; and only later a synthetic schema that tucks Matthew and John into place and crowns John as uniquely “spiritual.”

Seen against Eusebius’ own theology, that is not a neutral ordering. From the opening chapters of Book 1 he lays down a strongly subordinationist Logos-Christology. The Father is the “maker and creator and ruler of the whole universe,” the one who “commands” and “creates”; the Logos is “second cause of the universe after the Father,” the Power and Wisdom that once held first place but later “yields” the second “as in an imperial census,” the minister who executes the Father’s will in creation and who can say, in the persona of Wisdom, “The Lord created me the beginning of his ways.” This is exactly the Alexandrian Logos-framework later systematized by Origen and then fought over in the Arian controversy: a hypostatic second who is eternal yet clearly subordinated in rank and dignity to the Father.

That theological profile matches Eusebius’ political role. When Arius is first expelled from Alexandria, he finds instinctive sympathy at Caesarea. Eusebius appears as a leading advocate in the early attempts to rehabilitate him against Alexander. At Nicaea he promotes a compromise formula that lavishes honorific titles on the Son while carefully avoiding homoousios; he signs the Nicene creed under imperial pressure and spends the rest of his life explaining that homoousios need not mean what Athanasius will later insist it must mean. His instinctive home is the Alexandrian, Origenist Logos-tradition within which both Alexander and Arius are fighting their family quarrel.

If that is the case, then Eusebius’ gospel historiography is not random. By making Mark the first gospel whose composition story he tells, and by making that Mark the founding evangelist of Alexandria, he effectively gives Alexandrian Christianity an apostolic, gospel-writing charter. Alexandria does not just have a chain of bishops; it has “its” evangelist and “its” gospel, anchored in Peter’s preaching yet delivered in perfected form on Egyptian soil. The theological school later branded “Arian” grows precisely out of that Alexandrian Markan trajectory: Clement, Origen, Dionysius, Peter of Alexandria, and then Alexander and Arius, all arguing over the implications of the same Logos-framework.

This is why a small structural observation has larger implications. The Historia Ecclesiastica, as Eusebius structures it, is already an Alexandrian book before it ever reaches the fourth century. The first chapter plants the subordinationist Logos-Christology that later gets called “Arian.” The early books promise a history of “the most prominent parishes” and quietly slide Alexandria into the set. Mark, “interpreter” of Peter, is historicized first and then branded as Alexandrian evangelist. The middle books slowly turn Alexandria into the intellectual and martyr-church of the empire: the catechetical chair with Pantænus, Clement, and Origen; the episcopal succession with Demetrius, Heraclas, Dionysius, Peter; the Egyptian monastic prototypes by Lake Mareotis; the Decian and Diocletian persecutions in Egypt and the Thebaid; the Egyptian bishops who die in the Great Persecution; the festal letters regulating the Pascha; the theological dossiers on Sabellius, Novatianism, Nepos, Revelation. By the time Constantine appears, Alexandria is structurally central. It is the see of Mark, the school of Origen, the martyr-church of Egypt.

If the story were left to Eusebius himself, the natural ending would not be the council of Nicaea. It would be the Constantinian settlement in which his own party – the Alexandrian, Origenist, subordinationist trajectory – becomes the imperial theology. That is exactly what later polemic will call “Arianism.” From the inside, it is simply the normal Constantinian church.

At this point the labels we habitually use start to look suspicious. We are so deeply programmed by Theodosian catechesis that we reflexively call one cluster of trajectories “Arian,” as if it were a discrete alien deviation, and another “Nicene,” as if it were the straightforward unfolding of the “real” Nicaea. A more honest terminology would flip that. What is called “Arian” in later polemic is, in broad outline, the Constantinian settlement: the bundle of subordinationist, Origenist, Alexandrian trajectories that Constantine actually lived under, died under, and rewarded with imperial favor. What is called “Nicene” after 381 is in reality Theodosian: a new doctrinal regime constructed in the later fourth century, retrojected back onto Nicaea and sold as its genuine meaning.

The chronology is not complicated. In 325 there is a hastily assembled creed built around homoousios as a political bludgeon against a particular cluster of eastern bishops, laid on top of an already broad Logos-subordinationist consensus. Men like Eusebius sign it under pressure and immediately set about explaining it away. For decades afterward, the lived doctrinal landscape is dominated not by Nicaea but by “Eusebian” and homoian formulas that explicitly resist the stronger metaphysical reading Theodosius will later canonize. It is only when Theodosius seizes the eastern throne, issues his famous edict making communion with Rome and Alexandria the criterion of “Catholic” identity, and convenes Constantinople in 381 that a new bloc is created and retrospectively christened “Nicene.”

If that is right, then the ten-book Historia Ecclesiastica we possess is best described as the Theodosian edit of a Constantinian Alexandrian history. The cut-off at 325, the refusal to narrate Constantine’s baptism in its compromising context, the absence of a triumphant account of the post-Nicene ascendancy of the Eusebian party – all of this is exactly what one would expect if later hands decided that Eusebius was too compromised to be allowed to tell the story all the way to the end, but too valuable to discard.

The external evidence points in the same direction. An Arian church historian like Philostorgius, whose work is preserved in epitome, explicitly reports that Eusebius brought “his records of the history” down to “the succession of the sons of the great Constantine.” The phrase “of the history” in that context is the normal shorthand for the Ecclesiastical History. Philostorgius had every reason to know and value a long, Constantinian Eusebian tradition; he praises Eusebius lavishly as a historian while criticizing his theology. His notice makes sense if, in his circles, a longer, more Constantinian recension of the History was still in circulation.

A Latin source like the so-called Gelasian Decree distinguishes between an earlier, “lukewarm” draft of Eusebius’ narrative and a later phase where, in defending Origen, he composed another book, but still permits the history and chronicle “to be read” because of their unique information. That sort of guarded approval presupposes a compromised, suspect Eusebius whose work cannot simply be embraced as straightforwardly orthodox. Again, the picture fits a Constantinian Alexandrian Eusebius much better than the sanitized ten-book version alone.

A catholic historian like Socrates, writing in the early fifth century, tells his readers that Eusebius wrote ten books of ecclesiastical history, bringing the story down to the outbreak of the disturbances around the Egyptian synod and adding nothing beyond that. This matches our current text and shows that, by his time, the ten-book pre-Constantinian recension had been canonized in catholic circles. But it does not erase the earlier testimony. It sits uneasily beside Philostorgius and the other hints of a longer version and shows that, very early, there were competing ways of packaging the Eusebian material: a safer ten-book catholic Eusebius, and a longer, Constantinian Eusebius cherished in “Arian” circles.

The Byzantine evidence is, if anything, sharper. A ninth-century reader like Photius can speak of an Ecclesiastical History “in many books” and then say that “in these same books” Eusebius frequently mentions Arius, does not conceal his heresy, and records Constantine’s baptism, stating who baptized him and where. That description fits neither our ten-book HE nor our Vita Constantini. In the Vita the baptizer is pointedly not named. In the ten-book HE Arius is barely mentioned at all, and Constantine’s baptism is not narrated. Photius is clearly remembering an Eusebian ecclesiastical-historical dossier in which the Arian controversy and the emperor’s baptism were treated at length.

When he turns to Eusebius’ doctrine, Photius reinforces the point. He says that “at the very beginning of the book,” while citing David, Eusebius approves the distinction between “things commanded” and “things created,” calls the Father “maker and founder and ruler of the whole universe who governs with secure dominion,” places “next after him” the divine Word who follows the Father’s commands, and quotes Proverbs “The Lord created me the beginning of his ways.” That is nothing but a paraphrase of HE 1.2–3. Photius is reading the Book 1 Logos-prologue as the banner of an Alexandrian, subordinationist Eusebius and then, in the same breath, recalling a longer ecclesiastical history in which that Eusebius spoke more freely about Arius and Constantine.

Two centuries later, a chronicler like Zonaras has the ten-book HE in its Theodosian form in front of him and has also read Photius. He reproduces the same paraphrase of the Book 1 Logos-Christology: the Father as maker and ruler of the universe, the Word as second after him, Power and Wisdom once in first place and later yielding the second, the Word created as the beginning of God’s ways, ministering to the Father in creation. He sees, in other words, exactly the same “Arian-sounding” Logos-scheme a modern reader sees. Yet he finds, in the text on his desk, no open narrative of the Arian heresy, no explicit account of Constantine’s delayed baptism and the identity of the baptizer. His way of reconciling this with Photius is to accuse Eusebius of concealment: he writes a strongly subordinationist theology but “nowhere openly recounts the Arian heresy,” “conceals that Constantine delayed baptism and was later baptized,” “conceals who baptized him,” and yet “wrote at length, indeed in four books, about his Church History at Nicaea.”

From a different angle, the pieces fit together more simply. Philostorgius remembers a long, Constantinian church history that runs down to the accession of Constantine’s sons. Gelasius is aware of drafting phases and doctrinal suspicion. Socrates has the shorter ten-book “Nicene” recension. Photius has read an ecclesiastical history “in many books” in which Eusebius speaks freely about Arius and Constantine’s baptism and identifies that work by the opening Logos-prologue that matches our HE 1.2–3. Zonaras has the short version, reads the same prologue, and cannot find the Arian narrative Photius describes. The most economical inference is that there really was a longer, more Constantinian, more Alexandrian recension of the Historia Ecclesiastica in circulation, that it carried the story through the Arian controversy and the emperor’s baptism, and that the ten-book version canonized in catholic manuscripts is the Theodosian edit, frozen at 325 and stripped of its most embarrassing Constantinian triumphalism.

Once that is admitted, the internal Mark/Alexandria pattern stops being an odd quirk and looks like preparation for the missing ending. The whole narrative has already been carefully bent in an Alexandrian direction: Mark as the gospel-founder of Alexandria; Philo’s Therapeutae by Lake Mareotis recast as Christian monks; the distinction between the episcopal throne and the catechetical chair in Alexandria; the long Dionysian dossier in Books VI–VII; the Egyptian martyrs in Books VIII–IX. In a Constantinian ending, the see of Mark, with its Alexandrian Logos-theology, would naturally emerge as a primary beneficiary of imperial favor. The same Alexandrian trajectory that produces Clement, Origen, and Dionysius, and that gives the church its theology of the Logos and its model of spiritual exegesis, would be presented as the normative catholic tradition under Constantine and his sons. That is precisely what later polemic will label “Arian.”

In that sense the surviving Historia Ecclesiastica is to the Constantinian Alexandrian settlement what Mark’s first Roman gospel is, in Clement’s story, to the more spiritual Alexandrian edition: an incomplete, public-facing digest, good enough to hand over to the outsiders, but not the whole of what the tradition knows itself to be. A later regime has taken that public digest, cut it off at the point where it would have affirmed the wrong victors, and then rebranded the trajectory it originally celebrated as “heresy.”

If one reads Eusebius against the grain of that Theodosian edit, the picture that emerges is uncomfortable but consistent. The so-called “Arian” tendencies we are trained to spot in him are not marginal errors in an otherwise proto-Nicene history; they are the main line of the story he tells. The so-called “Nicene” orthodoxy that will condemn his party is not the timeless essence of 325 but a fourth-century political construction that needed to efface his original conclusion. The Mark/Alexandria structuring of the early books, the Alexandrian Logos-prologue of Book 1, the long build-up of Alexandrian institutions and martyrs, and the ancient testimonies to a longer, more Constantinian Ecclesiastical History all point in the same direction: Eusebius originally wrote a church history that ended with the triumph of the Alexandrian, Markan, Origenist settlement under Constantine and his sons, and what we have is the shortened, Theodosian version, in which the Alexandrian agenda is still everywhere in the structure but the final celebration of its victory has been carefully removed.