James Eusebius and Alexandria

Andrew Criddle considers a test for whether there really was an ancient scheme that deliberately synchronized two events: the death of James “the Just” in Jerusalem and the rise of Annianus as the first bishop of Alexandria. The constructive proposal imagines an early pattern like this: Christianity in Alexandria began as a mission under the authority of Jerusalem; James’s death in Nero’s seventh year marked the breaking-point, and in the same regnal year Annianus took office as bishop, symbolizing Alexandrian autonomy. On this reading, later stories about Mark in Alexandria and the Claudian dating of his arrival are second-order adjustments that retroject the founding of the great sees back to the “dispersion of the apostles,” while the real primitive anchor-point was the James–Annianus synchronism itself. If that were true, it would imply that the passage in Josephus about “James, the brother of Jesus who is called Christ” was not first exploited by Eusebius, but had already been used in the early third century to date James’s death and to structure Alexandrian memory.

Against this, the surviving evidence resists being pressed into a tight synchronism. In the Greek Ecclesiastical History, Annianus is clearly placed in Nero’s eighth year and said to have ruled twenty-two years until the fourth year of Domitian, an internally coherent framework that is repeated more than once. The Chronicle tradition, in its Latin form, matches that scheme; the Armenian Chronicle, which appears to slide Annianus into Nero’s seventh year and to adjust Domitian correspondingly, also introduces other chronological slips and so looks text-critically secondary rather than preserving a purer, older Alexandrian reckoning. The Ethiopic History of the Episcopate, often treated as independent, in fact dates Mark’s entry into Alexandria to Nero’s seventh year, not Annianus’s accession, and then lets Annianus inherit a twenty-two–year episcopate; this can just as easily be read as harmonizing to the same broad Eusebian pattern, with local color, as as preserving some lost, more primitive bishop list. The late legendary materials—the Martyrdom of Mark with its Passover dating and the Apostolic Constitutions with their apostolic first-person voice—confirm only that a developed tradition made Annianus “first bishop” under Mark and liked to align martyrdoms and accessions with Pascha; they cannot carry fine chronological arguments.

So the “ancient linkage” thesis remains a tantalizing possibility rather than a demonstrated fact. It is not impossible that a pre-Eusebian Alexandrian chronographer once coordinated James’s death and Annianus’s accession in a single scheme, but nothing we possess states this linkage explicitly in an early, independent Alexandrian voice. The simpler explanation fits the extant evidence better: Eusebius dates James by inferring from Josephus’ administration-table and by integrating Hegesippus’ martyr story, and he dates Annianus by episcopal material that gives him an eighth-year accession and a twenty-two–year tenure; the apparent near-coincidence of dates is a product of his harmonization and later derivative traditions. The one fixed line that really stands behind the whole debate is the Chronicle-style notice: “The first bishop of the church of Alexandria ordained after Mark the Evangelist was Annianus, who presided for twenty-two years.” That sentence, rather than any reconstructed seventh-year synchronism, is what can actually be read in the ancient sources.