"Eusebius of Caesarea’s Conception of History in Texts between Autonomy and Heteronomy"

Eusebius of Caesarea, the "father of church history", stands as a central figure in an era of change: during his lifetime, the persecutions of Christians came to an end, and the first Roman emperor was baptised. Eusebius processed the events of his time in both historical and theological writings. The literary genera which he created developed an influence that was to last for centuries: his Church History and his Chronicle became examples that were followed by a multitude of successors. He thus had a lasting influence as a historian. At the same time, one should not try to understand the historian Eusebius only by examining those of his writings which are traditionally classified as historiography. His historical thinking is reflected in all of his works; for Eusebius, theological, apologetic and exegetical thoughts were always connected with history.

This fundamental assumption underlies my dissertation project. The subject of study is Eusebius's apologetic magnum opus, consisting of the Praeparatio Evangelica and the Demonstratio Evangelica, which represents a kind of Christian prehistory, but is usually studied from a theological and patristic perspective. In structure, the work consists of a multitude of quotations from older literature which are drawn upon to illustrate Eusebius's argumentation. Because of this structure, the work has often been used as a "quarry" to extract fragments from lost authors, while Eusebius himself has often been disregarded as a writer in his own right. An analysis of the sources used by Eusebius guided by the history of ideas – with a focus on the dependence, the heteronomy, in which the author consciously places himself as well as the independence, the autonomy, which he develops in the process – promises a better understanding of the historical conceptions of this important writer.