Eusebius the Evangelist: Introduction

AJR is pleased to host the #SBLAAR2022 review panel of Jeremiah Coogan's Eusebius the Evangelist: Rewriting the Fourfold Gospel in Late Antiquity (Oxford University Press, 2022). This book review panel took place at the annual meeting for the Society of Biblical Literature in Denver, Colorado, on November 19, 2022. It was hosted by the new Program Unit, “Ancient Education: Social, Intellectual, Material Contexts,” which aims to explore ancient education beyond curricula, and to consider how knowledge was—or various knowledges were—constructed, organized, and transmitted, especially in late antiquity. In keeping with these aims, we had the privilege of reviewing a book that—as the author says—focuses not just on the “what” of the construction and ordering of knowledge, but also on the “how” (p. 4).

While this book is thus about the ordering of knowledge in late antiquity, it is, more specifically, a study of something called the “Eusebian Apparatus,” a complex set of cross-references of the four Gospels, developed by Eusebius, the bishop of Palestinian Caesarea in the early fourth century. For those readers who are unfamiliar with how these cross-references work, I would simply echo Coogan’s exhortation to use the Apparatus: employing Eusebius the Evangelist as an instruction manual (pp. 14–21), dust off your Nestle-Aland 28, and use the canon tables and the marginal apparatus. However, I should note that both Coogan and one of our reviewers, Jennifer Knust, are rightly critical of the NA28’s formatting of the Apparatus. I offer this suggestion not only because the Apparatus was important for the reception of the Gospels for at least a millennium following Eusebius’ invention of it, but also because central to Coogan’s argument is his repeated contention that “the meaning of the Eusebian Apparatus is in its use” (see, e.g., pp. 27, 137, 173). By using the Apparatus, we can see what it ‘means’ or, better, how it makes meaning.

With respect to this apparatus, Coogan’s basic argument is that “[b]y crafting the Gospels according to Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John into a durable canonical and bibliographic unity, Eusebius transformed the fourfold Gospel that circulated for a millennium and more” (p. 26). In the process of mounting this larger argument, Coogan makes a series of moves that are worth drawing attention to, before we hear from the reviewers. Notably, the book looks both forward and backward.

First, backward. Coogan situates the Eusebian Apparatus both within a longer history of bibliographic technologies (including other types of tables, both astronomical and biblical), and within a longer history of writing and re-writing Gospel texts (beginning with the writing of Mark, and continuing through Luke, and then Tatian’s Diatessaron, among others). While Coogan sees significant continuities between preceding book technologies and the Eusebian Apparatus and significant continuities between Gospel writing and the Apparatus, he argues that in both cases Eusebius was highly innovative—so much so, that Eusebius himself is a writer or rewriter of “Gospel”: like Mark, Luke, and Tatian, Eusebius too is an evangelist. His Gospel is the “Fourfold Gospel.”

Second, it looks forward. Coogan takes pains to illuminate what he calls the “affordances” of the Eusebian Apparatus. He shows that the Apparatus makes certain uses and readings of the Gospels possible, as well as convenient (e.g., the Apparatus affords readings that highlight continuities between Jesus pre- and post-resurrection). Coogan also looks forward by locating traces of readers of the Fourfold Gospel—those who in the millennium following Eusebius made use of the Apparatus. Especially important are those who transformed the Apparatus’s technology. These transformations show that the Apparatus was no mere ornamental vestige in medieval Gospel books (whether in Latin, Greek, Ge’ez, Syriac, Armenian, or the various other languages Coogan draws attention to), but that readers were actively using it.

With this summary I have steamrolled the undulations of Coogan’s highly nuanced arguments. However, the reviewers generously supplement this account, providing much more detail, as they reflect on the many productive aspects of Eusebius the Evangelist. To the end of highlighting the far-reaching significance of the book, we have gathered a group of scholars who, while all working on late antiquity, specialize in a diversity of materials and languages. In what follows, we will hear how the reviewers imagine Eusebius the Evangelist will impact the fields of late antiquity and early Christianity more broadly.

Robert Edwards is currently an Alexander von Humboldt postdoctoral fellow at the University of Göttingen.