Similar Things: Reflections On Eusebius The Evangelist

“Temporal anomalies from the future…sometimes land on the surface of a text not prepared for their arrival.”[1]

As Jeremiah Coogan shows in his wonderful new book, Eusebius did not simply invent a clever way of pulling the fourfold Gospels into a harmonious whole, he also transformed them into something else entirely and was therefore an evangelist. Eusebius created a new way to put the Gospels to use; his apparatus “affords” particular readings and therefore shapes meaning in ways that have impacted Gospel transmission since the moment of the apparatus’s introduction. His close reading of the apparatus — Coogan puts the apparatus to use — shows that Eusebius was interested in identifying “similar things,” a strategy of highlighting resemblances, not synchronicities, that invites readers to find verbal, narrative, and thematic connections and places a “second, poetic geography on top of the geography of the literal.” Eusebius’s ingenious intervention was at the cutting edge of scholarship and knowledge production: he applied the technical genre of the astronomical table to literary analysis; by segmenting, curating, resequencing, conflating, expanding, and reconfiguring, he produced a new work, “The Gospel according to Eusebius,” but without explicitly interrupting the evangelists’ own words; and, to extend Coogan’s argument, he highlighted the harmonic resonances of the fourfold Gospels in a way that embraces (or better, produced) their ordered, coordinated difference.[2]

Eusebius’s contribution was so incredibly useful and afforded so many varied responses and reuses that it was taken up not only by those who manufactured Greek Gospels, but also by the translators and editors responsible for the Latin, Gothic, Syriac, Ethiopic, Arabic, Armenian, traditions, and more. Later writers employed the apparatus in their exegesis, often without giving either Eusebius or his apparatus their due. Editors and scribes invented new ways to insert the canons, illuminate the tables, and call attention to the numbers. Gospel harmonizers used it to create continuous-text Gospel narratives. Commentaries employed the sections to track commented passages. Liturgical handbooks used them to identify readings. And those responsible for distributing readings across the moveable and fixed feasts of the church year let these numbers be their guide. If meaning lies in use and not in text, then Eusebius should perhaps be considered not only an evangelist, but also the most influential evangelist of all time.

Since I have no objections to Coogan’s analysis (everyone should just read this book already), I will structure my own response around two areas where I think Coogan and/or scholarship after Coogan could go next: (1) further analysis of what the “harmony of the Gospels” meant to the ancients who claimed it (or better, to follow Coogan: how a claim like “harmony of the Gospels” was used) and (2) a reconsideration of what an “evangelist” is or can be. In her study of conjectural emendations to Shakespeare’s Henry V, Linda Charnes makes a point I find helpful for those of us who study Gospels and evangelists: “future ideas must in some way be ‘embedded’ in the texts of the past in order for us to discern their emergence from the position of hindsight.”[3] In other words, we are always anachronisms to what we study and sometimes we insert our anachronisms into material texts.[4] It seems to me that, when it comes to the fourfold Gospels and Coogan’s analysis of them, at least two embedded future ideas can be detected: (1) Eusebius’s idea of symphony as a way of exploiting difference and (2) the modern refusal of this idea, either in the name of history and the genius of the author or because cacophony, rather than harmony, is preferred. To locate an evangelist within a symphony, or to rescue the unique evangelist’s voice, or to arrange a plenitude of insurmountable Gospel discrepancies within a critical apparatus each put the Gospels to use, and do so strategically, politically, epistemologically, and theologically. My first question to Jeremiah is therefore: Why does Eusebius invent an apparatus designed to track “similar things”? Can you say more? My second, more mischievous question is: If Eusebius is an evangelist, then who else is? And finally, most impolitely, I dare to ask: Why do we care? What is gained once we perceive that an apparatus, ancient or modern, is a creative way of mapping theological trajectories and of producing a “good text” for a now?

Similar Things

As Coogan rightly argues, the Eusebian apparatus is not interested in, for example, showing that Matthew and Luke placed Jesus’s birth on the same day. Instead, a reader is invited to use the apparatus to navigate from one birth story to another, one baptism to another, one feeding miracle to another, and so on, reading from a canon table to other “similar things” (τὰ παραλήσια) and therefore discovering resemblances but also differences that preserve what is distinctive in the “symphony of the evangelists” (τῆς τῶν εὐαγγελιστῶν συμφωνίας). Eusebius has therefore designed a system capable of demonstrating not sameness but what is distinctive and yet in symphony or, as the term is more often translated, in harmony. It seems that modern scholars are therefore quite wrong when they accuse ancient scribes, editors, readers, and writers of wanting “to harmonize” textual and interpretive divergences away. To “harmonize” cannot mean to correct away discrepancies, as textual critics like Westcott and Hort and exegetes like Burgon assumed. Rather, a Eusebian “harmony/ symphony” requires that discrepancies be preserved and yet perceived as “in tune” (to stick with the metaphor). Why is this a use that Eusebius wants?

With the identification of astronomical tables as the bishop’s model, Coogan is perhaps onto something he could take further. From a Pythagorean point of view, heavenly bodies were in symphony. Thus, as Iamblichus put it, Pythagoras could hear and understand “the universal harmony and music of the spheres and of the stars which move within them, uttering a song more complete and satisfying than any human melody” (VP 15.64-66).[5] Numbers were also “in harmony.” Thus, Plato advises lawgivers in an ideal city to remember “as a universal rule” that numerical divisions and variations are ordered, consistent, and in symphony, and then to organize their laws accordingly (Leg. 746e-747b; cf., Phileb. 25c-26b). Among late ancient, philosophically trained scholars like Eusebius, harmony/symphony presupposed coordinated, ordered, and beautiful difference, akin to the sweet Olympian songs of the Muses.[6] The supposedly underlying (or perhaps better overlying) unanimity of the fourfold Gospels was therefore rooted in a thesis that affirmed divergence, not for diversity’s sake, but because an ordered symphony of finite and distinctive and yet perfectly arranged objects was the infrastructure of divine reality. Eusebius was an “evangelist” not only because his composition mirrored the evangelizing moves of his predecessors but also because he embedded the idea of symphonic divergence within the fourfold Gospels, making of them a “good news” that could meet the needs of and compete within fourth-century cosmological science.[7] As Coogan rightly observes, this apparatus was not in the text. Rather, the apparatus put the text to work by making it something it had not been before while seeming to call attention to what was always already there, all without violating the text itself. This cosmological aspect of Eusebius’s apparatus may not have been put to much later use. Even so, his “second poetic geography” invites further reflection on conceptions of “reality” and what this reality might possibly entail.

Who is an “evangelist”?

Coogan’s decision to label Eusebius an “evangelist” is among the most distinctive contributions of this book. The label provides an opportunity for Chapter Three, a brilliant rehearsal of what evangelists do and did, namely, to collapse the reader-writer distinction. I wonder, then, if we are not also invited to name a few other apparatus-centric “evangelists.” As Coogan observes, the Nestle-Aland editions of the Greek New Testament include the Eusebian apparatus but print it in such a way that it is rendered almost entirely useless. I couldn’t agree more. The Epistle to Carpianus and the Canon Tables are tucked surreptitiously away on page 89, after the long, tedious, and technical introduction, the tables and section numbers are rendered in Roman and Arabic numerals rather than in Greek,[8] and, in the Gospels, they are printed in the center margins in a font that is smaller than the critical apparatus. By contrast, the chapter and verse numbers are in a bold, black font, placed within the running text and at the top of each page. Together these paratexts announce that the Nestle-Aland, 28th rev. ed., is not a Byzantine text but a Greek text for non-native Greek readers, a curated, expanded, contracted, replaced, conflated, re-sequenced, segmented, and reconfigured document invented in medieval Latin Europe, by early modern Protestant printers and scholars, and by nineteenth- and twentieth-century philological approaches to this legacy. Paratextual devices like the sigla below the main text, the brackets that surround suspected passages, the lists of biblical cross-references in the outer margins, and the page numbers in the upper, inside corners anchor the NA28 Gospels within a European modernity that stretches from Erasmus to Theodore Beza, Karl Lachmann, Eberhard Nestle, Caspar René Gregory, and Kurt Aland. Eusebius the Evangelist has been supplanted by New Testament Textual Criticism the Evangelist. “The instrumenta shape the reading and the readers shape the instrumenta,” Coogan concludes. He has also shown that an apparatus can, in fact, “write” a Gospel. Is that what “we biblical scholars” have done then? Are we evangelists too?

What’s at stake?

The Eusebian apparatus was often disparaged by nineteenth- and twentieth-century scholars, as Coogan points out. Eusebius’s lack of interest in “the literal” and his refusal to solve historical and factual discrepancies led to the work’s dismissal as “primitive” and “inadequate.” More recently, historians have been more friendly, finding in Eusebius an “impresario” whose scholarship fit securely within the best ancient philology of the day. By naming Eusebius as an “evangelist,” however, Coogan asks scholars to take a further step and acknowledge that writing and reading are always already pre-determined by prior commitments and categories. To read is to write, to write is to read, whether the text in question is inscribed on 10th century parchment, printed in a modern book, or imaged on a digital database. The book ends with a challenge: scholars need to stop misunderstanding the Eusebian apparatus and recognize it for the fulcrum that it is. Agreed.

Only I’m not sure that the problem is a misunderstanding. Instead, I would argue that scholars like Burgon were putting the apparatus to a different use, that of valorizing their own “scientific” achievement and placing themselves within a narrative of “modern progress” that insists on the “facts of the matter” and the “really real.” Historians who love multiplicity, diversity, divergence, and contradiction between the “them” of the past and the “us” of now, are also putting the apparatus to use. This historical project can love and admire Eusebius but keep him at a distance. As for me, I suppose I am with this camp. I love to think with Eusebius, or my fantasy of him and his alternative way of putting diversity to use. We can sing in tune, I hear him saying, even when we are different. In fact, being different is what makes the song beautiful. Resemblance shows us that we are all human, but collapsing our humanity into one, flat sameness would ruin the music of the stars. Still, I know that my fantasy is a fantasy. We no longer live in a Ptolemaic universe. The society to which I belong commits itself, ever more fiercely, to technical solutions as if they alone can save us. Yet, no matter how complete and beautifully arranged an apparatus, the text will not hold; it will not be fixed or finished. Also, to be honest, Eusebius never cared about me, of this I am sure. What other ways, then, can I put the Eusebian apparatus to use, to make of it some good news? Well, practically, I know I can’t live without it. It is simply impossible to navigate any tetrevangelion, lectionary, or liturgical handbook without it. So, what do you say Jeremiah? What fourfold Gospels should we be reading? Is it time to put the NA28 aside and read, say, Codex Cyprius (K 017), which we can handily find online? Or maybe it’s too late for that. The NA28 is just who “we” are. I’m not so sure.

[1] Linda Charnes, “Anticipating Nostalgia: Finding Temporal Logic in a Textual Anomaly,” Textual Cultures 4.1 (2009): 72-83. 

[2] See, for example, Iamblichus, VP 15.64-66; Plato, Leg. 653d-e, Tim. 148.9-11; and Philo, Somn. 1.36. 

[3] Charnes, 76. 

[4] Mike Chin said this “we are always anachronisms to what we study” to me in a private conversation and I’ve never gotten over it. As Maria Doerfler added later, also in a private conversation, “We like our fictions well documented.”

[5] English translation by Gillian Clark, Iamblichus: On the Pythagorean Life (Translated Texts for Historians 8; Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1989), 27. 

[6] See Adriana Caverero, “The Envied Muse: Plato versus Homer,” in Cultivating the Muse: Struggles for Power and Inspiration in Classical Literature, ed. Efrossini Spentzou and Don Fowler (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 47-68 (esp. 52-53). 

[7] Compare Charnes, 76. 

[8] This is especially annoying when one is attempting to navigate one’s way through a medieval Greek manuscript.

Jennifer Wright Knust is Professor of Religious Studies at Duke University.