Eusebius, the Evangelist, and the Rabbinic Mapping of Knowledge

It is another example for the irony of life: After having decided in my undergrad studies that learning how to use the apparatus in the Nestlé-Aland edition of the Greek New Testament was utterly boring, its sheer presence distracting, and unnecessarily complicating what previously appeared to be a simple text, I suddenly found myself admiring the person who invented it while reading Coogan’s book.

Jeremiah Coogan is a scholar who reads between the lines, and obviously belongs to those people (far removed from my own world) who find tables helpful. But he also belongs to those who can explain how margins, even simple rows, columns, or tables, features that are often neglected and ignored, supported ancient knowledge construction, and why they should be understood as cutting-edge innovations of the first centuries CE. These paratextual tools, he shows, enabled the many excerpting, reorganizing, and compiling projects of late antiquity, the very literary features, in fact, that earned the period the reputation of intellectual decline in modern assessments. Coogan reconfigures this image and advances Andrew Riggsby’s claim that a “revolution in information technology” took place with the invention and adaptation of tools such as “the codex, the prefatory paratext, and the columnar table.”[1] He argues that in Eusebius’ canon tables, which cross-reference parallel gospel passages, we can observe a big advancement in this revolution.

As a scholar of rabbinic texts, I was particularly fascinated by the different affordances of the canon tables which Coogan describes in detail in the book’s second chapter. So far, the production of rabbinic literature has been framed as somewhat stubbornly holding on to oral transmission in the face of Christian technical advancements in book production. At the end of my response, I will briefly add some thoughts about how the composers of the Babylonian Talmud may have taken part in the above outlined technical revolution, perhaps even by using tables. But first I want to discuss the contribution of this chapter to our understanding of book history and ancient data management more broadly. I will do so by loosely following the four keywords affordance, technology, map, and library.

Coined by the psychologist of perception James J. Gibson, affordance is “what things furnish [the observer], for good or ill” or, in the words of Caroline Levine cited by Coogan: “affordance is a term used to describe the potential uses or actions latent in material and designs.”[2] Coogan explains that the affordances of the tables have both positive and negative effects on gospel reading. That the tables enable a quick overview of the parallels, facilitate the retrieval and comparison of parallel passages, and map the four books as if they were a single “conceptual space” are positive aspects, of course.[3] Then again, the reader is sort of manipulated by the tables as the “system of textual segmentation commands: ‘Divide here, and not there.’ Cross-references instruct: ‘Read X with Y, but not with Z.’ And so forth.”[4] Additionally, the reader’s attention is constantly drawn towards comparison and thereby judgement. But the table, defined by Coogan as “a regular arrangement of columns and rows that organizes information in two directions” has also neutral, organizational affordances.[5] It can be read vertically and horizontally and thereby renders the material it organizes significant in two directions. Once set up, the table can be filled with information by anyone who is familiar with the system, thereby allowing for a timely completion of the project or its completion even after the initiator has passed away.

Eusebius himself appears to have been inspired for his tables by the different affordances he observed in tables used to organize astronomical data and Origen’s Hexapla, a juxtaposition in columns of different versions of the biblical text, two in Hebrew, four in Greek. Eusebius, then, conceived the four gospels as four versions of the same text (like Origen) while accrediting for the fact that they only infrequently but repeatedly meet (correspond) by mapping them like a table used for the constellation of stars.

Eusebius thereby creates a new technology, but also a new book: the fourfold Gospel book. The tool soon merged with the text and Eusebius becomes literally the fifth Evangelist.[6] That this is not just a thesis or nice book title is proven by depictions of Eusebius, the book-engineer-Evangelist, together with the four author-Evangelists in later Gospel manuscripts.[7]

Despite its achievements and success, the Eusebian tables have not received the kind of treatment other technological innovations have and Coogan notes that “Scholars often ignore tools for knowledge production.”[8] The reason for this may be that the table is not a technology as defined by the book, namely “the application of scientific knowledge for practical goals.”[9] Rather, the tables are an intermediary tool that allows for the correlation of data with the goal to obtain more and more significant data. The text-technology becomes a carrier for scientific knowledge that will only then accomplish a “practical goal.” The table itself is just the silent, ubiquitous servant. The canon tables together with other paratextual tools that are part of the imperial period “revolution in information technology” were so successful that they became self-evident.

Terms that Coogan often uses when describing the Eusebian apparatus and its affordances are map and navigation: Eusebius maps the Gospels so that the reader can navigate them. It is indeed interesting to think of the table as a space marked by columns and rows that invites a particular way of spreading out, sorting, and ultimately accessing knowledge. In Coogan’s words: “One can think with a table.”[10] The ancients were familiar with checkered surfaces and their potential from playing board games or from weaving. Varro, for example, draws an explicit analogy between the playing surface of the strategic board game latrunculus and a table.[11] An analogical link is drawn between the weaving loom and text-based knowledge production in the Latin word textus or the Hebrew word massekhet, tractate, both of which originally refer to web or fabric. If we think of it, the vertical warp threads hanging from the loom look like columns. The proper order of these threads is decisive for the success of the planned pattern. Much planning, sometimes even involving mathematical operations, precedes the weaving process. After the vertical warp threads are in place, the horizontal weft according to the predesigned color and figure pattern can begin. Eusebius’s preparations to craft his tables must have been equally comprehensive and to some extent comparable. His warp threads, the columns, organize the gospels according to the parallel material that connects them: first all four, then three each in different combinations, then two.

That parallels existed between the Gospels is and was quickly observed. Eusebius writes of a certain Ammonius of Alexandria who had juxtaposed the parallel passages of the other Gospels to that of Matthew. According to Eusebius, this method resulted in the destruction of the—note his use of fabric-terminology—“web of reading” (ὕφει τῆς ἀναγνώσεως) of the other three Gospels.[12] Although Eusebius did not think much of Ammonius’s “Gospel through four,” this text may have given him not just the stimulus to conceive of the four Gospels as of one (cosmos), it certainly gave him the basis to fill his tables rather quickly, as at least the parallels to Matthew were already identified. Eusebius also went beyond Ammonius’s project in that he numbered every sequence in the Gospels, not just the parallel ones. This allowed him to identify original material or parallels between two Gospels. His weft on the tables was the result of this structuring, which sometimes entailed associative links that give interesting insights in what he (or his helpers) thought belonged together.

If we think of “library” as any collection of books, it follows that Eusebius adapted the table to associatively interlink the stock of the Gospel-library. Günter Stemberger once noted that to him, the Babylonian Talmud looked like the Babylonian Jewish national library arranged around the text of the Mishnah.[13] Indeed, several independent sources can be identified, and many stories appear to be linked by what Zvi Septimus referred to as “trigger words.”[14] In the form of individual excerpts, the whole “national library” seems to be present. Thinking with Eusebius’s table, we can now imagine how the Talmud may have been planned. A column was assigned to Mishnahic passages selected as relevant or which were taken over from the Palestinian Talmud, which may be considered as the Babylonian Talmud’s “Ammonius,” the predecessor with a good idea that could be made even better. In the case of the Talmuds, the Palestinian Talmud produced a discursive commentary on the Mishnah that was made more discursive and less scholion-like by the Babylonian Talmud. While sifting the library, the first step was to turn meaningful units into excerpts, copying them separately, assigning them with one or several keywords, and filing them accordingly. Maybe Eusebius used keywords as well, which may be responsible for some irritating lexical connections such as the institution of the last supper—keyword bread and wine—and the ‘I am the bread of life’ discourse in John.[15] Preliminary tables may have correlated main keywords with sub-keywords. Keywords and sub-keywords could then be correlated via rows with the Mishnaic passages in the columns. Already assigned excerpts could be marked for more cross-referencing – indeed, we see that Talmudic compilers were aware of the material that had already been used elsewhere.

While Eusebius added a cosmic dimension to the four gospels by mapping them out based on an (astronomical) table, the Talmud seems to be the cosmos created by tables that linked the content of the Babylonian rabbinic library (as the sum of all books rather than one specific collection) associatively with each other and with the Mishnah.

[1] Jeremiah Coogan, Eusebius the Evangelist: Rewriting the Fourfold Gospel in Late Antiquity, Cultures of Reading in the Ancient Mediterranean (New York: Oxford University Press, 2022), 56, with reference to Andrew M. Riggsby, Mosaics of Knowledge. Representing Information in the Roman World (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019), 216–22.

[2] J. Gibson, James, The Senses Considered as Perceptual Systems (London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd, 1966), 285, cited via Richard Fox, Diamantis Panagiotopoulos, and Christina Tsouparopoulou, “Affordanz,” in Materiale Textkulturen: Konzepte - Materialien – Praktiken, ed. Thomas Meier, Michael R. Ott, and Rebecca Sauer (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2015), 63–70. Coogan, Eusebius the Evangelist: Rewriting the Fourfold Gospel in Late Antiquity, 6, cites from Caroline Levine, Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015), 6. 

[3] Coogan, Eusebius the Evangelist, 36.

[4] Coogan, Eusebius the Evangelist, 7.

[5] Coogan, Eusebius the Evangelist, 40, emphasis in original.

[6] Coogan, Eusebius the Evangelist, 56.

[7] Coogan, Eusebius the Evangelist, 1–4.

[8] Coogan, Eusebius the Evangelist, 26.

[9] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technology, last accessed 11-5-2022.

[10] Coogan, Eusebius the Evangelist, 40, emphasis in the original.

[11] See Riggsby, Mosaics of Knowledge, 78.

[12] Following the edition and translation of Eusebius’s Epistle to Carpianus by Coogan, Eusebius the Evangelist, xiii–xvi.

[13] Günter Stemberger, Einleitung in Talmud Und Midrasch, 9th ed. (München: C.H. Beck, 2011), 213.

[14] Zvi Septimus, “Trigger Words and Simultexts: The Experience of Reading the Bavli,” in Wisdom of Bat Sheva: The Dr. Beth Samuels Memorial Volume, ed. Barry S. Wimpfheimer (Jersey City, NJ: Ktav, 2009), 163–83.

[15] Coogan, Eusebius the Evangelist, 94.

Monika Amsler (PhD Zurich 2018) is Senior Research Assistant at the University of Bern. She is the author of The Talmud and Late Antique Book Culture (CUP 2023) and the editor of Knowledge Construction in Late Antiquity (De Gruyter 2023). Her current research project focuses on the concept of the paradox in ancient world-making.