Interpreting Ancient Israelite History, Prophecy, and Law. John H. Hayes
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one hundred works are cited directly or referred to as read by Eusebius. It is true, as Eusebius’s critics have frequently noted, that his intellectual qualifications were somewhat defective, that he sometimes suppressed that which might disgrace religion, that he occasionally misquoted sources, and that he sometimes failed to note that his quoted documents were contradictory. Nonetheless, Eusebius realized that the writing of history is dependent upon the reading and discriminating study of the documents of the past. Considering the number of spurious documents he chose not to utilize, one must judge Eusebius an outstanding source critic for his age.
Eusebius wrote his works in the glow of Christianity’s newly acquired status. In the glare of the conflagration kindled by the barbarian invasion of the Roman empire, Augustine (354–430 CE), the converted ex-teacher of rhetoric, sought to gather the whole of human history into a theological-eschatological framework. Christianity, like the empire, found itself on the defensive in the days of Augustine, and he launched a counter-offensive against paganism’s attempts to lay the blame for the empire’s troubles on the steps of the church. For the later Augustine, any attempt to present the Roman empire in messianic terms would have constituted a heresy of the first order.
Augustine took the six-day scheme of creation and transposed these into a sixfold periodization of sacred history, the history of De civitate dei versus De civitate terrena: Just as there were six days of creation, so there were six ages of history: the first from Adam to the flood, the second from the flood to Abraham, the next three (as outlined in St Matthew’s gospel) from Abraham to David, from David to the Babylonian captivity, and from the Babylonian captivity to the birth of Christ. Then came the sixth age, in which the human mind was recreated in the image of God, just as on the sixth day of creation humandkind was created in the image of God. In this age men now lived (De civitate dei 22.30). The time from Adam to Noah constituted the first day and saw the light of a promised redeemer given to the fallen parents of the human race. The second day—the period of childhood—extended from Noah to Abraham with the ark as the symbol of the promise of salvation. From Abraham to David was the third day of youthful adolescence, and, as God has separated the waters on the third day, so he in this age separated the chosen people from the heathen masses. From David to the exile was the day of early manhood. The period of full manhood—the fifth day—extended from the scattering of the chosen people until the coming of the Messiah. The period of old age—the sixth day—was the age of Christian salvation with its new Adam (Jesus) and its new Eve (the church). The seventh day, corresponding to the divine sabbath, would dawn with the return of Christ in glory to establish a peace that would know no end. Augustine thus placed his own time within the waning period of the sixth day. That day had dawned with John the Baptist, with Christ’s incarnation the sun had risen, and with the spread of Christianity noonday had arrived. The sun had now begun its descent and senility set in but Augustine warned against precise speculation on the arrival of sunset.
In Augustine’s schematization, a number of factors are of significance. (1) He is not so much concerned with history as with the philosophy of history. (2) It is sacred history, the history of De civitate dei, that is important, not the outer events or occurrences nor human actions and causality. (3) The past of humankind and of Israel and Judah are of importance only as the prelude to the age of redemption, which itself is only a prelude to that final timeless period of total salvation and damnation. (4) Augustine’s vision embodies a penultimate pessimism about his own day, which was the age of senility, the time before the end. (5) Augustine sought “to direct man’s gaze from the contemplation of himself and the achievements of his reason upwards to the majesty of God.”37
In The City of God, Augustine had attempted to prove that the calamities that had befallen the Romans were not limited to the period of the church and, whenever they had occurred, were the result of the corruption of manners and the vices of the soul. The expansion of this thesis he bequeathed to his contemporary and admirer, Orosius. The latter’s Historiarum adversus paganos libri septem, completed in 418 CE, was an attempt “to trace the beginning and man’s wretchedness from the beginning of man’s sin” (1.1). Orosius prefaced his main discussion with a description of Asia, Europe, and Africa, thus manifesting a recognition of the importance of geography for history (as had Caesar, Cicero, and Sallust). Orosius’s work is important for subsequent historiography not because he “set forth . . . the desires and punishments of sinful men, the struggles of the world and the judgments of God, from the beginning of the world down to the present day, that is, during five thousand six hundred and eighteen years” (7.43), but because of his particular periodization of world history. According to Orosius, there had existed four world empires: Babylon, Macedon, Carthage, and Rome. His thesis is no doubt based on a particular interpretation of the four empires in Daniel (Babylonian, Persian, Median, and Greek), which identified the fourth empire with Rome. However, Orosius took a far more favorable attitude towards the Roman empire than his idol Augustine. For him, the iron teeth and claws of the fourth beast were a deterrent to the barbarians and the antichrist.
Before summarizing the early church’s historiographic legacy to the Middle Ages, three additional factors should be noted. In the first place, the theory of the plenary inspiration of Scripture had become widespread by the fifth century CE. Such a view of the origin and nature of the Bible stifles any drastic critical approach to the biblical materials. Since the Bible was and remains the basic source material for the history of Israel and Judah, such a position almost by necessity means that the historian retells, expands, elucidates, and harmonizes the biblical source material but does not deal with it critically. Secondly, the hermeneutical principles widely employed in the church allowed the interpreter to find several meanings in any given text: the historical and various mystical, analogical, figurative, and allegorical senses. This multiple layer method of interpretation was indebted not only to Greek allegorical treatments of epic and mythical materials and to rabbinic exegesis but also to the philosophical–allegorical interpretation of Aristobulus and Philo of Alexandria.38 The allegorical approach to biblical interpretation meant that interpreters did not have to confront directly the problems and difficulties within the biblical text. When in doubt, appeal could be made to the rule of faith and the established tradition: Quod ubique, quod semper, quod ab omnibus creditum est.
Thirdly, hagiography (the writing of accounts of the lives and sufferings of saints) had become widespread in the fourth and fifth centuries, perhaps influenced to a degree by the Hellenistic conception of the divine man. Athanasius’s Life of St. Anthony and Sulpicius Severus’s Life of St. Martin of Tours are good examples. These hagiographies were eulogistic and rhetorical biographies that offered a sort of dateless and timeless semi-historical work. They actually functioned to draw people away from the matter-of-fact world and pointed to that transcendental realm that impinged upon historical reality. Eusebeius, in his life of Constantine, demonstrated how difficult it was to write a Christian biography of a person involved in affairs military, political, and economic. Hagiography was concerned with different matters. Yet hagiography was to be standard fare in medieval times and in its own way an impediment to the development of serious historiography.
What the early church transmitted to the Middle Ages did not encourage the development of serious historiography. No developed Christian historiography comparable to the work of Herodotus, Thucydides, or even Livy, Tacitus, and Josephus, was passed on unless Eusebius’s Ecclesiastical History be the exception. Augustine, Orosius, and their contemporaries had not dialogued with the secular historians of the pagan revival in the late fourth and early fifth centuries, such as Ammianus Marcellinus. These were left “to die from natural causes.”39 The works of the Greek and Hellenistic historians belonged to the pagan past and in the West could quickly sink into a long dormant eclipse. Source and textual criticism were suffocated by the weight of a totally inspired collection of Scriptures, and allegorical interpretation was at hand to provide any needed escape valve. Concern with the transcendental, with the sacred side of the historical process, with the philosophical-eschatological dimensions oriented people towards the other world and away from the questions of human causality and action.
The Medieval Period
Three major types of historical tradition during the medieval period have been distinguished by Southern: classical, early scientific, and prophetic.
The aim of the classical imitators was to exemplify virtues and vices, for moral