Gibbon, Plato, and the Origins of a Historical Reputation

One of the more damaging accusations against Eusebius of Caesarea is often presented as a confession. Supposedly, the fourth-century bishop admitted that he included whatever brought Christianity glory and suppressed whatever might bring it disgrace. The statement is repeated in discussions of early Christian history, usually as evidence that one of our most important sources openly approved of manipulating the historical record.

There is an immediate problem. Eusebius never wrote those words.

They belong to Edward Gibbon, who wrote in chapter 16 of The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire that Eusebius “indirectly confesses” to recording what brought religion glory while suppressing what might disgrace it. Gibbon was interpreting Eusebius, not quoting him. He made that distinction himself when he defended the passage against criticism, explaining that he had condensed the sense of two passages. Somewhere in the subsequent retelling, the distinction disappeared, and Gibbon’s judgment became Eusebius’s supposed admission.

It would be easy to stop there and declare the accusation another historical myth. But Gibbon was not inventing the underlying problem. Eusebius did acknowledge leaving certain things out of his history, and his account of the emperor Constantine presents a strikingly favorable picture of a ruler whose life was considerably less tidy than the one Eusebius described. There is also a passage in which Eusebius draws approvingly on Plato’s discussion of useful falsehoods. Those passages deserve attention, especially when we remember how much of early Christian history comes to us through his work.

The difficulty is determining what they establish. Eusebius was selective, and at times his selectivity could mislead. Whether he therefore considered it acceptable to invent historical evidence is another matter.

The bishop and his history

Eusebius lived through one of Christianity’s most consequential transformations. He knew a church that had endured persecution and lived to see it receive imperial support. His Ecclesiastical History followed Christian communities from the apostolic period through the persecutions of his own lifetime, drawing together letters, documents, accounts of martyrs, and quotations from earlier writers. Much of that material would otherwise have been lost. Historians who disagree with Eusebius still depend on him, sometimes because his quotation is the only surviving witness to a text.

His interests were hardly concealed. He wanted to demonstrate the continuity of Christianity, explain the struggles of the church, and show the providential meaning of its survival. His Preparation for the Gospel and Demonstration of the Gospel defended Christianity through an extended engagement with Jewish scripture and Greek philosophy. After Constantine’s rise, Eusebius also wrote a Life of Constantine that celebrated the emperor and his role in the church’s changing fortunes.

That celebration has caused problems ever since. Eusebius’s relationship to Constantine has sometimes been exaggerated into the image of a permanent court theologian directing imperial religious policy, an image the evidence does not sustain. Yet his admiration for the emperor is unmistakable. His position in the theological disputes surrounding Arius also made him controversial among other Christians, though calling him simply an “Arian” obscures more than it explains.

Criticism of his history began long before modern skeptics. In the fifth century, Socrates Scholasticus complained that Eusebius had devoted himself to praising Constantine while giving the controversy involving Arius too little attention. Socrates was not accusing him of manufacturing documents. He believed that praise had displaced a fuller account of what happened. It is a telling criticism because it came from another Christian historian, writing long before Gibbon.

Gibbon made the problem famous in a different form. Later, Jacob Burckhardt delivered an even harsher verdict, describing Eusebius as extraordinarily dishonest and unfair. Those judgments have remained influential, but neither relieves us of the need to read the passages from which the reputation developed.

What Gibbon found in Eusebius

Gibbon drew his original accusation from Ecclesiastical History 8.2 and Martyrs of Palestine 12. The first appears in Eusebius’s account of the conditions preceding the Great Persecution. Far from offering an unbroken portrait of Christian virtue, Eusebius describes a church troubled by rivalry, ambition, hypocrisy, and divisions among its leaders. Bishops quarreled with other bishops. Communities turned against one another. Eusebius interpreted the persecution that followed as divine chastisement for these failures.

Having admitted all this, he then imposed a limit on what he would recount. He would not linger over every disgraceful act or the failures of those who collapsed under persecution. He preferred to preserve what might prove useful to his readers and illustrate the judgments of God.

Gibbon noticed the admission, and he was right to notice it. Eusebius was choosing which incidents deserved a place in his history according to a theological purpose. He gave his readers the general outline of the church’s failings but withheld many of the cases that would have allowed them to judge those failings for themselves. The admission that leaders behaved badly is less informative when the circumstances, names, and consequences are left out.

In Martyrs of Palestine, Eusebius made a similar decision. He passed over disputes involving bishops, irregular ordinations, and conflicts among confessors, preferring to remember the conduct of the martyrs that he considered worthy of praise. A work devoted to martyrs was naturally intended to honor them. Yet conflicts over authority and ordination were part of the history of those communities, not incidental gossip. Their absence changes the picture a reader receives.

What Eusebius actually did is troubling enough without enlarging his admission. He did not say he would suppress everything that could damage Christianity’s reputation; indeed, his own description of Christian corruption would make little sense if that had been his policy. Gibbon turned a declared choice about particular material into a sweeping account of the historian’s practice. The criticism has force, but its familiar wording overstates the evidence.

There is a larger issue here that extends beyond Eusebius. A historian can produce a misleading account without inventing a single incident. A carefully chosen record can make the past appear more orderly, admirable, or inevitable than it was. Eusebius understood history as a vehicle for theological instruction, and we need to account for that when using him as a source. We do not need to pretend that ancient authors had no standards of honesty, or that the conventions of their genres make their omissions harmless.

Plato and the usefulness of falsehood

Gibbon did not stop with the passages about omission. In his Vindication, he pointed to a section of Eusebius’s Preparation for the Gospel that, on a quick reading, appears to approve of deception. A heading associated with the passage speaks of using falsehood as a remedy for people who need that form of treatment. Gibbon cited it as Book 12, chapter 32; in E. H. Gifford’s edition it appears as chapter 31. The chapter divisions and headings have their own transmission history, so it is safer to begin with the argument in the passage than to treat the heading as a personal declaration from Eusebius.

Eusebius was comparing the teachings of Plato with those of the Hebrew scriptures. He quoted Laws 2.663d–e, where Plato’s Athenian speaker considers whether a lawgiver might use a beneficial falsehood to persuade young people to practice justice willingly. Plato does not offer unrestricted permission to deceive. He does, however, entertain the idea that a false belief might be useful in moral education.

Eusebius followed the quotation with examples from scripture. The Bible speaks of God as jealous, angry, or sleeping, although Eusebius did not understand God as literally subject to human passions or bodily needs. He regarded such expressions as ways of teaching people who required a more accessible description of divine things. In that setting, he saw a resemblance between Plato’s argument and biblical language.

This is sometimes brushed aside by saying that Eusebius was merely quoting Plato. That explanation does not work. He selected the passage for his argument and immediately drew a parallel with scripture. The comparison was his. It is also too simple to dismiss everything as harmless metaphor. Plato’s example involves the possibility of teaching a false proposition for a good end, and Eusebius evidently found the comparison useful. His treatment leaves us with an uncomfortable question about what he considered permissible in religious instruction.

But the subject of the passage matters. Eusebius is discussing how moral and theological ideas are communicated. He is not explaining how he edits chronicles or whether a historian may forge a letter to strengthen Christianity’s case. The Greek word pseudos can carry different shades of meaning depending on context; arguing over whether to translate it as “lie,” “falsehood,” or “fiction” cannot substitute for reading what Eusebius does with the example. Here his own illustration concerns the description of God in human terms.

Elsewhere, while discussing the different genealogies of Jesus in Matthew and Luke, Eusebius confronted the suggestion that a genealogy might have been invented to honor Christ. In the surviving material from Gospel Problems and Solutions, he rejected the idea of establishing truth through falsehood. That statement does not guarantee his personal consistency, and the work’s fragmentary transmission calls for care when quoting its wording. Nevertheless, it is difficult to square his stated objection to an invented genealogy with the claim that he openly endorsed fabricating historical evidence for Christianity.

It is possible for an author to hold inconsistent views or fail to practice his stated principles. We should not acquit Eusebius on the strength of a single remark. But neither should we transform a discussion of Plato and scriptural language into a confession about falsifying history. The text has to bear the weight of the accusation, and this one does not.

The emperor Eusebius preferred to remember

If we want to see how far Eusebius’s devotion to a favorable account could go, Constantine is a better place to look than Plato.

In 326 AD, Constantine’s son Crispus was executed. Constantine’s wife Fausta died not long afterward, under circumstances that remain disputed. These events were part of the emperor’s reign, yet they do not appear in Eusebius’s Life of Constantine. The work is not a neutral biography in the modern sense. It is a celebration of the emperor, written by someone who considered his victories and support for Christianity historically significant. That purpose helps explain the omission, but cannot make the omission unimportant.

A reader who knew Constantine only through Eusebius would never encounter two of the most disturbing events associated with his household. The silence is particularly striking because Eusebius had room to discuss the emperor’s virtues and piety at considerable length. We cannot recover his private motives with certainty, but the result is plain enough: a portrait shaped by praise leaves out facts that could substantially alter a reader’s judgment.

Nor was omission his only limitation. Eusebius read events through providence, seeing persecution as punishment and Constantine’s success as evidence of divine favor. He preserved documents whose authenticity historians now dispute, including the correspondence between Jesus and King Abgar. His quotations from earlier authors could also be abbreviated, rearranged, and placed in new argumentative settings. Sabrina Inowlocki’s study of his citation practices has been especially useful in showing how deliberate those choices could be.

We should examine those quotations closely, particularly where the earlier source still survives for comparison. But the presence of a spurious document in Eusebius does not tell us that he forged it. A mistaken attribution may have reached him from an earlier writer. A shortened quotation may reflect the demands of his argument, or it may distort its source. The answer comes from reconstructing what happened in the particular case, not by assigning a single explanation to every instance.

That is one reason Eusebius remains indispensable. He preserved an enormous amount of evidence while filtering it through his own concerns. We can be grateful for what survived because of him without adopting his judgments about it.

The other confession he never made

Another sentence circulates under Eusebius’s name: “It is an act of virtue to deceive and lie, when by such means the interests of the Church might be promoted.” It is usually supplied without a reference to any work or chapter by Eusebius. There is a reason for that: it is not a passage from his writings.

The wording resembles a statement found in the English transmission of Johann Lorenz von Mosheim’s Institutes of Ecclesiastical History, especially James Murdock’s nineteenth-century translation. Mosheim was describing what he believed had become an attitude among Christians in a particular period. He was making a historical judgment about the church, not reproducing a confession by Eusebius. The familiar wording attributed to Eusebius even differs slightly from the form commonly cited in Murdock.

The underlying confusion is much like the one involving Gibbon. A later historian condemns a practice, or interprets an earlier author, and eventually the historian’s own words are repeated as though they came from the person being criticized. The result is especially unfortunate in a dispute about honesty. Readers are invited to distrust Eusebius on the authority of statements that cannot be located in his books.

Now, none of this proves that his every quotation was accurate. Instead, it tells us something about how his reputation has sometimes been handled.

What remains disputed

There are other accusations against Eusebius that deserve examination, particularly those concerning documents preserved in his writings. One of the more familiar involves the Testimonium Flavianum, the passage about Jesus in Josephus’s Antiquities of the Jews. Eusebius is the earliest surviving Christian author to quote the passage, a fact that has occasionally led to accusations that he either wrote it himself or substantially altered it. Such theories have attracted little scholarly support, however, and should not be confused with the much broader debate over whether the passage contains later Christian additions.

Part of the difficulty is that Josephus’s Antiquities, although possibly known to earlier Christian writers, was not quoted as extensively as it would be by Eusebius. His writings preserve some of our earliest surviving quotations from the work, including the Testimonium. This has raised questions about the passage’s transmission and whether its wording may have changed around his time. Yet the absence of an earlier surviving quotation does not establish when any alteration occurred, much less who was responsible for it. Eusebius may simply have inherited the text in the form available to him, which I consider the more persuasive explanation.

The authenticity of the Testimonium remains a legitimate subject of scholarly debate, although the suggestion that Eusebius personally forged it occupies a marginal position within that discussion. Any argument for his involvement must rest on the textual evidence rather than on his reputation. Gibbon’s criticism of his historical methods, or his discussion of Plato’s beneficial falsehood, tells us nothing about whether he altered this particular passage.

Eusebius certainly had his shortcomings as a historian. His omissions in the Life of Constantine demonstrate how thoroughly his admiration for the emperor could influence what he chose to record. His treatment of Plato also shows that he accepted certain forms of false or nonliteral instruction when he believed they served a religious or moral purpose. These are legitimate criticisms, but they do not establish that he fabricated historical documents. Accusations of forgery require evidence of forgery, and that evidence cannot be supplied simply by pointing to other aspects of his writing.

Conclusion

Eusebius gave later historians good reasons to approach his work with caution. He chose what to preserve, arranged evidence to advance theological arguments, and sometimes passed over events that would have complicated the story he wanted to tell. His treatment of Constantine alone should discourage anyone from reading him as an impartial witness.

Gibbon recognized a genuine weakness in his method. But the familiar accusation has acquired a life of its own, and in that process later writers have attributed to Eusebius words he never wrote. His comments on Plato have also been made to answer a question they were not addressing. Neither is a sound basis for deciding that Eusebius routinely fabricated historical evidence.

We owe him neither automatic trust nor automatic suspicion. When he quotes an earlier writer, we should compare the surviving texts. When he passes over an episode, we should ask what the omission does to his account. When a document survives only through him, we should acknowledge both its value and the limits of our knowledge. That is a more demanding approach than repeating a verdict about his character, but it is also more likely to tell us what actually happened.

The irony is difficult to miss. An accusation about a historian’s willingness to distort the record has itself been kept alive by quotations that were never his. We can criticize Eusebius without adding to the problem.

Sources and further reading

Primary sources

• Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History 8.2 and Martyrs of Palestine 12.
• Eusebius, Preparation for the Gospel 12.31 (Gifford numbering), with Plato, Laws 2.663d–e. Gifford translation: https://www.tertullian.org/fathers/eusebius_pe_12_book12.htm
• Eusebius, Life of Constantine.
• Eusebius, Gospel Problems and Solutions, To Stephanus (genealogical discussions); consult the critical edition for exact wording and fragment numbering.
• Socrates Scholasticus, Ecclesiastical History 1.1: https://www.newadvent.org/fathers/26011.htm
• Edward Gibbon, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire 16, and A Vindication of Some Passages in the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Chapters: https://www.ccel.org/g/gibbon/decline/vndctn/chelsum.htm

Modern research and attribution

• Sabrina Inowlocki, Eusebius and the Jewish Authors: His Citation Technique in an Apologetic Context (Brill, 2006).
• Johann Lorenz von Mosheim, Institutes of Ecclesiastical History, translated by James Murdock (1832). Verify exact edition and page before giving the “act of virtue” wording as an exact quotation.