Christianity and the Transformation of the Book: Origen, Eusebius, and the Library of Caesarea (review)

In the third and fourth centuries c.e., Caesarea in Palestine witnessed major developments in the metamorphosis of Christianity from a lunatic fringe to the established Church. According to Grafton and Williams, these steps were technological as much as doctrinal: Book design was reshaped to facilitate a particular view of the intellectual place of Christianity. Origen’s Hexapla was an innovative codex that presented the text of the Bible in six or more parallel columns containing the Hebrew text next to multiple Greek versions. Eusebius echoed this format to give a tabular presentation of human history in his Chronicle, and in other works, he devised new approaches to the use of documentary evidence. The library of Caesarea, which both authors used and helped to create, became an institution for scholarly research and the dissemination of knowledge and Christian propaganda; the ties between the Bishop Eusebius and Emperor Constantine led to a new funding system for scholarship that in return supported the imperial church.

Grafton and Williams offer an engaging account of generally unfamiliar material, deploying an impressive range of evidence and methods. They discuss Origen in the context of the textual studies of Greek philosophers. They use demography to explore the world of early Christian scholarship and life. They examine Alexandrian techniques of exegesis, the study of the Bible by both traditional and Hellenized Jews, the role of patronage in ancient literary life, and the culture of the book in transition from roll to codex and from private home to institutional scriptorium. They show Origen and Eusebius breaking new ground by subsuming “barbarian” materials (Jewish, Samaritan, Egyptian, and others) into the methodological worlds of Greek philosophy and history.

Though a readable introduction to obscure materials, the book may not satisfy experts. Origen’s Hexapla was a technical and scholarly marvel, but no more than one complete copy of it may ever have existed. Eusebius’ Chronicle was difficult to design, but no more difficult to copy than any other book. These were major works, but they did not change the world; even Grafton and Williams do not claim any direct effect on Western European scholarship. Their accounts of much of the technical material (the philosophical schools, the demography of early Christianity, and even the format of the Hexapla itself ) each come from one modern source on which they rely to excess; they rarely discuss the primary evidence in any detail, and when they do, they make mistakes. To buttress their claims for Caesarea, they pay little attention to earlier examples of complex texts or sophisticated patterns of dissemination. Institutional structures for the dissemination of Christian learning and texts existed earlier in the East, but ecclesiastical scriptoria in Italy soon took up the task that the government abandoned. Moreover, although Eusebius’ construction of human history in an accessible (and tendentious) form was, through Jerome, hugely influential, writing about Christian historiography without once mentioning Augustine’s City of God seems odd.

There was no one path that led from the Christian Bible to later European scholarship. Oversimplification of this nature can result in a good story, but the reality was much more complicated.