Ethnicity and Argument in Eusebius’ Praeparatio Evangelica (review)

Eusebius of Caesarea’s Praeparatio Evangelica (PE) and its companion volume, the Demonstratio Evangelica (DE), constitute a magisterial contribution to early Christian apologetics. Nonetheless, neither has received a dedicated, monograph-length study. The PE, in particular, has tended to be read as the La Brea tar pit of otherwise lost works of antiquity rather than as a coherent work in its own right. Aaron Johnson’s volume is an effort to fill this gap. Taking a cue from recent work in the fields of classics and early Christian studies that points to the productivity of discourses of ethnicity in the formation and contestation of identities in antiquity, Johnson reads the PE as an extended ethnological argument. Eusebius’s apologetic skill consists in his strategic deployment of “ethnic reasoning” to construct Christianity as a superior ethnos in contradistinction to other ethne. Johnson identifies and traces two narratives of descent within the PE: a polemical narrative of Greek descent on the one hand and an apologetic narrative of Hebrew/Christian descent on the other.

After establishing the literary and historical backgrounds to the PE in an introductory chapter, Johnson lays out the theoretical and methodological terms of his reading of the PE in chapter 2. The recognition that ethnicity, like other categories of group identity, is constituted discursively through its deployment in specific socio-historical circumstances, the author argues, should prompt a careful philological study of the vocabulary of ethnicity in Eusebius. Such an approach, he maintains, serves as a prophylactic against the importation of modern conceptions of race and ethnicity into ancient sources. The chapter offers thorough and helpful philological surveys of Eusebius’s use of the terms genos, ethnos, and politeia/politeuma.

The very structure of the PE poses its own methodological conundrum, too; in this bricolage of quotations one must decide where the voices of Eusebius’s sources end and where his own begins. Johnson opts for a minimalist approach—he considers only Eusebius’s “own” words. On the one hand, this obscures the intertextual complexities of the PE and is perhaps the book’s principal weakness. Johnson does do a good job of pointing out the influence of certain predecessors (his analyses of Philonic material in the PE, for instance, are very good), but we miss a more critical exploration of the ways in which Eusebius competes for, reacts to, and refracts the “ethnic reasoning” of his sources, particularly the works of his near contemporaries. Porphyry of Tyre, for instance, whom Eusebius quotes most often and most extensively in constructing his narrative of Greek descent, was also one of the main targets of the bishop’s polemics. On the other hand, these intertextual complexities demand some sort of delimiting if one is to keep from getting overly mired in the bishop’s documentary habits, and Johnson’s method is clear and consistent.

Chapters 3 and 4 trace Eusebius’s narratives of Greek and Hebrew descent. Greek culture is dependent on that of Phoenicia and Egypt and was transmitted by a number of culture heroes (especially Orpheus and Cadmus). Johnson does a good job here of tracing Eusebius’s debt to euhemeristic theories of religion, particularly as he read them in the work of Diodorus. Eusebius’s polemics against the allegorical interpretation of traditional myths and iconography, oracles, and fate, Johnson argues further, all function to discredit the character of the Greek ethnos. The Hebrews, in contrast, cultivated and maintained a natural piety and a rational theology, and the Hebrew patriarchs are paragons of virtue worthy of imitation. The Jews, however, are the product of ethno-cultural miscegenation with Egyptians. Johnson shows how the difference Eusebius constructs between Hebrews and Jews is grounded in ethnic reasoning and not merely (or even primarily) in a “religious” or “theological” distinction between those living before and after the Mosaic Law. In Chapter 5, Johnson goes on to argue that the final third of the PE, which engages the history of Greek philosophy and is centered...