Eusebius of Caesarea (ca. 260-339 C.E.) invented a paratextual apparatus for reading Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John as a fourfold unity. Yet despite Eusebius's creativity and the long afterlife of his invention, the apparatus remains under-appreciated and widely misunderstood. This article argues that Michel de Certeau's distinction between itineraries and maps illuminates the innovative function of the Eusebian apparatus, which contrasts with earlier attempts at gospel harmony and synopsis. Instead of disrupting the narrative integrity of the four canonical gospels, Eusebius's map creates a canonical space that preserves gospel narrative and facilitates exegetical and liturgical appropriation.
Eusebius the Evangelist analyzes Eusebius of Caesarea’s fourth-century reconfiguration of the Gospels as a window into broader questions of technology and textuality in the ancient Mediterranean. The four Gospels of the New Testament (Matthew, Mark, Luke, John) share language, narratives, and ideas, yet they also differ in structure and detail. The sophisticated system through which Eusebius organized this intricate web of textual relationships is known as the Eusebian apparatus. Eusebius’ editorial intervention—involving tables, sectioning, and tables of contents—participates in a broader late ancient transformation in reading and knowledge. To illuminate Eusebius’ innovative use of textual technologies, the study juxtaposes diverse ancient disciplines—including chronography, astronomy, geography, medicine, philosophy, and textual criticism—with a wide range of early Christian sources, attending to neglected evidence from material texts and technical literature. These varied phenomena reveal how Eusebius’ fourfold Gospel worked in the hands of readers. Eusebius’ creative juxtapositions of Gospel material had an enduring impact on Gospel reading. Not only did Eusebius continue earlier trajectories of Gospel writing, but his apparatus continued to generate new possibilities in the hands of readers. For more than a millennium, in more than a dozen languages and in thousands of manuscripts, Eusebius’ invention transformed readers’ encounters with Gospel text on the page. By employing emerging textual technologies, Eusebius created new possibilities of reading, thereby rewriting the fourfold Gospel in a significant and durable way.
Eusebius employed innovative technologies—the prefatory textual map and the columnar table—to afford new possibilities for reading a fourfold Gospel. He adapted the table of contents, an emerging device used to structure miscellanies and reference texts. The apparatus maps the text as a structured whole and facilitates navigation. Drawing on predecessors like Ptolemy and Origen, Eusebius employed the column-and-row table to facilitate complex textual access and analysis. Eusebius did not invent the columnar table or the table of contents; prefatory lists of contents, astronomical tables, and multilingual columnar tools already existed. They appear in a wide range of sources, from medical anthologies and agricultural handbooks to text-critical databases, schoolroom glossaries, and astronomical charts. Eusebius assembled a new text from the conceptual resources at hand. By combining two emergent textual technologies, his apparatus invites new textual practices and new modes of Gospel reading. While the tools of knowledge production have often escaped sustained attention, centering the technological conditions of reading and knowledge advances historical inquiry. The insights offered by the Eusebian apparatus enrich other recent developments in the study of material texts and late ancient textuality—especially attention to the work of editors, the possibilities of paratexts, and the organization of knowledge.
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