Christian Texts

Nicene and Ante-Nicene Fathers, Ser. II, Vol I: The Churc...

Church HistoryEusebiusNicene and Post-Nicene Fathers

Summary only - full text stays on its own separately-gated source. Read the full text at the source »

This is a chapter from Eusebius's *Ecclesiastical History* (with scholarly footnotes), belonging to the tradition of early Christian apologetics and church historiography. The chapter quotes Josephus's account of Theudas, a self-proclaimed prophet who gathered followers at the Jordan River promising to part the waters, only to be crushed by Roman cavalry under the procurator Fadus around 44 AD. Eusebius presents this as corroboration for the mention of Theudas in Acts, where Gamaliel cites him as a precedent before the Sanhedrin. The footnotes, however, identify a significant chronological problem: Josephus places Theudas after the crucifixion of Jesus, while Gamaliel's speech in Acts treats him as a figure from an earlier era, making the two Theudases chronologically incompatible if both sources are reliable. The editor defends Eusebius against accusations of deliberate fraud, arguing instead that his identification of the two figures was a careless blunder — the kind of hasty, unreflective reading that produced several similar errors in his work — rather than a calculated distortion. The piece is thus as much a study in how to assess an ancient historian's credibility and error-making as it is a record of a minor messianic pretender.

Nicene and Ante-Nicene Fathers, Ser. II, Vol I: The Churc...

Related pages View as graph →