Church history and early church historians

From the beginning the Christian group took an interest in its own past. Ecclesiastical history is a specialised form of this corporate self-awareness. The fourth and fifth centuries were the period in the Christian church’s history when this form of self-awareness crystallised. The father of church history, Eusebius, was the fountainhead of a tradition of historiography which came to dominate the work of his successors. His Ecclesiastical History straddles the constantinian revolution. Eusebius began working on it before the end of the last persecution, that under Diocletian and his colleagues; by the time he came to add the last touches to his final edition, twenty or more years later, the social conditions of the church’s existence had come to differ profoundly from those which obtained at the time he began writing. The age of the martyrs and of a persecuted church in a hostile empire were becoming a heroic age recollected in tranquillity. The following century was to take the church very much further along the road away from the situation of the church that Eusebius had been writing about.