Eusebius and CONstantine

Last updated August 20, 2001

Caesarea  was about 70 miles (112 Kilometers) north of Jerusalem.

Eusebius Pamphili (270 — 340), bishop of Caesarea,  was one of the greatest scholars and  historians that ever lived. Naturally he was a very devout Christian too. He is called the "Father of Church History"

He was the Curator of the Library in that city that contained over 700.000 books. He visited Jerusalem frequently and he mentions another huge library located on the Mount of Olives. He was an eye-witness to the condition of the former Temple site:

" . . . their once famous Mount Sion, instead of being, as once it was, the centre of study and education based on the divine prophecies, which the children of the Hebrews of old, their Godly prophets, priests and national teachers loved to interpret, is a Roman farm like the rest of the country, yea, with my own eyes I have seen the bulls plowing there, and the sacred site sown with seed" (Proof of the Gospel, p.141).

He ranks right up there with Dr. J. A. Wylie. He is mostly know for his 20 volume work entitled Ecclesiastical History, being a history of  Christianity from the Messiah to the year 324 A.D., and his Life of Constantine.

Eusebius also wrote a book on the chronology of the world entitled Chronicon.   For many centuries this book was the basis for the chronological history of the world. As a matter of fact a copy was printed in 1483 and it was the first to mention Gutenberg as the inventor of printing. You can buy a copy for about $10.000. 

Eusebius lived at one of the most momentous/revolutionary periods of church history. 

When Eusebius was born, Christianity was sweeping paganism off the face of the earth. Like the idol in the temple of Dagon that fell on its face before the Ark of God, paganism was reeling from the blows of the Gospel sword. 

The worldwide preaching of the Resurrection of Christ was turning the world upside down. All the Christians had to do to convince the skeptical pagans of the FACT of the Resurrection was to take them to the Mount of Olives in Jerusalem and show them the empty tomb.

They needed no help (especially financial) from Caesar . . and got none. At best the Emperors were plain neutral and at worse were out and out persecutors. Emperors like Nero, Domition, Diocletian being the most prominent persecutors.

There were Christians everywhere and Tertullian in his famous Apology tells us that if the Christians quit the Empire it would be left like a ghost town:

"The outcry is that the State is filled with Christians — that they are in the fields, in the citadels, in the islands: they make lamentation, as for some calamity, that both sexes, every age and condition, even high rank, are passing over to the profession of the Christian faith . . . "Tertullian, Apology, p.26).

As in Hibernia centuries later, the Gospel was making saints and SCHOLARS out of the most ignorant pagans.....Most of the apostles were unlearned fisherman but they soon became great writers. Christians were studying and writing. The world was filled with books on the life of Christ and the early church, as well as apologetic works defending their belief in the Risen Christ.

Satan was desperate. It was only a matter of time before his false religion of paganism ceased to exist. It was then that he initiated the Last Great Pagan persecution of the church. 

Beginning in the year 303, the pagan Roman Empire made one last great attempt to exterminate Christianity This persecution, under the Emperor Diocletian, began on the 23rd of February (303 A.D.), that being the day the Roman Terminalia was celebrated, and the cruel pagans boasted that they would finally put a termination to Christianity. . . . Fire, racks, swords, wild beasts, crosses, poison and famine were made use of to kill the Christians. Invention was exhausted to devise tortures against those who would not deny Christ and acknowledge Caesar as "lord" and burn incense to his image.

The lives of Christians during that time consisted of persecution above ground and prayer underground. This is know in history as the era of the martyrs. 

The main target of the pagans was the Word of God . . . and the histories of Christ. All of the great books portraying the Mount of Olives as the site of the Resurrection were systematically  destroyed.  

Even Eusebius was imprisoned during this time and his close friend Pamphilus was martyred.

This persecution lasted 10 years and was ended by the victory of Constantine, and his Edict of Milan (313 A.D.), granting freedom of worship to the believers. It was a great victory of Christ over the Dragon and the pagan Roman superstition. 

Even though the True Faith was victorious, it was a deadly blow to Christianity from which it never fully recovered. As fast as the pagans killed all the great leaders of the Church, they were replaced by phonies who had none of the zeal of their predecessors.

Imperial Rome was not able to destroy all the copies of the Word of God but they were able to destroy most of the history which pointed to the Mount of Olives as the true site of the Resurrection.

With the true history of our Saviour Jesus Christ destroyed, Satan was able to introduce his next phase in the war against the Gospel:

Emperor CONstantine was the first Pope!!

Constantine came riding in on a white horse and ended the persecutions. The surviving Christians were so grateful to him that they were even hailing him as the new Moses who drowned his opposition in the Tiber River during the battle at the Milvian Bridge.

His first objective was changing the Time of the Resurrection and this he did at the famous Council of Nicaea.

Constantine united Church and State

After changing the TIME and PLACE of the Resurrection, the third strike of Satan against the Gospel was the marrying of this false Christianity with the State. He made Christianity the State religion or united church and state. This was the last straw — marrying the pure bride of Christ with the dirty politics of this world.

Jesus had said long ago to another representative of pagan Rome named Pontius Pilate:

"My kingdom is not of this world: If my kingdom were of this world, then would my servants fight, that I should not be delivered to the Jews: but now my kingdom is not from hence" (Matt. 18:36).

Constantine was a roughneck Roman soldier and a fighter ALL his life.

Eusebius had written a 15 volume masterpiece entitled Preparation for the Gospel in which he refutes All the arguments that the pagans and Jews brought against Christianity.

This was followed by a 20 volume masterpiece entitled Proof of the Gospel. The first 10 volumes consisted of a history of Christ right up to the Crucifixion....and then the last 10 volumes are missing. This would have cleared up forever the true site of the Resurrection . . . and the career of St. Peter . . . but Satan wanted the site of his greatest defeat to remain a secret forever.

When Constantine started to make all these changes, Eusebius realized that he was not the great Deliverer (the new Moses) that he claimed to be. 

Eusebius changed his style of writing after 326. He wrote in code language that only the believers could understand. 

"Let those, however, who are within the sanctuary, and have access to its innermost and untrodden recesses, close the doors against every profane ear, and unfold, as it were, the secret mysteries of our emperor's character to the initiated alone. And let those who have purified their ears in the streams of piety, and raised their thoughts on the soaring wing of the mind itself, join the company which surrounds the Sovereign Lord of all (God], and learn in silence the divine mysteries. Meanwhile let the sacred oracles [the Holy Scriptures], given not by the spirit of divination, or rather let me say of madness and folly, but by the inspiration of divine truth, be our instructors in these mysteries; speaking to us of the sovereignty, generally: of him who is the Supreme Sovereign of all, and the heavenly army which surrounds the Lord of all; of that [true] example of imperial power which is before us, AND THAT COUNTERFEIT COIN" (The Oration of Eusebius, 1.4,5).

Eusebius was very familiar with pagan Rome's penchant for destroying books and history and he realized that his writings would be destroyed too and the Christians left without any history if he was not cautious and discreet when writing.

Writing of the 30th anniversary of the ascension of Constantine he pays particular attention to the number 10:

"Again the triad combined with the decade, and performing a threefold circuit of tens, produced that most natural number, thirty. For as the triad is in respect to units, so is the number 30 in respect to tens...."(Oration to Constantine).

1

+

2

+

3

+

4

=

10

What Eusebius was telling the initiated who knew the Scriptures was that 1 plus 2, plus 3, plus 4 equals 10. In other words, right before their eyes, Babylon, Persia, Greece, Rome were culminating in this Empire of Constantine which would exist until the Second Coming of Christ!!

"For the unit is the tenth of ten, and ten units make up a decade, which is itself the limit, the settled goal and boundary of units; it is that which terminates the infinity of number the term AND END of units" (Oration to Constantine).

And that Constantine's Empire was not the Empire of Christ . . . but was the 10 toed, 10 horned evil empire of the book of Daniel and Revelation. This was the beginning of the evil Empire that John saw in a vision over 200 years earlier:

"And I stood upon the sand of the sea, and I saw a beast rise up out of the sea, having seven heads and TEN horns, and upon his horns 10 crowns, and upon his heads the name of blasphemy" (Rev. 13:1)

This was the same ten horns that Daniel saw upon the Roman wild beast over 500 years earlier: 

"After this I saw in the night visions, and behold a fourth beast, dreadful and terrible, and strong exceedingly, and it had great iron teeth: it devoured and brake in pieces, and stamped the residue with the feet of it: and it was diverse from all the beast that were before it; and it had TEN horns" (Daniel 7:7).

Eusebius was telling his readers in coded language that no matter how many decades intervened between his days and the Second Coming of Christ, this form of corrupt Resurrection-less Christianity married to the kings of the earth would continue until the end of  time.

How right he was!!

Editor's Note

Proof of the Gospel by the Great Church Historian Eusebius is available from

http://www.academicbooks.com/WS/

References

Barnes, Timothy D., Constantine and Eusebius, Harvard University Press, 1981.

Eusebius, Preparation for the Gospel, Baker Books, Grand Rapids, Michigan, 1981.

Eusebius, Proof of the Gospel, (10 volumes only), Baker Books, Grand Rapids, Michigan, 1981. (Volumes 11 to 20 are missing)!!

Eusebius, Oration to Constantine.  

Kee, Alistair, Constantine Versus Christ: The Triumph of Ideology, SCM Press, London, 1982.

Martin, E. L. Secrets of Golgatha, ASK Publications, Portland, Oregon, 2000.

Tertullian, (145-220), Apology, The Anti-Nicene Fathers. 

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