Photo Illustration by Luis G. Rendon/The Daily Beast; Getty
If you were traveling through the verdant Ethiopian highlands, then you might make a stop at the Abba Gärima monastery about three miles east of Adwa in the northernmost part of the country. If you were a man—and you’d have to be to gain entry into the Orthodox monastery—then you might be permitted to look at the Abba Gärima Gospel books. These exquisitely illuminated manuscripts are the earliest evidence of the art of the Christian Aksumite kingdom. Legend holds that God stopped the sun in the sky so the copyist could finish them. Leafing through a Gospel book you would come upon portraits of the four evangelists—Matthew, Mark, Luke and John—the authors of the book’s contents. You might be surprised to find, however, that there is a fifth evangelist included there.
‘A fifth evangelist?!’ you say, and rightly so. This fifth portrait is that of Eusebius of Caesarea, the man who taught us how to read the Gospels. A new book, Eusebius the Evangelist: Rewriting the Fourfold Gospel in Late Antiquity, by Dr. Jeremiah Coogan, an assistant professor of New Testament at the Jesuit School of Theology at Santa Clara University, sheds light on history’s lost “fifth evangelist” and explains the pervasive influence of the bishop who has, arguably, done more than anyone else to shape how we read the gospels.
Eusebius of Caesarea is not a very well-known name outside of scholarly circles. He was born in the last half of the third century in Caesarea Maritima, in what is today Israel. He became first a priest and then a bishop. He would later become a biographer of the emperor Constantine possibly even a wheeler-dealer in the ecclesiastical politics of the imperial court. Under the influence of the third-century theologian Origen, who spent a long period of his life in Caesarea, Eusebius became an accomplished textual scholar.