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Chapter 5 - Christian Families

from Part II

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 January 2019

James Corke-Webster
Affiliation:
King's College London
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Summary

Chapter 5 argues that Eusebius, despite his reputation as a champion of asceticism, in fact presents Christian families as the last bastion of traditional Roman family values. He thus rewrote the rejection of family inherent in much Christian literature of the second and third centuries, where Christian protagonists fight with pagan parents who resist their conversions, and aligned himself instead with more pro-familial factions in early Christianity. Non-Christian critics of Christianity had also presented Christianity as a religious minority that seduced innocent children away from their parents, and Christians as rebels who rejected the stable family unit in favour of sedition, immorality, and isolation. Eusebius instead sought to construct a picture of the Christian family aligned with traditional Graeco-Roman family values. He presents Christian families as exemplifying precisely the reciprocal obedience, affection and solidarity that characterised idealised Roman conceptions of the family, and hails them as the key locus for education. Moreover, at times of crisis in the History, Christians exemplify ideal Roman family values while non-Christians (Jews and ‘pagans’) fail to do so. As in the previous two chapters, Eusebius thus both responded to traditional elite criticisms of Christianity and affirmed the traditional nature of Christian piety.
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Chapter
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Eusebius and Empire
Constructing Church and Rome in the <I>Ecclesiastical History</I>
, pp. 149 - 174
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2019

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