EUSEBIUS.
The Father of Church History.
In referring to his work of writing a history of the church up to his own times, he says:
“We are attempting a kind of trackless and unbeaten path.”
Again he says of Philo Judæus that he was a very “learned man.” Among many other things which contradict this estimate, is the fact that Philo takes more than one hundred pages in showing how that dreams are sent from God.
Again, Eusebius does not say that the last works of Hegesippus, Papias and Dionysius of Corinth, contain anything concerning the canonical gospels; therefore, they contained none.
We give the opinion of a few well-known writers upon this “father of church history”:
In Draper’s Intellectual Development of Europe, p. 197, Bunsen and Niebuhr are quoted—the one (Bunsen) as saying that he purposely “perverted chronology for the sake of making synchronisms,” and the other (Niebuhr) declaring “he is a very dishonest writer.”
“Eusebius had a peculiar faculty of diverging from the truth.” (“History of Christian Religion,” p. 7.)