The Road More Traveled

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The Onomasticon by Eusebius of Caesarea, Palestine in the Fourth Century A.D.

Translated by G.S.P. Freeman-Grenville, indexed by Rupert L. Chapman III, edited and introduced by Joan E. Taylor

(Jerusalem: Carta, 2003), 206 pp. + 8 maps. $44.95

She had traveled to ancient Palestine to tour the holy places, and now, after three years, she was ready to head home. In 384 C.E., Egeria announced her departure from Jerusalem: “I had seen all the places which were the object of my pilgrimage,” she wrote in her famous diary/travelogue, which would spawn a horde of pilgrims in the next two centuries.¹ As her guidebook, she had carried a Latin translation of Eusebius’s Onomasticon, written almost a hundred years earlier.

Whether this was the intended purpose of Eusebius’s Onomasticon remains a question.

Eusebius, the bishop of Caesarea (260–c. 341 C.E.), was also the author of the Ecclesiastical History, the first real history of the Christian Church. Even before that, he had written his Chronicon, which describes a series of complicated events in world history and in the history of the Hebrew people to show that these two great historical streams now coexist as the history of the Roman Empire and the history of the Christian Church. Together, the Onomasticon, the Chronicon and the Ecclesiastical History comprise an apologetic trilogy to announce the Christian Church’s succession to the ownership of Biblical time (Chronicon), place (Onomasticon) and history (Ecclesiastical History) in the Roman world.

Eusebius’s Onomasticon is a first. There was simply nothing like it earlier. It is a gazette that precisely locates Biblical sites in Roman Palestine. It lists, in alphabetical order, sites mentioned both in the Hebrew Bible and in the New Testament, sometimes with commentary on how they appeared in his day.

This is not to say that Eusebius didn’t have predecessors in compiling and discussing Biblical site names, but all his predecessors’ works were distinctly different from his own. One of the first was Origen of Alexandria’s own onomasticon. Origen (185–253 C.E.) spent the last years of his life in Eusebius’s city on the Mediterranean coast of Palestine, teaching and establishing the library of the Church of Caesarea. By Eusebius’s time, Origen was already a legendary figure. But Origen’s onomasticon, preserved in Jerome’s fourth-century Latin translation, shows an almost complete preoccupation with etymological questions that illuminate the meaning of Biblical names. Origen sought to ascertain the precise names of Biblical sites so that he could conform their spellings in the texts of Scripture. Eusebius, on the other hand, wanted to do much more than simply collect information to stabilize Biblical names. And he wanted to do more than simply locate Biblical sites precisely on a map of Roman Palestine.

The first three parts of the Onomasticon have unfortunately been lost. Our earliest witness to it, by Procopius of Gaza (c. 435–538 C.E.), gives its title as “Concerning the Names of Places.” We do have the fourth part, both in its original Greek and in Jerome’s Latin translation and amplification of it. Jerome calls it a “Book about the Location and Names of Hebrew Places.”

From Eusebius’s preface to the fourth part, it is clear that he intended much more than simply giving the reader a gazette of Biblical place names. Eusebius tells us in the preface to the fourth part that in the 055now-lost first three parts he has translated Hebrew names into the Greek for Gentiles; he has made a register of ancient Judea from the whole Bible and divided it into tribal allotments; and he has included a plan of Jerusalem and the Temple. Now, in this fourth part, he intends to tell us “the distances of the cities and villages mentioned in the divine scripture in the paternal language, both what sort of country and how they are named in their day, exposing whether they [are named] as of old or have different names [now].”

In the typical entry, Eusebius gives the scriptural name of the site, where the name appears in Scripture, the fact that there is (or is not) a contemporary village (Greek: kome) or city (polis) on the site and its location in Roman distances, that is, according to the milestones that lined the roads at each Roman mile.

Modern scholars have sometimes mistakenly assumed that Eusebius wrote his Onomasticon as a guidebook for pilgrims,² because he goes to great lengths to give more than 35 notices of a site or a monument still being pointed out by local inhabitants in his own day. This would seem to indicate that Eusebius had considerable knowledge about Palestine and real interest in notifying pilgrims of the presence of people at or near a site who would show visitors holy things, a practice not common, however, before the fifth and sixth centuries, when the Holy Land tourism business was booming.

A closer look demonstrates that Eusebius’s knowledge of contemporary Palestine at this early period in his writing career, however, is literary rather than 056actual. Eusebius was a literary man—an urban library rat. For the most part, he sat on the Palestinian coast gazing at his books and out to sea. It is only the imperial persecutions of 303–311 C.E. (known as the Great Persecution, the last attempt in antiquity by the Roman emperors to stamp out Christianity) that would turn Eusebius into a traveler. In fact, he gives us an account of a Christian martyrdom he witnessed in Egypt. But, in the years before 303, he knows virtually nothing of the physical realities of his own country, apart from what he reads in books or might see as he traveled to Jerusalem. (Perhaps that accounts for the Onomasticon’s large clustering of site-names on the road from Caesarea to Jerusalem.)

The clues that indicate his limited on-the-ground experience are subtle but numerous. For example, his citations of the then-current monuments are formulaic, not descriptive. Eusebius’s characteristic way of contemporizing the description of a site is to employ the formula “until now” (eis eti nun). This is the formula he uses to provide proof that a site named in the Bible actually existed and that its existence still could be seen and verified in his own day. One of Eusebius’s sources, the first-century Jewish historian Josephus, tells his readers that the remains of Noah’s ark are still being shown at Mt. Ararat. Josephus writes: “Until now the remains of [the ark] are pointed out.” Eusebius takes this information, supplies the fact that people of the surrounding area are doing the “pointing out” and replaces Josephus’ verb with Eusebius’s own preferred verb, “to show.” Thus the notice, now 057bearing Eusebius’s heavy hand, reads: “Until now the local inhabitants point out the remains of [the ark].”

Without having firsthand knowledge of the Noah’s ark being pointed out in his own day, Eusebius has, as at so many other places, used, made his own and updated an earlier literary source. Similar literary high jinks occur when Eusebius lifts and changes a passage on the showing of Aaron’s tomb at Ur.

In short, far from being an astute traveler and observer, Eusebius lifts notices from his literary sources and makes them appear as if he himself has been at the places he describes.

Eusebius’s Onomasticon has now appeared side by side with Jerome’s translation in a superb English edition by G.S.P. Freeman-Grenville. It is indeed a handsome publication and is the first published translation in English, with an index by Rupert Chapman and an extensive introduction by Joan Taylor.

Taylor takes the conservative view that there is no clear-cut scholarly consensus on the dating of the Onomasticon and places it in a much later period than I have argued for, although she does recognize that the intended audience of the Onomasticon was, in her view, not wealthy pilgrims like Egeria, but scholars interested in the text of the Bible clarified by the location of sites, whether such scholars ever intended to visit Palestine or not.

To discern more accurately the purpose of Eusebius’s Onomasticon, 058however, we need to locate it more precisely within his larger literary corpus. Here I think Taylor errs. She dates the Onomasticon in its final form to “between 313 and mid-325, but no later.”

In my view, Eusebius wrote his Onomasticon much earlier in his career—between his Chronicon and his Ecclesiastical History. Timothy Barnes has recently lent a new precision to the dating of Eusebius’s writings. He dates the first edition of the Chronicon and the Ecclesiastical History to 303, or earlier.³ He says the Onomasticon was written shortly after the Ecclesiastical History. I essentially agree with Barnes, but I believe the Onomasticon was written shortly before the Ecclesiastical History. 059This general dating has important implications for the interpretation of Eusebius’s writings, for it means this trilogy was written before the Great Persecution, which began in 303 C.E.

After writing the Chronicon, sometime in the early 290s, setting forth the Biblical chronology from the beginning to the Roman era, Eusebius turned his attention to the places in Palestine mentioned in the Bible; hence, his Onomasticon. Then he turned his attention to writing his Ecclesiastical History. We can surmise this because in the first edition of the History he uses the same formula and updating of a source already perfected in multiple examples in the Onomasticon.⁴

The Onomasticon thus belongs to Eusebius’s early historical/apologetic efforts to bring Biblical, Roman and Christian histories together in a way that depicts Christianity as the legitimate successor of the Biblical world in the Roman era. Composed before 303 C.E., it was never meant to be more than an apologetic document passing on the mantle of Biblical succession to the Christian church of his day.

Eusebius eventually became bishop of Caesarea. As such, he was one of the five most influential bishops of the Eastern Empire. The early dating of his trilogy means that it was written before he became a bishop, and more importantly, before the enmity between the Roman state and the Christian church reemerged, as reflected in the Great Persecution.⁵

As we have seen, Eusebius’s interest was in sites mentioned in Scripture. Indeed, some very important historical and archaeological sites from the Roman period did not merit an entry of their own. For example, Sepphoris,^a just four miles west of Nazareth and Herod Antipas’ first capital, where the Mishnah (the first great rabbinic legal treatise and the core of the Talmud) was codified, has no entry of its own in the Onomasticon simply because it’s never mentioned in Scripture. Eusebius knows of it, however, under its Roman name, Diocaesarea, as an important city ruling a large territory that included important Biblical sites. Thus he refers to Diocaesarea seven times either to locate a site in its territory or to indicate distances to a site using its milestones, or both. But it does not have its own entry.

Although I differ with the introduction, as I have indicated, this new edition of the Onomasticon is nevertheless a superlative guide to the Biblical site identifications that were on Eusebius’s radar screen early in his literary career. We can all welcome a tool as useful to scholars as to the average non specialist—now able to look up in an English translation the many references that scholars make to it in both archaeological and textual studies of ancient Palestine.

The Onomasticon by Eusebius of Caesarea, Palestine in the Fourth Century A.D. Translated by G.S.P. Freeman-Grenville, indexed by Rupert L. Chapman III, edited and introduced by Joan E. Taylor (Jerusalem: Carta, 2003), 206 pp. + 8 maps. $44.95 She had traveled to ancient Palestine to tour the holy places, and now, after three years, she was ready to head home. In 384 C.E., Egeria announced her departure from Jerusalem: “I had seen all the places which were the object of my pilgrimage,” she wrote in her famous diary/travelogue, which would spawn a horde of pilgrims in the next […]