Eusebius of Emesa

Eusebius was born at Edessa around the year 300, into a noble family of that Syriac-speaking city. He was taught the Scriptures in Syriac as a boy, which set him apart from nearly every other bishop of his generation in the Greek East, who came to the Bible through Greek alone.

He studied in Palestine at Caesarea, under Eusebius the historian, and then at Antioch, and later went to Alexandria for philosophy. When Athanasius was deposed in 340, the anti-Nicene party offered Eusebius the see of Alexandria. He turned it down, saying, sensibly, that the Alexandrians would never accept a man installed over a bishop they still regarded as theirs. He was made bishop of Emesa instead, the city now called Homs in Syria.

Emesa did not want him either. The townspeople accused him of practicing astrology and ran him out, and he had to take refuge with Bishop George of Laodicea until he could be restored. He seems to have been an astronomer with an interest that could easily be misread, and the charge stuck long enough to hurt.

He travelled with the emperor Constantius on campaign against the Persians, and by all accounts had the emperor's favor. In the doctrinal fighting of the 340s and 350s he sat with the moderate party that hesitated over the Nicene word homoousios without embracing outright Arianism.

What makes him worth reading is his preaching. He belongs to the Antiochene tradition of interpretation: begin with the plain historical sense of the passage. His sermons are practical, direct, aimed at ordinary congregations rather than at a council chamber, and they show a pastor working through the text of Scripture in front of people who had to go back to work in the morning.

Jerome says he wrote a great deal, commentaries on Galatians and on the Gospels, works against the Jews, the pagans and the Novatianists, and ten books against Marcellus of Ancyra. Nearly all of it is lost in Greek. What survives does so mostly in a collection of Latin homilies preserved in Gaul, in Armenian translation, and in fragments quarried out of medieval commentary chains. Modern scholarship has slowly reassembled him from those scraps.

He died at Antioch about 359, and was buried in his native Edessa.

Sources: Socrates Scholasticus, Ecclesiastical History, II.9; Sozomen, Ecclesiastical History, III.6; Jerome, On Illustrious Men, 91; The Catholic Encyclopedia (1913), s.v. "Eusebius of Emesa".