This communication takes as its point of departure an insightful comment by Anthony Grafton and Megan Williams to assess the upshot Eusebius’ Chronicle, his visual rendering of history. They note, “Reading the Hexapla column against column, in other words, taught Eusebius to compare texts word by word. And the evidence that Eusebius turned up as he did so forced him to admit that no single authoritative chronology of the world could be drawn from the Old Testament. Eusebius read the Hexapla as Origen had meant it to be read: as a treasury of exegetical materials, some of them perplexing, rather than an effort to provide a stable perfect text of the Bible. By doing so, he turned chronology from a fixed, perfect armature for the history of the world into an open, hotly debated discipline” (Christianity and the Transformation of the Book, pp.169-170, emphasis mine). I wish to make a similar claim about Eusebius’ promise in H.E. III.3.3 “to indicate successively which of the orthodox writers in each period used any of the contested writings, and what they said about the ‘encovenanted’ and acknowledged writings and about those which are not,” and the categorizations he proffered in III.25. As Eusebius surveyed the Christian textual landscape, he could not, unlike his Jewish counterpart, Josephus, provide a finite list of authoritative, sacred books (H.E. III.10.1-5). Scholars have noted that his rhetoric of enumeration in III.25 is hardly perspicuous; his catalogue of Christian writings is maddeningly imprecise in its precision. I suggest that Eusebius, the “impresario of the codex” (Grafton/Williams) initiated a new discipline (imperfectly construed as “the canon debate”). His discussion, the almost-visualized arrangement of H.E. III.25 must be seen as a step in a process Umberto Eco (The Infinity of Lists) characterizes as “exchanges between list and form,” transformations for which Eusebius is justly famous.
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