Medieval historiography
The early Christian conception of history
The earliest Christians thought that history was about to end, because Jesus had said that some of his disciples would still be alive at his Second Coming. Fired with such apocalyptic expectations, all they needed to know of history was that God had broken into it through the Incarnation and that Jesus had conquered death through the Resurrection. Thus, it was hardly inevitable that Christians would develop an interest in history, much less their own philosophy of history. But the authors of the canonical Gospels (Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John) regarded the Hebrew Bible as authoritative and reinterpreted it to accord with the new revelation. In their view many prophecies of the Hebrew scriptures referred to Jesus, and many of its stories prefigured his life (thus, Jonah’s three-day sojourn in the belly of the great fish was a foreshadowing of the Resurrection).
Incorporation of the Hebrew Bible into the Christian canon helped to shape the Christian conception of history. By tracing their history to Adam and Eve and the other figures who preceded Abraham, Christians encompassed all of humanity within their worldview. Reflecting the influence of the Hebrew prophets, the early Christians held that sins were inevitably followed by divine punishment and that the plot of history was the unfolding of God’s will for humanity. Disasters represented punishment for sins; prosperity indicated divine favour to faithful humans. Thus, nothing could happen that could not be explained by the providential interpretation of history.
Nevertheless, the idea of providence did not instantly solve all historical problems, some of which were peculiar to Christianity. In particular, what was the place of the Roman Empire in the divine plan? For almost three centuries Christians provoked in Roman authorities puzzlement, exasperation, and intermittent persecution. For their part, Christians treated the empire as at best irrelevant and at worst (as in the Revelation to John) as one of the beasts of the apocalypse. But with the conversion of the emperor Constantine in 312, Christian historians had to come to terms with the historical significance of a Christian emperor. The challenge was met by Eusebius, whose Historia ecclesiastica (written 312–324; Ecclesiastical History) was the first important work of Christian history since the Acts of the Apostles. For Eusebius, the Roman Empire was the divinely appointed and necessary milieu for the propagation of the Christian faith. Roman peace and Roman roads allowed the Apostle Paul to travel tens of thousands of miles on his evangelical journeys, and now Constantine had been appointed to end the persecution of Christians.