Eusebius the Evangelist: Rewriting the Fourfold Gospel in Late Antiquity by Jeremiah Coogan (review)

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Reviewed by:

• Eusebius the Evangelist: Rewriting the Fourfold Gospel in Late Antiquity by Jeremiah Coogan
• Carl Johan Berglund

Jeremiah Coogan
Eusebius the Evangelist: Rewriting the Fourfold Gospel in Late Antiquity
Cultures of Reading in the Ancient Mediterranean
New York: Oxford University Press, 2022
Pp. xvi + 234. $110.00.

Among early Gospel readers, a select few have had a disproportionate influence over how subsequent readers approached the stories of Jesus. Matthew’s rewriting of Mark became so dominant that it threatened to erase its predecessor from historical memory. Origen’s literary-critical interpretations of the Gospels provided the standard commentary pattern for many centuries. And Eusebius’s early fourth-century apparatus continues to impact how the fourfold Gospel is read.

As Eusebius explains himself in his letter to Carpianus, he divided the Gospels into suitable sections and numbered them with black ink in the margins. To each section number he added a reference in red ink to one of ten tables, or “canons,” that gave the section numbers for any similar patterns in the other Gospels. A Matthean reader finding a red beta (Greek numeral 2) in the margin could conclude that this passage had parallels in Mark and Luke, but not in John, and consult the second canon to find which sections in those Gospels to look for. Eusebius’s system was an early example of organizing data in rows and columns, constitutes the first ever set of textual cross-references, and is included in most medieval manuscripts and modern editions of the Gospels. Scholars have often dismissed the Eusebian apparatus as primitive, inadequate, and generally inferior to a modern synopsis, but Jeremiah Coogan argues in his revised PhD dissertation (2020, University of Notre Dame) that it offers an innovative textual framework that established the fourfold Gospel as a unified conceptual space and found many uses through the centuries.

To organize data in columns and rows may seem mundane today, but it was much rarer in Eusebius’s time. Possible precedents include Ptolemy’s regnal canon (a list of kings and their dates) and his more advanced Handy Tables (a set of interlocking tables to calculate the locations of heavenly bodies). Origen’s Hexapla is basically an enormous table with parallel texts in six columns, and Ammo-nius the Alexandrian had apparently tried to arrange the Gospels in a similar way: four parallel columns based on the order found in Matthew. But Eusebius found it unsatisfactory to break the sequence of three out of four Gospels. In his [End Page 467] Chronological Tables, he emulated Ptolemy’s regnal canon by organizing historical eras, events, and empires by time (horizontally) and location (vertically). Coogan finds his apparatus more innovative in that it does not merely summarize existing knowledge but functions as a map to the fourfold Gospel, allowing the reader to move either vertically through each Gospel or horizontally to reveal hitherto inaccessible parallels between the texts.

The reception of Eusebius’s apparatus over the fifteen centuries since its inception is massive. Coogan finds it repeated in numerous Gospel manuscripts in Greek, Latin, Gothic, Syriac, Coptic, Ethiopic, Arabic, Armenian, Georgian, and Slavonic. Some manuscripts make the system more effective to use, either by enumerating parallels directly in the margin or by distributing smaller tables throughout the pages, which Coogan takes as proof that the system was used extensively. And countless lectionaries identify their readings by use of Eusebius’s section numbers—often complemented by a few words from the beginning and end of readings that do not fit precisely with Eusebius’s section delimitations. Coogan also finds that Augustine employs it systematically to compare the Gospels in his On the Harmony of the Evangelists and that Epiphanius of Salamis uses Eusebius’s 1,162 Gospel sections as a shorthand for the totality of the fourfold Gospel. Likewise, he argues that both Jerome and Severus of Antioch use the apparatus to identify instances of Gospel harmonizations: if a Markan manuscript uses a Matthean wording in a passage Eusebius had categorized as unparalleled Markan material, there must be a more original Markan formulation to be found.

While earlier scholarship has considered the apparatus in the category of Gospel interpretation, Coogan maintains that what...