When early Christians began to study the Bible, and to write their own history and that of the Jews whom they claimed to supersede, they used scholarly methods invented by the librarians and literary critics of Hellenistic Alexandria. But Origen and Eusebius, two scholars of late Roman Caesarea, did far more. Both produced new kinds of books, in which parallel columns made possible critical comparisons previously unenvisioned, whether between biblical texts or between national histories. Eusebius went even farther, creating new research tools, new forms of history and polemic, and a new kind of library to support both research and book production.

Christianity and the Transformation of the Book combines broad-gauged synthesis and close textual analysis to reconstruct the kinds of books and the ways of organizing scholarly inquiry and collaboration among the Christians of Caesarea, on the coast of Roman Palestine. The book explores the dialectical relationship between intellectual history and the history of the book, even as it expands our understanding of early Christian scholarship. Christianity and the Transformation of the Book attends to the social, religious, intellectual, and institutional contexts within which Origen and Eusebius worked, as well as the details of their scholarly practices--practices that, the authors argue, continued to define major sectors of Christian learning for almost two millennia and are, in many ways, still with us today.,

Eusebius of Caesarea was one of the most significant and voluminous contributors to the development of late antique literary culture. Despite his significance, Eusebius has tended to receive attention more as a source for histories of early Christianity and the Constantinian empire than as a writer and thinker in his own right. He was a compiler and copyist of pagan and Christian texts, collator of a massive chronographical work, commentator on scriptural texts, author of apologetic, historical, educational, and biographical works, and custodian of one of the greatest libraries in the ancient world. As such, Eusebius merits a primary place in our appreciation of the literary culture of late antiquity for both his self-conscious conveyance of multiple traditions and his fostering of innovative literary and intellectual trajectories. By focusing on the full range of Eusebius’s literary corpus, the collection of essays in Eusebius of Caesarea offers new and innovative studies that will change the ways classicists, theologians, and ancient historians think about this major figure.

In this interesting and insightful work, Eugenia Scarvelis Constantinou, the leading expert on Andrew of Caesarea and the first to translate his Apocalypse commentary into any modern language, identifies an exact date for the commentary and a probable recipient. Her groundbreaking book, the first ever written about Andrew, analyzes his historical milieu, education, style, methodology, theology, eschatology, and pervasive and lasting influence. She explains the direct correlation between Andrew of Caesarea and fluctuating status of the Book of Revelation in Eastern Christianity through the centuries.