Christian thinkers fused biblical and Roman imperial history into one narrative

Evidence

Ever since the fourth century, when Eusebius, bishop of Caesarea and adviser to Constantine, penned his Ecclesiastical History and his Chronicle, two historical traditions were inextricably linked: biblical history and Roman imperial history. During the age of Roman persecution of Christians, Christian writers had vilified Rome as the whore of Babylon, reincarnation of the despised enemy of the Old Testament, the Babylonians who in their arrogance constructed the tower of Babel and later destroyed the Temple of Jerusalem and led the Jews into captivity. Eusebius, writing to glorify Constantine and his Christian Roman empire, overhauled Christian historiography. He provided an unbroken narration of human history from Abraham to his own day, calculating the periods between key biblical events. In the fifth century, Augustine of Hippo divided world history into six ages, following a Jewish tradition that, just as the world was created in six days, it would last six long “days” and be destroyed on the seventh, but Augustine refrained from calculating the lengths of these ages. — John V. Tolan, Saracens, 97

Categorization

• DEFINE: Explains the six-ages-of-the-world framework that shaped pre-modern Christian historiography.
• XREF: connects to: Christian nationalist history follows a golden-age-fall-redeem narrative structure. — Katherine Stewart, The Power Worshippers: Inside the…, 526