#19 – Burn Them in the Fire

* When the Greek author Herodotus, the ‘father of history’, sat down to write the first history he declared that his aim was to make ‘inquiries’ – historias, in Greek – into the relations between the Greeks and the Persians. * He was so even-handed with the way he treated both sides, that he was accused by the Greeks of being a ‘barbarian lover’. * Christian historians took a different view. * Our old friend Eusebius – the ‘father of Church history’ – wrote that the job of the historian was NOT to record everything but instead only those things that would do a Christian good to read. * In his History on the persecutions of Diocletian, he says he doesn’t want to talk about the people who escaped the persecutions by renouncing their faith. * ‘I shall include in my overall account only those things by which first we ourselves, then later generations, may benefit.’ * Herodotus had seen history as an enquiry. * But The father of Church history saw it as a parable. * Which, by the way, is how I think we should read the Gospels. * They were written as parables, not as history. * But I digress. * Of course, we know that most ancient writers of history didn’t think about it in the same academic way we do today. * They often wrote propaganda even when they claimed to be writing history. * But I think it’s interesting that Eusebius was so open about it. * He only thinks he should talk about things that are edifying to Christianity. * And later Christians adopted this motto. * If someone wrote something that was hostile to Christianity or even if a Christian wrote something that had ideas which were later discarded – these books weren’t recopied or passed on, or they were actively suppressed. * For example. * In Alexandria, towards the end of the fifth century, a Christian writer named Zachariah of Mytilene says he entered the house of a man and found that he was ‘sweating and depressed’. * Zachariah says he instantly knew what was wrong: this man was struggling with demons. * Either that – or he’d had a really bad acid trip. * Zachariah knew where these demons were coming from – the man had some scrolls containing pagan spells in his house. * ‘If you want to get rid of the anxiety,’ he told the man ‘burn these papers.’ * And so he did. * He took his scrolls and, in front of Zachariah, set them on fire. * The story finishes with a homily being read to the man who had now been cleansed of his ‘demons’ – not to mention of part of his library. * As Zachariah makes very clear – he didn’t consider that he has harmed this man by forcing him to burn his papers. * He had not bullied him, or acted cruelly towards him. * Quite the reverse: he had saved him. * By forcing him to burn heretical books, he’d saved his soul. * This is another attitude that was widespread. * Remember how Constantine ordered the works of the heretic Arius to be burned and had condemned to death all who hid the heretic’s books? * That didn’t work – half of the empire is still Arian 200 years later, but you can’t blame him for not trying,. * We know that book burning was common. * The fifth-century Syrian bishop Rabbula said  ‘Search out the books of the heretics . . . in every place, and wherever you can,