A Christian Perspective to History in the Historical Writings of the Eastern Church

Abstract

    The activities of the Christian fathers had a vital in various fields, especially those that relate to historical records, documenting political, economic and cultural events in the lives of the communities they lived with. However, the historical recording was based in a special philosophy for the church fathers, a philosophy that drew on the politico-religious developments; hence, they made their own school thought. This new school of thought had a clear impact on regions of the east and the west at various time spans. The impact relates primarily to salvation and man’s divine destination. The impact includes various fields, like the history of philosophy and philosophers, the historical studies of different historical pre/post Christian periods, especially the Middle Ages and Renaissance, as well as the study of language  ̶   for the writings of the church fathers were written in different languages. Generally, the writings, Eusebius of Caesarea kept on following the same approach. As a result, these writings represent an ideological historical recording, religiously in the first place, then politically when the papal Christian establishments in the east and the west were associated with missionaries and great empires. Yet, in the eastern church such studies followed a modernistic method adopted by the eastern church historians; this new approach got deeper during the second half of the twentieth century.