Church History

Philostorgius (born 368 C.E.) was a member of the Eunomian sect of Christianity, a nonconformist faction deeply opposed to the form of Christianity adopted by the Roman government as the official religion of its empire. He wrote his twelve-book Church History, the critical edition of the surviving remnants of which is presented here in English translation, at the beginning of the fifth century as a revisionist history of the church and the empire in the fourth and early-fifth centuries. Sometimes contradicting and often supplementing what is found in other histories of the period, Christian or otherwise, it offers a rare dissenting picture of the Christian world of the time.

Philip R. Amidon, S.J., D.Phil. (1979) in Theology, Oxford University, is Resident Assistant Professor of Theology at Creighton University in Omaha, Nebraska. He is the author of The Panarion of St. Epiphanius, Bishop of Salamis: Selected Passages (1990) and The Church History of Rufinus of Aquileia (1997), both from Oxford University Press.