Eusebius

Eusebius was born in Caesarea ca. 263, and initiated into Origen’s hermeneutics and exegesis by Pamphilus, with whom he wrote a lost Apology for Origen during Pamphilus’s imprisonment during the Diocletian persecution. Eusebius himself was seized in the Thebais and imprisoned during the same persecution; however soon after Constantine and Licinius had published their edict of tolerance, Eusebius was elected to the see of his home town in 313. A moderately conservative Origenist, without a great deal of theological creativity, he was effectively compromised in the Arian controversy. His exceptional learning and indefatigable labors as an author made him the “father” of ecclesiastical historiography, an encyclopedic expert in Christian apologetics, a prominent theological adviser of Emperor Constantine, and an important link in the continuity of Origen’s biblical scholarship into the fourth century.

Charles Kannengiesser, Handbook of Patristic Exegesis: The Bible in Ancient Christianity (Leiden: Brill, 2006), 675.