AJR is pleased to host the #SBLAAR2022 review panel of Jeremiah Coogan's Eusebius the Evangelist: Rewriting the Fourfold Gospel in Late Antiquity (Oxford University Press, 2022). This book review panel took place at the annual meeting for the Society of Biblical Literature in Denver, Colorado, on November 19, 2022. ...The first essay:
Five Initial Thoughts on Eusebius the Evangelist (Paul Dilley).
My subsequent comments, organized as five initial reflections, were prompted by Coogan’s many strong insights, and in response to the ongoing holes and ambiguities in our source material.The second essay:
Echoes of Eusebius in Syriac (Marion Pragt)
Coogan presents his book as an “invitation to reexamine encounters between textual artifacts and their users” (p. 177). Inspired by Coogan’s work, I would like to explore some of the ways in which gospel authorship and the parallels and differences between individual gospels were imagined and encountered by Syriac-using Christians in late ancient and early medieval times.The third:
Eusebius, the Evangelist, and the Rabbinic Mapping of Knowledge (Monika Amsler).
While Eusebius added a cosmic dimension to the four gospels by mapping them out based on an (astronomical) table, the Talmud seems to be the cosmos created by tables that linked the content of the Babylonian rabbinic library (as the sum of all books rather than one specific collection) associatively with each other and with the Mishnah.The fourth:
Similar Things: Reflections On Eusebius The Evangelist (Jennifer Wright Knust)
Since I have no objections to Coogan’s analysis (everyone should just read this book already), I will structure my own response around two areas where I think Coogan and/or scholarship after Coogan could go next: (1) further analysis of what the “harmony of the Gospels” meant to the ancients who claimed it (or better, to follow Coogan: how a claim like “harmony of the Gospels” was used) and (2) a reconsideration of what an “evangelist” is or can be. ...Jeremiah Coogan's response:
Poetic Geography: Reading Eusebius’ Fourfold Gospel
I am grateful to each of my interlocutors in this forum for their generous engagement with Eusebius the Evangelist.[3] In what follows, I structure my response around three themes: (1) technologies and practices, (2) readers, and (3) imagination. These three themes interweave with one another as we consider how Eusebius’s reconfigured Gospel “articulat[es] a second, poetic geography on top of the geography of the literal.”[4][...]
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