Lecture Summaries: 17 March, 2004

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Eusebius' Onomasticon:  Geographical Knowledge in Byzantine Palestine
by
Joan E. Taylor and Rupert L. Chapman

The subject of the lecture focused on the recent publication by the two presenters, a book co-written with Dr. Greville Freeman-Grenville, entitled: Palestine in the Fourth Century: The Onomasticon of Eusebius of Caesarea (Jerusalem: Carta, 2003). Eusebius (c.260-339), a student of Pamphilus, was persecuted by the emperor Diocletian, but rose to power under Constantine.He authored numerous works of Christian theology, and the definitive history of the church. The Onomasticon is a list of Biblical places which sites them, where possible, in the Palestine of Eusebius' time. The work greatly assists in discussions about the identification of Biblical sites. For example, Bethel.

The most widely held view is that the modern site of Beitin was Bethel, however, the detailed information given by Eusebius did not particularly suit this identification, which had first been made by the local Greek Orthodox clergy of et-Taiyibeh, prior to Edward Robinson's visit in 1838. Eusebius had used Bethel as a central place for identification of the location of other places, second in importance only to Jerusalem, and had given distances from four other locations. The first of these, at the twelfth milestone north of Jerusalem, presented few problems, but the second, 4 milestones east of Gibeon, was more problematic, did not really fit Beitin, and was better suited to el-Bireh. Two further references to distances were not particularly useful, as the first, from et-Taiyibeh, fit no known site, while the second, from the village of Aialon, was not secure, since the identification of Aialon was influenced in a circular fashion by the identification of Beitin as Bethel. While Robinson had suggested that Bethel had become Beitin by the change of the final 'l' to 'n', a simpler change had been suggested, namely, a vowel change from Beth-aun (sometimes transliterated as Beth Aven) to Beitin. Archaeologically, although both Eusebius and Jerome described Bethel as a village in their own times, the small amounts of Roman-Byzantine pottery found at Beitin, from unstratified contexts, suggested an occupation ending before this period. In addition, there was a ruined Crusader church, with a dedication to St. Joseph, at Beitin, although Bethel was not mentioned, at least by that name, in any Crusader sources. Unfortunately in J. L. Kelso's publication of the archaeological material from the site, the artefacts were not related to their find-spots and the interpretation of the finds involved a good deal of vivid and uncritical imagination, at times amounting to little more than fantasy.

Eusebius' information on the location of Golgotha suggests a place well to the south of the site which since has become traditional, in what later became the Decumanus of Aelia Capitolina. Eusebius' text was written before the visit of Helena, mother of the Emperor Constantine, to Jerusalem (c.326), at which time the traditional site was established with the 'finding' of the true cross close to the site of Jesus' tomb. Also, Eusebius' statement that Akeldama, 'The Field of Blood' where Judas Iscariot committed suicide, was located 'in the north of Mt. Sion' is at odds with the locations given by all of his contemporaries and by later writers. When compared to the wording of his description of the location of Golgotha, it becomes clear that his statement of the location of Akeldama is a duplicate of that for Golgotha, and, moreover, it is contradicted by other statements in the text of the Onomasticon, in which Eusebius reliably places Akeldama to the south-east of Mt. Sion, close to the Valley of Gehinnom, Taphet and the Fuller's Pool.