EUSEBIUS OF CAESAREA AND THE CONCEPT OF PAGANISM

Abstract

In scholarship the term ‘paganism’ is often rejected on the grounds that it reflects Christian attempts to project a false unity onto the variety of ancient religions. Although this is true to a certain extent, this paper argues that philosophers of the imperial age already ascribed a fundamental unity to all religions, and that Christian apologists drew on these ideas to formulate their own concept of ‘paganism’. The creation of paganism should thus been seen as a dialectical process, not as a onesided projection.