It's all a bit quiet, isn't it?
Maybe the sort of quiet you get in the classic Westerns, where the Sergeant turns to the officer, and says,"It's too quiet, sir". Then you hear the thud of the arrow, and the Sergerant falls back slowly with the arrow sticking out of his chest.....
However, thank you to cj.23 for the pointers - I've done a little research into Eusebius.
Now as a source for the accuracy of the NT authors. I'd suggest he's a bit suspect.
His dates: c. 263-339 would make it a tad difficult for him to have been an eye-witness. I understand that he used a lot of stuff from Origen - c, 185-254 - who would also appear to have been an unlikely eye-witness. So, we seem to have at the very least 2nd/3rd hand accounts.
It's also interesting that Eusebius (at about 20-25 years old) was a student of Pamphilius, who used Origen's library as a foundation. Because of a close relationship with his schoolmaster, Eusebius was apparently know as the "son of Pamphilius". The primary aim of Origen and Pamphilus' school was to promote sacred learning. However,
marginal comments in extant manuscripts note that Pamphilus and his friends and pupils, including Eusebius,
corrected and revised much of the biblical text in their library.
So - I think the important part of the previous sentence is clear - if any biblical data comes from this source, you have to wonder about its closeness to the original. I suspect that it's impossible to identify which parts of the "current" NT were "corrected" by this team of graffiti artists, so maybe all of the NT should be treated with suspicion.....
It's also interesting that Eusebius - in Praeparatio evengelica (XII, 31) wrote, “That it will be necessary sometimes to use falsehood as a remedy for the benefit of those who require such a mode of treatment”. So - "Lies for Jesus" starts here....
Eusebius was also very involved with the Arian question, and became a close friend of Emperor Constantine. So much so, that after the Emperor's death, he wrote a panegyric entitled the "Life of Constantine."
So - maybe some of what he wrote was tainted by the politics of the Arian controversy -he was pro-Arian BTW, and came out on the losing side.
As a conclusion, therefore, I think that to use Eusebius as a reference for the accuracy of the NT authors or the martydom of the apostles is - "Busted!"
Ciao,
