Book 1 — Chapter 1 — The Plan of the Work
Eusebius opens by defining a history broader than a list of rulers. He intends to trace the successions of those who led the principal assemblies from the days of Yahushua to his own generation; to record teachers and writers who transmitted the Word; to identify movements he regards as destructive innovations; to recount persecutions, witnesses unto death, and the reversals by which the assemblies survived; and to describe the calamities that overtook the Yehudi nation after the time of Yahushua. He admits that no predecessor has given him a continuous path to follow. Instead, he must gather scattered notices from older writers, letters, public records, chronicles, lists of overseers, and surviving books, drawing them into one historical sequence. He compares the task to collecting flowers from a meadow: his work will preserve what might otherwise disappear. He therefore begins not with the Roman state but with the origin and mission of Yahushua the Anointed, because the history of the assemblies depends upon the identity of the one from whom they take their name.