The charge that LDS and non-LDS Scholars Abuse Eusebius

Matthew Paulson has made the argument that some LDS scholars (e.g., Kevin Christensen) and others (Margaret Barker) have abused Eusebius, who in his view, was a good Trinitarian. For instance, he states that:

Eusebius never says that Jesus was a second God; however, he does quote Moses in calling Jesus a “second Lord” (The Church History of Eusebius, Book 1, Chapter 2:9). (Matthew A. Paulson, Breaking the Mormon Code: A Critique of Mormon Scholarship Regarding Classical Christian Theology and the Book of Mormon [Livermore, Calif.: WingSpan Press, 2006, 2009], 100)

Elsewhere (ibid.) he references some excerpts (with no background) to support such a claim, such as Proof of the Gospel, Book 4, Chapter 3:

And as the Father is one, it follows that there must be one Son and not many sons, and that there can be only one perfect God begotten of God and not several.

The problem with this text and others is that it shows that the person of the Father alone is autotheos (God in an underived sense), something that was the near unanimous consent of Patristic theologians. He then concludes:

Did Barker even read Eusebius’ Proof of the Gospel? Eusebius is an adamant monotheist and he believes Moses to be the same. Simply, Eusebius does not accept Jesus as a second God or lesser deity! Barker is advocating polytheism where there is none. Eusebius is an early source of Christian doctrine, yet he never taught that Jesus is a second God. (Ibid.)

I will admit that I am rather critical of some of Barker’s conclusions, especially her most recent volume, The Mother of My Lord. Notwithstanding, Barker has read Eusebius and interacts with, in a rather insightful manner, with his Proof of the Gospel. Obviously, Paulson has not read Barker’s The Great Angel and is only deriving it from quotes by LDS and non-LDS. I will simply reproduce the following from Barker and will let the honest reader come to their own conclusions; it should be obvious that, say what you will about Barker’s claims, she has read Eusebius’ work and does a much better, fairer job at interacting with Eusebius than Paulson does with the work of Barker et al.:

Most remarkable of all is Eusebius, who shows how this reading of the Old Testament survived into the fourth century. In the Preparation and throughout the Proof he both assumes and argues systematically for the belief that the God of the Jews was the second God who appeared in human form and was finally manifested in Jesus. Commentaries on his work label his more explicit statements as Arian, but they are in fact consistent with, and developed from, the ancient and unbroken tradition of reading the Old Testament in this way. The second God was the Great Angel, King, High Priest and Anointed One. Much of his language is close to that of Philo, but, since Philo did not originate the idea of the second God this similarity is not significant. In the Preparation he wrote of the Second Cause: ‘the Hebrew oracles teach [him] to be the Word of God and God of God, even as we Christians also have ourselves been taught to speak of the Deity’ (Preparations Xi.14) and of the Beginning: ‘the Image of God and Power of God and Wisdom of God and Word of God, nay further “the great captain of the host of the Lord” and “Angel of great Counsel.”’ (Preparation VII.15). Moses, he said, spoke of two Lords (two names Kyrios, both Yahweh in the Hebrew) in the account of the destruction of Sodom. David spoke of two Lords in Ps. 110.1, ‘the Lord said to my Lord . . .’ (two named Kyrios in the Greek which he used, but only the first is Yahweh in the Hebrew). This second Lord, he said, was the agent of the creation known either as the Word, Ps. 33.6, or as Wisdom, Prov. 3.19.  Eusebius also knew that the second God was the one whom Philo had called the Logos (Preparation XI.14).

In his Proof he began by stating his case:

Remember how Moses calls the Being, Who appeared to the patriarchs and often delivered to them the oracles written down in Scripture, sometimes God and Lord and sometimes the Angel of the Lord. He clearly implies that this was not the Omnipotent God but a secondary Being, rightly called the God and Lord of holy men, but the Angel of the Most High His father. (Proof I.5)

The Lord was the visible second God:

And if it is not possible for the Most High God, the invisible the Uncreated, and the Omnipotent to be said to be seen in mortal form, the being who was seen must have been the Word of God, Whom we call Lord as we do the Father. (Proof I.5)

Eusebius knew, then, the tradition apparent in several texts, that both Father and Son could be called Lord, just as the gnostics knew that both could be called Father. He distinguishes throughout between God Most High and another Lord, and shows in his treatment of Ps 91 that God Most High was the Father addressed by Jesus (Proof IX.7). The psalmist had addressed the second God, later manifested as Jesus, when he spoke of the Lord who had made his refuge with God Most High. Eusebius here has read the Hebrew more accurately than modern translations since the text of Ps. 91.9 does actually say:

You, O Yahweh, are my refuge,

You have made Elyon your dwelling place.

which clearly distinguishes Elyon from Yahweh, God Most High from the Lord. As has happened so often, translators have altered the text in order to give what they think it should have said.

The second figure was the anointed one, the heavenly reality with an earthly counterpart who was both King and High Priest. Moses had seen the true High Priest in his vision of the tabernacle on Sinai, and the instruction to reproduce everything in accordance with what he had seen (Exod. 25.40) included installing a high priest:

And Moses himself, having been first thought worthy to view the divine realities in secret and the mysteries concerning the first and only Anointed High Priest of God, which were celebrated before him in His theophanies, is ordered to establish figures and symbols on earth of what he had seen in his mind in visions . . . (Proof IV.15).

When the psalms spoke of the Anointed One they referred not to the king but to the second God anointed by his Father Elyon:

Wherefore in the Psalms this oracle sys thus to this same Being anointed
of the Father
Thy throne O God, is for ever and ever . . .
Wherefore God, thy God, hath anointed thee . . . (Ps. 45.6-7)

Eusebius discusses the finer nuances of the Greek and Hebrew of this verse and concludes:

So the whole verse runs: ‘Thou hast, O God, loved justice and hated impiety: therefore in return, O God, the highest and greater God, Who is also thy God . . . ‘

. . . so that the Anointer, being the supreme God, is far above the Anointed, he being God in a different sense. And this would be clear to anyone who knew Hebrew.
Therefore in these words you have it clearly stated that God was anointed and became the Christ . . .
And this is He who was the beloved of the Father and his Offspring and the eternal Priest and the being called the Sharer of the Father’s throne. (Proof IV.15)

In earlier times the heavenly anointed One had been known to the prophets: ‘Therefore the prophetic word . . . referring to the Highest Power of God, the King of Kings and Lord of Lords, calls him the Christ and the Anointed” (Proof IV.15). He has been manifested particularly in the high priests: ‘ . . . among the Hebrews they were called Christs who long ago symbolically presented a copy of the fist (Christ)’ (Proof IV.10). This is exactly what Philo describes, when he says the Logos was the high priest, the second God present with his people, passing through the veil of the temple to pass into heaven. The ancient Christs had also been anointed with the Holy Spirit. David, said Eusebius, had spoken of this anointed high priest when he wrote Ps. 110.1, ‘The Lord says to my Lord’: ‘David . . . knows an eternal priest of God and calls him his own Lord and confesses that he shares the throne of God Most High’ (Proof IV.15). The second God had been named throughout the Old Testament ‘already hymned as God and Lord in the sacred oracles’ (Proof IV.10). Eusebius knew and used all the examples which earlier writers had employed; there was Another present at the Creation, there were two Lords in the story of Sodom, the angel who met Jacob was the Lord and the angel who led Moses was the Lord.

When Origen had spoken of the Son as High Priest he too had been careful to name the one worshipped as God Most High: ‘To the Son we present [our petitions] and beseech him, as the propitiation for our sins, and our High Priest, to offer our desires, and sacrifices, and prayers, to the Most High’ (Against Celsus VIII.13; cf. VIII.26).

Eusebius also dealt with the problem of the vision of God (Proof V.18). if the Gospel could say ‘No man has seen God at any time’ (John 1.18), was the Gospel incorrect? No, because the appearance in the Old Testament had not been of God, meaning God Most High, but of the Lord:

But if they be understood, like our former quotations, of the Word of God, Who was seen by the fathers ‘In many ways and in sundry manners’, no contradiction is involved. The God of Israel here seen is shown to be the same Being who wrestled with Jacob . . . I have shown in the proper place that this was no other than the Word of God (Proof V.18).

The Almighty God Himself, Who is One, was not seen in his own person . . . so that the Father was seen by the fathers through the Son according to his saying in the Gospels ‘He that hath seen me hath seen the Father’. (Proof V.13). (Margaret Barker, The Great Angel: A Study of Israel’s Second God [Louisville, Ky.: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1992], 197-200)