Why the First Two Books Were Revised

Rufinus, who wrote a Church History in Latin, went wrong in his chronology. He supposes that what was done against Athanasius happened after the death of the emperor Constantine, and he did not know of Athanasius’s exile to Gaul or of various other circumstances. We ourselves first wrote the first two books of our history following Rufinus. But in writing our history from the third book to the seventh, we gathered some facts from Rufinus, others from different authors, and some from the accounts of people still living. Afterward, however, we read through the writings of Athanasius, in which he describes his own sufferings and how he was banished through the slanders of Eusebius’s party. We judged that more credit was due to the man who had suffered, and to those who were witnesses of the things they describe, than to those who had depended on guesswork and had therefore gone wrong. Besides this, we obtained several letters of people who were eminent in that period, and we have used their help too in tracing out the truth as far as possible. [a]

For this reason we were compelled to revise the first and second books of this history, though we still use the testimony of Rufinus where it is clear that he could not have been mistaken. It should also be noted that in our former edition we did not include the sentence of deposition passed on Arius or the emperor’s letters. We simply told the facts in order, so that the history would not grow bulky and weary readers with tedious details. But in the present edition we have made these changes and additions for your sake, Theodore, holy man of God, so that you would not be left ignorant of what the emperors wrote in their own words, or of the decisions of the bishops in their various synods, in which they kept altering the confession of faith. So we have inserted in this later edition whatever we judged necessary. Having followed this course in the first book, we will try to do the same in the next part of our history, I mean the second. Let us now begin it.