other · 175 · Rome
Jerome describes it as a history of all ecclesiastical events from the passion of our Lord down to his own period, composed in five volumes in a simple style. Eusebius quotes from it repeatedly and nobody else preserved a line. What survives through him is a strange, valuable list of particulars: the martyrdom of James the Just, thrown from the temple parapet and clubbed; the choosing of Simeon son of Clopas to succeed him; the grandsons of Jude brought before Domitian, who looked at their farmer's hands and let them go; and the account of the heresies as they arose. Five rows already in this dataset rest on him and none of them linked back to a page that had no events at all. He is the witness to those scenes and not a party to them: he was born around 110 and every one of them happened before he was.
To write down, in five books, what had actually happened in the churches from the passion onward — and what had gone wrong.
Lost, except where Eusebius quotes it; and what Eusebius chose to quote is most of what anyone knows about the first century after the apostles.