Are you sure you are running Laravel 5.0? Because 5.1 requires PHP >= 5.5.9. That error message sounds like it could be because of PHP 5.5's class name resolution.

Example: ObjectClassName::class

http://php.net/manual/en/language.oop5.basic.php#language.oop5.basic.class.class

Oddly enough, I think this is a good thing. It would be best to upgrade the PHP version to 5.5, especially since PHP stopped security support 21 days ago.

http://php.net/supported-versions.php

If you can't though, then you would be to downgrade to 5.0. I don't know of any easy way to do this. You can follow the "upgrade" guide and work backwards from there, but it would probably be easier just creating a fresh copy of Laravel and migrating the changes. I think this command installs a fresh Laravel 5.0:

composer create-project laravel/laravel {directory} "~5.0.0" --prefer-dist