chasm. The Eastern Syrian Christians were early suspected of heresy imbibed from Tatian and Barsedanes. But the slight irregularities which might have been detected then were soon overcome. It is later that we see the great schisms produced first by Nestorian and then by the Monophysite heresies resulting in the establishment of the Nestorian and Jacobite Churches, both of them anathematised by the orthodox Church.
In the first place, then, we must understand that Syrian Christianity—in the early stages of its development—is the Christianity of the people speaking Syriac and living so far to the east that we scarcely think of their home as Syria at all Meanwhile the Greek-speaking Syrians in the west, with their headquarters at Antioch, are a different body of Christians, and form an integral portion of the Greek Church till they too are cut off, first by heresy, and then by Islam. The headquarters of Syrian Christianity, and at first apparently its only centre, was the city of Edessa, known in the vernacular as Urhai, and now represented by Urfa, the capital of the district which the Greeks named Osrhoene, situated to the east of the Euphrates. While it is uncertain at what time and by what means the city was evangelised, there can be no doubt that this was not later than the second half of the second century of the Christian era; possibly the new light began to dawn in this far-off Eastern capital even before the middle of that century. The legend of Addai and King Abgar, which would carry it back to the times of Christ's life on earth, is manifestly unhistorical. Eusebius repeats it without any question as to its genuineness;[1] and it is contained in a Syriac form in the Doctrine of Addai, an apocryphal book of "acts" written at the end of the third century or the beginning of the fourth. Apart from the absence of earlier testimony and the inherent improbability of the story, it is condemned by obvious anachronisms.[2]
- ↑ Hist Eccl. i. 13.
- ↑ Thus it refers to Eleutheropolis in Palestine, a name that was first
