Page:The Greek and Eastern churches.djvu/489

This page has been proofread, but needs to be validated.

EARLY SYRIAN CHRISTIANITY

463

hast written to me, that I should come unto thee,—that for which I was sent hither hath now come to an end, and I go up unto my Father that sent me; but when I have gone up unto Him, I will send thee one of my disciples, that whatever disease thou hast he may heal and cure. And all that are with thee he shall turn to life eternal, and thy town shall be blessed and no enemy shall have dominion over it for ever and ever."^[1] The reader must be struck with the antique tone of this document. In particular, the antithetical sentence, "They which see me will not believe in me, and they which see me not,—they will believe in me," is exactly in the style of the Oxyrhynchus Logia.^[2]

Still following the legend, we see Addai, one of the "Seventy," despatched by Thomas to Edessa after the resurrection of Christ, with the result that the king is immediately healed; whereupon he and a great number of his people are converted to Christianity. Addai is said to have laboured at Edessa to the end of his life, and to have died a natural death. He is succeeded by Aggai, who suffers martyrdom under Ma'nu, a heathen son of Abgar, his legs being broken while he is sitting at church. Aggai having no time to ordain his successor Palut, the latter goes to Antioch and there receives ordination from Serapion. Here we come out of the mist of legend into the light of history. But Serapion did not become bishop of Antioch till a.d. 190. Evidently then Palut cannot be

↑ Burkitt, pp. 13, 14.
↑ A seeming proof of great antiquity may be found in the last sentence, which promises Abgar that no enemy shall have dominion over his town for ever and ever. This sentence, which is contained in the Ephesian inscription as well as in the Doctrine of Addai, is discreetly omitted by Eusebius, who thus shows that he is aware of the sack of Edessa by Lucius Quietus, under Trajan. And yet, to place it at a more ancient date than that is to set back the origin of Christianity too early for all the other evidence. Therefore we seem driven to reverse the argument, and to see in this statement a reason for dating the letter considerably later, when the disaster was not in mind. At all events, one thing is certain: it could not have been written in the earlier decades of the first century when that horror was in the memories of the Syrian Christians.

[1] Burkitt, pp. 13, 14.

[2] A seeming proof of great antiquity may be found in the last sentence, which promises Abgar that no enemy shall have dominion over his town for ever and ever. This sentence, which is contained in the Ephesian inscription as well as in the Doctrine of Addai, is discreetly omitted by Eusebius, who thus shows that he is aware of the sack of Edessa by Lucius Quietus, under Trajan. And yet, to place it at a more ancient date than that is to set back the origin of Christianity too early for all the other evidence. Therefore we seem driven to reverse the argument, and to see in this statement a reason for dating the letter considerably later, when the disaster was not in mind. At all events, one thing is certain: it could not have been written in the earlier decades of the first century when that horror was in the memories of the Syrian Christians.

[1]

[2]