The Testimony of Bardaisan

Another early witness to the Abgar tradition is the Book of the Laws of Countries written by the Gnostic Bardaisan (154-222) in Syriac sometime at the beginning of the third century. Bardaisan was born in 154 at Edessa from supposedly pagan parents, and was brought up by a pagan priest. Sometime in 179 A.D., at the age of 25, he became a Christian while one day passing by the church founded by Addai, where he heard the Scriptures read and interpreted; he was soon baptized by the bishop of Edessa Hystasp, and ordained deacon by him.



Bardaisan refers to the Abgar tradition which would certainly have been common knowledge at Edessa. With reference to the abandonment of the rite of castration in the worship of the Mother Goddess cult at Hierapolis (Mabbug), Bardaisan states: “…when Abgar the king believed [in Christ] he decreed that anyone who castrated himself should have his hand cut off. And from that day on to this time, no man castrates himself in the country of Edessa.” This is certainly the same Abgar who is credited with being involved in the evangelization of Edessa. It seems that Bardaisan was educated with the monarch Abgar VIII (176-213), and was favored at the royal court; it is from his acquaintance with Abgar that Bardaisan makes the assertion concerning the evangelization of Edessa.

Bardaisan also mentions the presence of Christians in Parthia, Gilan (southwest of the Caspian Sea), Bactria (between the ranges of Hindu Kush and the Oxus), Persia, Edessa and Media, and by the year 200 A.D. knew of the presence of Christians over the known parts of Asia.

The Evangelization of Adiabene

The other major territory of missionary activity which directly concerns the history of the Church of the East is the evangelization of Adiabene in northeastern Mesopotamia, some four hundred miles east of Edessa. In the ancient world, Adiabene was historically known as ‘Assyria.’ The well-known Roman topographer Strabo, writing his famous Geographica in 20 A.D., mentions Assyria and Parthian Persia east of Asia “whose eastern provinces touched the borders of India.”

He refers to the strip of land exactly between the rivers Tigris and Euphrates as ‘Assyria,’ and all that is west of that he terms ‘Syria.’

In 247 B.C. the third Persian dynasty known as the ‘Parthians’ came onto the scene by re-conquering Persia from the Greeks and made Persia Asian again by capturing the Seleucid emperor at Babylon in 140 B.C. The Parthians had captured Edessa from the Romans, and later made Seleucia-Ctesiphon (on the Tigris, north of old Babylon) their capital. They also had the policy of making petty ‘client-kingdoms,’ among them being Edessa, Adiabene and Armenia. Adiabene was farther east of Edessa (on the upper waters of the Tigris near the old capital of Nineveh) and “its capital, Arbela (modern-day Erbil), was to become the center for Christian missionary advance into central Asia.”

There was a Jewish community at Adiabene, considered stronger than that of Edessa, which saw in the first century A.D. the conversion to Judaism of Helena, the queen of Adiabene, along with her two sons. There also existed a strong Jewish community in Nisibis as well, probably the strongest in the region. Furthermore, the cities of Edessa, Nisibis and Adiabene were connected by the silk-road, and the Jewish, Christian and pagan constituencies of these cities lived side-by-side, and the strong Jewish presence allowed for the swift progress of Christianity in these merchant centers.

According to S.H. Moffett, “…like Edessa, Arbela was one of the earliest Christian centers in oriental Asia. One theory…holds that the faith came first to Adiabene and from there was carried back west to Edessa,”

rather invalidating the generally-held theory that the first Christian missionaries came to Edessa from Jerusalem itself. Scholars, however, generally agree that the new Christian faith was preached and gained more followers in the villages of the Adiabene region rather than in the metropolis itself.

The famous Jewish historian Flavius Josephus in his Jewish Antiquities (XX, 20) relates the story of the conversion of the royal family of Adiabene to Judaism. Josephus narrates that the king of Adiabene married his sister Helena, and sent his son Ezad to remain with Abednergal the king of Karkha d’Meshan near the Persian Gulf.

Ezad later succeeded his father to the throne of Adiabene in 36 A.D., thus becoming a contemporary of Abgar Ukkama, in the meantime having married the daughter of his host. The interesting part of the story, however, is that while Ezad was still at Meshan, a certain Jewish merchant named Ananias had converted some women in the royal court to Judaism. Later, Helena the queen mother had already converted to Judaism independently from the influence of her son and Ananias. Ezad later was granted the governance of Nisibis by the Parthian emperor Walagash I, who later opposed him. Both Ezad and his mother Helena were buried at Jerusalem, where their tombs are to be found to this very day. This story later gets interwoven with the Abgar tradition of Edessa, and the conversion of Helena of Adiabene is later confused with the much later story of the finding of the Cross by Helena the mother of Constantine.

In the Arabic legend about Jesus (Rosat al-Safa), the Abgar story is retold with different characters. The King of Nisibis Nersai (rather than the ‘Ezad’ of Josephus) invites Jesus to visit him, who is in then accompanied by Thomas, Simon and James. In fact, the name of the king of Adiabene at the time of Abgar Ukkama was in fact one Narseh who is known as the king of the ‘Assyrians’ (Adiabene). According to the legend, Thomas was followed at Edessa by Addai, accompanied by his disciples Aggai and Mari, who arrived three years after the Ascension of Christ and who are said to have gone as far as the ‘great lakes of the east’ converting the nations to Christianity. Once returned to Edessa, they found the Christian king Abgar dead and succeeded by his son Ma‘nu, who seems to have been a heathen. He is supposed to have killed Addai on July 3 (ironically the feast of St. Thomas), and was buried in the church which Addai himself had built.

Addai is also believed to have been the apostle of the region of Adiabene, modern-day Arbel. With the presence of a great Jewish diaspora, and the fact that Syriac was also the tongue of Adiabene, the connection with missionaries from Edessa is almost indubitable. Whether by Addai himself or a disciple, the tradition points to Edessa as its source of evangelization. The infamous document known as the Chronicle of Adiabene, attributed to Mshikha-zkha and perhaps written sometime between 550-569, traces the line of apostolic succession of the first 20 bishops of Adiabene from 104 to 511 A.D.



The first bishop was Pqida, who in turn is connected to the earlier evangelistic efforts of Addai at Edessa, and according to the Chronicle it was Addai himself who ordained Pqida as bishop.

Pqida is reported as having been converted to Christianity from Zoroastrianism by witnessing a miracle brought about by the apostle Addai from Edessa having raised a dead girl to life. Thus, the Chronicle makes no mention of the other disciple of Addai – namely Aggai and Mari – and directly links Pqida to Addai the apostle of Edessa.

Though the existence of an episcopacy in Adiabene in the first Christian century may be debatable, we may conclude that there is no reason to seriously doubt the conversion of Adiabene – already a commercial center enjoying a strong Jewish and pagan presence – or that one of its earliest converts to Christianity was a certain ‘Pqida.’ Among the other bishops mentioned in the Chronicle is a certain Semsoun who is supposed to have been martyred in 117 or 123, after Trajan had defeated the Persian monarch Khosraw sometime in 116. However, the Parthians were generally tolerant of the other religious constituencies in the realm, and it is only later under the Sassanids that persecution of the Christians is well documented.

However, other Syriac documents seem to differ on who the apostle of Adiabene was. The Syriac Doctrina Apostolorum (‘Doctrine of the Apostles’) gives the credit to Aggai, the disciple and successor of Addai, as being the one who brought the Gospel to Adiabene.

The much later history of St. Mari one of the disciples of Addai, also known as the Acts of Mari, records him as the missionary of Adiabene, as well as that of the twin royal city of Seleucia-Ctesiphon in the late first Christian century.



Aggai succeeded his master Addai, and is said to have preached “over the entire country of Persia, also in Assyria, Media, Babylonia and many other places, and he traveled to the boundaries of India.”

He too was martyred under Ma‘nu after refusing to weave royal garments for the pagan monarch. The Doctrine of Addai states that “Aggai died in consequence of the misdeed of the prince, and too sudden to ordain Palut by imposition of hands.” The tradition then goes on to state that Palut fled to nearby Antioch where he was ordained by Serapion, the bishop of the city, and the acts of the martyrdom of Sharbil and Barsamya attest to the episcopal career of Palut. Although the accounts of these Edessene martyrs are spurious, it is known that the great persecution ordered by the Roman Emperor Diocletian in 303 took its toll in the ‘blessed city’ of Edessa. However, it was the villagers rather than the city dwellers that felt the sharpest sting of the persecution. The Doctrine states that Aggai, Palut, Barshlama and Barsamya:

ministered with [Addai] in the church which he had built…A large multitude of people assembled day by day and came to the prayers of the service and to [the reading of] the Old Testament and the New [Testament] of the Diatessaron. They also believed in the resurrection of the dead…They kept also the festivals of the Church at their proper season…Moreover, in the places round about the city, churches were built and many received from [Addai] the hand of priesthood. So the people of the East also, in the guise of merchants, passed over into the territory of the Romans in order to see the signs which Addai did. And those who became disciples received from him the hand of priesthood, and in their own country of the Assyrians they found disciples, and made houses of prayer there in secret from fear of those who worshipped fire and adored water.

The mention of the Christians of ‘the country of the Assyrian,’ which certainly refers to Adiabene, having to practice their religion in secret seems to indicate a date after 226 A.D. when the Parthian dynasty fell to the intolerant Sassanids.



The Doctrine also heavily supports the theory that Edessa – and consequently its dependents in nearby Adiabene and Nisibis – was ecclesiastically dependent on the primatial see of Antioch. According to the Doctrine:

…because he [Aggai] died suddenly and quickly at the breaking of his legs, he was not able to lay his hands upon Palut. And Palut himself went to Antioch, and received the hand of priesthood from Serapion, bishop of Antioch, the same Serapion who also received the hand from Zephyrinus, bishop of the city of Rome, [who was himself] of the succession of [those who had received] the hand of priesthood of Simon Peter, who had received it from our Lord…

One of the more famous Christians of Adiabene and “…first verifiable historical evidence of Christianity as far east in Persia as Adiabene” was the philosopher and Biblicist Tatian (120-175) who refers to himself as being from ‘Assyria,’ hence the Latinized form of his name Tatian Assyrus. According to S.H. Moffett, “This remarkable biblical scholar, linguist and ascetic was born of pagan parents in the ancient Assyrian territory of northern Mesopotamia (modern-day Iraq),” that is in Adiabene, and was a convert to Christianity, later becoming a disciple of Justin Martyr.

Early on he learned Greek, wrote his apology Against the Greeks sometime in 172 before settling in Edessa, or according to others he went back to his native Adiabene, “or somewhere near it east of the Tigris ‘in the midst of the Rivers.’”

He is the famous compiler of the Diatessaron, or ‘harmonized’ Gospel – which he probably composed in Syriac and was used by all of the Syriac-speaking Churches in the East up to the time of its suppression by Rabbula the West Syrian bishop of Edessa sometime after 411 A.D.