Introduction
If you can bear to hear the truth you've spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools
Rudyard Kipling, “If–”Footnote 1
Perhaps the most extraordinary story about Jesus to survive from antiquity is one of the least often told. It runs as follows: Towards the end of his life, Jesus's reputation has spread out from Palestine and reached the terminally ill Abgar V (also known as Abgar the Black), toparch of Edessa, the capital city of the kingdom of Osroëne. Abgar writes to Jesus requesting that he visit Edessa and heal him. In return he offers sanctuary from the Jews and shared rule of his city. The story preserves the text of both this letter and Jesus's reply, in which he declines to visit (citing his upcoming engagements in Jerusalem), but promises to send a disciple in his stead. After Jesus's death, the apostle Thomas, moved by divine impulse, sends Thaddaeus, one of the seventy (Luke 10:1–24), to Edessa.Footnote 2 Escorted to Abgar's court, Thaddaeus cures him along with one Abdu son of Abdu. The newly converted Abgar gathers his citizens to hear Thaddaeus preach, and the story ends with the Christianization of Abgar's kingdom.
This unlikely tale has occasioned much scholarly comment, the majority concerning its authenticity. Unsurprisingly, there is almost unanimous consensus in rejecting the historicity of the story as it stands.Footnote 3 There are two positions, though, on whether any kernel of truth can be salvaged. The consensus position, argued most famously by Walter Bauer and more recently by Helmut Koester, holds that the text is entirely a third- or fourth-century fabrication.Footnote 4 A less popular position, held initially by Francis Burkitt and more recently by Judah Segal, tries to salvage a core of historical accuracy by arguing that though the story is composed later, there was a historical conversion of a different Abgar, Abgar VIII (Abgar the Great),Footnote 5 at the end of the second century.Footnote 6 Of these, the first position is by far the more plausible.Footnote 7
Equally interesting, but less frequently addressed, is the question of how and why the story is told. It survives in early forms in the fourth/fifth-century Syriac Teaching of Addai (extant in a manuscript likely dating from 500 CE),Footnote 8 and the late fourth-century diary of Egeria (The Pilgrimage of Egeria 17.1).Footnote 9 But the earliest extant version is found at the end of Book 1 of Eusebius of Caesarea's ten-book Ecclesiastical History, the fourth-century narrative in which the self-proclaimed first Christian historian records the first three hundred years of Christianity. Eusebius claims that the story comes from an Edessan archive (EH 1.13.5).Footnote 10 But the presence of such an obviously apocryphal tale in our main narrative source for early Christianity, in which there is significant historical and religious investment, has been something of an embarrassment, and it has thus merited little attention in studies of Eusebius or his Ecclesiastical History.
In fact, there have been only two substantial discussions of the Abgar correspondence in Eusebius. Walter Bauer begins his seminal Orthodoxy and Heresy in Earliest Christianity, which sets out his thesis that Eusebius's Ecclesiastical History systematically misrepresented early Christianity's “heretical” origins, with a discussion of Edessan Christianity. He hypothesizes that the Abgar correspondence was a forgery by the fourth-century bishop Kune, designed to establish apostolic origins for the orthodox tradition in Edessa and to obscure Edessan Christianity's “heretical” origins. Kune, Bauer suggested, slipped the story to Eusebius, claiming to have found it in the archives of Edessa.Footnote 11 Eusebius is imagined as a passive dupe, ignorant of the Syriac world and easily convinced of the tale's authenticity. The story's inclusion in the Ecclesiastical History is thus ascribed to Kune's cunning and Eusebius's simplicity. Bauer's overall thesis met a mixed response,Footnote 12 but his thoughts on the Abgar correspondence fared rather better. For example, Sebastian Brock's article “Eusebius and Syriac Christianity” in the 1992 state-of-the-question collection of Harold Attridge and Gohei Hata followed Bauer's dismissal of Eusebius as the unwitting purveyor of a false tradition.Footnote 13
The second major treatment was that of Alexander Mirkovic, who treated Eusebius as part of a wider study of the Abgar legend. Mirkovic argued that Eusebius included the correspondence on apologetic and political grounds in response to the publication by the emperor Maximin Daia of the forged Memoranda of Pilate towards the end of the Great Persecution (EH 9.5.1).Footnote 14 Eusebius intended the Abgar legend to defend the respectability of the Christian religion and its founder. He could hold up its picture of a pious god-fearing royal convert as a contrast to the persecutors of the fourth century. Mirkovic suggested further that the tale served Eusebius's “theory of religions,” since Abgar's conversion coincides with the decline of the Jewish state and marks Messianic times.Footnote 15 Here the Abgar correspondence is conceived as Eusebius's deliberately chosen weapon in an anti-pagan rhetoric.Footnote 16
Bauer's and Mirkovic's treatments bookend modern scholarship on Eusebius, and, while both are pioneering studies, they also neatly represent its two main shortfalls. Even setting aside the weak evidence for his forgery theory, Bauer allowed Eusebius no agency, damning him with faint praise as “the learned and guileless bishop of Caesarea.”Footnote 17 This view of Eusebius as a simple historian abounds in studies of the Ecclesiastical History. Such a view was likely originally motivated by the theological need to rescue an important historical text from undue influence by an author of questionable orthodoxy. It was lent extra impetus in the twentieth century by Timothy Barnes's demonstration that Eusebius wrote independent of Constantinian influence, allowing the rehabilitation of Eusebius as historian rather than imperial apologist.Footnote 18 But such neglect of Eusebian agency cannot continue given recent work revealing Eusebius's own skills and motivations. A desire to rehabilitate Eusebius's neglected works, primarily the Preparation for the Gospel and Demonstration for the Gospel, has revealed Eusebius's considerable skills as writer and editor.Footnote 19 His sophisticated writing, judicious editing, careful framing, and subtle structuring mean he can no longer be dismissed as a mere compiler. Eusebius was a writer, and his writings—composition and quotation alike—must be read with an eye to his literary project. But these new insights have yet to be applied extensively to the Ecclesiastical History.Footnote 20
Mirkovic avoided this stumbling block, and I think was correct to see here a desire to rehabilitate Jesus's reputation in the eyes of fourth-century elites. But his discussion was hampered by misunderstandings concerning the circumstances of the Ecclesiastical History’s production. Mirkovic assumed both that the Ecclesiastical History was born of the “Great Persecution” and that it was intended for a pagan audience.Footnote 21 Both assumptions were flawed.Footnote 22 First, the text's dating has been much debated, but current consensus argues that it was produced in a series of four editions between 313 and 326 CE, and largely written between 311 and 315/6 CE. Eusebius mainly wrote after the western emperor Constantine's conversion to Christianity, but under the rule of his eastern colleague Licinius, whose attitude towards Christianity was rather more ambiguous.Footnote 23 He also wrote after the cessation of the Great Persecution (313, but 311 CE in Palestine). Most importantly, the significance of that event should not obscure the fact that the majority of Eusebius's life had been spent in the so-called “little peace of the church,” a long period in which Christians had flourished in the Roman Empire. That, and not the “Great Persecution,” had molded Eusebius's attitude towards Rome.Footnote 24
Second, Eusebius wrote not for a pagan audience but for a Christian one. This is clear from the Ecclesiastical History’s repeated assumption of its readership's familiarity with and approval of Christian texts and concepts.Footnote 25 Moreover, these Christians were provincial elites. Eusebius himself was a member of that stratum of society—a senior cleric in Caesarea, one of Palestine's oldest and most Romanized cities.Footnote 26 The Ecclesiastical History’s high cost, syntactically complex Greek, and wealth of intertextual references to previous historical, literary, and theological writings indicate that it was designed for that same highly educated stratum of society.Footnote 27 These Christians then were both Roman citizens and residents of the culturally and intellectually Greek east. Eusebius did not write for readers with only a “Christian” identity; their values were also simultaneously Roman and their cultural standards Greek. Such was the audience to which Eusebius tailored his vision of the church.
The Ecclesiastical History is therefore not an apologetic text designed for pagan detractors. It is for Christian insiders who shared the cultural standards and values of those detractors. The difference might seem slight, but it is significant. Eusebius was not on the back foot defending Christianity but taking a step forward, proposing a new picture of the church's past amenable to its new elite demographic. By shaping that audience's understanding of their own legacy he was attempting to mold the future of the church. Just as important, the means by which he sought to do so were those designed to best influence a Christian audience.
In this light I propose to take up afresh the Abgar correspondence. The inclusion of it in Eusebius's writing was not an arbitrary decision. He has little interest elsewhere in Syriac Christianity but here includes this lengthy anecdote in a prominent position.Footnote 28 In fact the story does not naturally fit there. The rest of Book 1 treats pre-history; the church's spread under the earliest disciples begins in Book 2: “let us now look at events after his [Jesus's] ascension” (EH 2.pr.2).Footnote 29 The Abgar correspondence fits more naturally in Book 2 and in fact is awkwardly recapped there (EH 2.1.6–7). This prompted Timothy Barnes's plausible suggestion that the Abgar correspondence was perhaps not in the Ecclesiastical History’s first edition.Footnote 30 But this only pushes the question back a stage. We must still ask what motivated its inclusion. Eusebius himself encourages us to do so in the words that close both the anecdote and Book 1: “let these things be put here by me, in their proper place [ϰατὰ ϰαιρὸν], translated literally from the Syriac tongue, and not without good reason” (ϰαὶ οὐκ εἰς ἄχρηστον) (EH 1.13.22). The Abgar correspondence is prominent by design.Footnote 31
I suggest that Eusebius positions the “Abgar correspondence” at the end of Book 1 as a programmatic introduction to the Ecclesiastical History’s subsequent nine books. Book 2 begins: “As many matters as were necessary to get out of the way by way of introduction to this Ecclesiastical History . . . we have treated in the Book before this one, briefly presenting examples” (EH 2.pr.1). If Eusebius has deliberately included the Abgar narrative here then, it is because he considers it introductory material. More specifically, it is a programmatic introduction to his attempt to remold Christian history for its new fourth-century context. And the earlier into Christianity's past he could push that remolding process, the more effective the picture would be for a conservative audience in the Greco-Roman world.
The Abgar correspondence presented Eusebius with an opportunity to rebrand Christianity's figurehead, Jesus himself.Footnote 32 I argue below that this was a tripartite process. First, Eusebius emphasized the story's epistolary aspects to make Jesus literate, a letter-writer, and a correspondent of kings. Second, Eusebius highlighted this literate and pastoral Jesus over and against the Passion-focused proto-martyr set up as a figure of imitation in so many second- and third-century Christian texts. Third, the Edessan setting allowed Eusebius to introduce his stylized picture of the interaction between Christianity and Rome. Rome is absolved of responsibility for Jesus's death and even given credit as his avenger. And Christians are established as being (and as always having been) those in the Roman Empire best capable of upholding its interests and values. Beyond this, I suggest too that this programmatic anecdote can serve as a lens for how we should approach the rest of the Ecclesiastical History. As the touchstone for Christian mimetic hierarchies, this new-look Jesus is our window into Eusebius's more thoroughgoing re-imagination of Christian models of authority in his Ecclesiastical History. In the Abgar correspondence, Eusebius gave his fourth-century audience a man for their times, and us a key to his historical project.
The Epistolary Jesus
If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue
Or walk with Kings—nor lose the common touchFootnote 33
In his treatment of the Abgar correspondence Eusebius focuses on the verbatim quotation of the letters exchanged between Jesus and Abgar. We read, “There is nothing like also hearing the letters themselves [οὐδὲν δὲ οἷον ϰαὶ αὐτῶν ἐπακοῦσαι τῶν ἐπιστολῶν], taken up from the archives by me and translated in their own words from the Syriac tongue thus” (EH 1.13.5). I suggest that this image of a Jesus capable not only of written correspondence but written correspondence with a king is of central importance to Eusebius, and enabled him to respond to elite concerns over the status of early Christians.
Comparison of Eusebius's account with the story's independent transmission in the Teaching of Addai demonstrates the importance of Jesus's act of writing to Eusebius.Footnote 34 In the Teaching of Addai, though the content is almost identical,Footnote 35 the form of the messages is different.Footnote 36 Abgar still writes, but Jesus replies orally: “When Jesus received the letter at the house of the chief priest of the Jews, he said to Hannan, the keeper of the archives: ‘Go and say to your lord, who has sent you to me’” (Teaching of Addai f.3b; see too f.20b).Footnote 37 The orality of the reply is clear again a few lines later when we read, “Hannan, the keeper of the archives, saw that Jesus spoke in this way to him.”Footnote 38 This oral reply is written down by Hannan, an archivist, and delivered to the king. The version of the story Eusebius quotes in Greek quotation in the Ecclesiastical History is ambiguous: the use of forms of ἐπιστέλλω in “an apostle of Jesus has come here, as he sent [ἐπέστειλέν] to you” (EH 1.13.11) and “it occurred to him thus, that it was the one about whom Jesus had sent [ἐπέστειλεν] to him” (EH 1.13.11–12) could refer to either oral or written missives.Footnote 39
Eusebius's own framing passages in the Ecclesiastical History, on the other hand, are anything but ambiguous. Eusebius notes that when Abgar wrote to him Jesus “did not accept the summons, but did judge him worthy of a personal letter” (ἐπιστολῆς γοῦν αὐτὸν ἰδίας ϰαταξιοῖ) (EH 1.13.3). Footnote 40 He then introduces Jesus's reply as “THE WRITTEN RESPONSE OF JESUS [ΤΑ ΑΝΤΙΓΡΑΦΕΝΤΑ ΥΠΟ ΙΗΣΟΥ] THROUGH ANANIAS THE COURIER TO ABGAR THE TOPARCH” (EH 1.13.9). Eusebius's sentence transitioning between his quotations of the letter and of the account of Thaddaeus's adventures in Edessa similarly emphasizes mutual epistolarity: “To these letters [Ταύταις δὲ ταῖς ἐπιστολαῖς] are joined still further these things” (EH 1.13.11). Eusebius insists upon Jesus as letter-writer and makes a written letter the vehicle of his authority.Footnote 41
This radical picture of Jesus intervenes in a debate over Jesus's literacy and status that went back to Christianity's earliest days. The New Testament witnesses two schools of thought—one affirming Jesus's scribal literacy and one denying it. Mark's characterization of Jesus as a “carpenter” (ὁ τέϰτων) (Mark 6:3),Footnote 42 for example, became in Matthew “son of a carpenter” (ὁ τοῦ τέϰτονος υἱός) (Matt 13:55), a change that likely reflects the latter's discomfort with low status implied by the profession.Footnote 43 That other Christians shared Matthew's mixed feelings is indicated by the assimilation of Mark's reading to Matthew's in a number of manuscripts (most notably P45) and the removal of τέϰτων completely in a sixth-century Palestinian Syriac tradition as well as by Luke (Luke 4:22).Footnote 44 Luke elsewhere makes Jesus's literacy clear, equating him with the scribal-literate class (Luke 2:41–50) and even describing him using a scroll (Luke 4:16–30).Footnote 45 Concerns over Jesus's literacy and its implications for his status continue in later texts. John's story of Jesus writing in the dust while preventing the stoning of the adulteress has been identified as a third-century interpolation intended to provide definitive evidence of precisely the literacy the story leaves unclear.Footnote 46 The late second-century apocryphal Infancy Gospel of Thomas bypasses the question by presenting a Jesus capable of learned teaching despite a lack of education (e.g., 15.3–4).Footnote 47 This debate centered on whether Christians could claim a literate authority for their founder.
The discussion was not merely academic. Jesus's perceived low status and lack of education made Christians an easy target for their critics.Footnote 48 This was most obvious in the second-century author Celsus's critique of Christianity.Footnote 49 Celsus famously crowed that Christians evangelize “no one educated, no one wise, no one sensible” (µηδεὶς . . . πεπαιδευμένος, μηδεὶς σοφός, μηδεὶς φρόνιμος) (Against Celsus 3.44),Footnote 50 but “anyone ignorant, or senseless, or uninstructed, or childish” (εἴ τις ἀμαθής, εἴ τις ἀνόητος, εἴ τις ἀπαίδευτος, εἴ τις νήπιος) and “only the foolish and the low-born and the mindless and the low and women and children” (μόνους τοὺς ἠλιθίους ϰαὶ ἀγεννεῖς ϰαὶ ἀναισθήτους ϰαὶ ἀνδράποδα ϰαὶ γύναια ϰαὶ παιδάρια). He characterized Christians as “the most uneducated and the most rustic” (τοὺς ἀπαιδευτοτάτους τε καὶ ἀγροικοτάτους) (Against Celsus 3.55, see too 1.62, 3.50 and similarly Minucius, Octavius 12, Galen, On the Difference Between Pulses 24, 3.3). These barbs found their force in large part because of Christianity's founder. Celsus mocked Jesus as coming “from a Jewish village and a rustic, poor, spinner woman” (ἀπὸ γυναικὸς ἐγχωρίου ϰαὶ πενιχρᾶς ϰαὶ χερνήτιδος) (Against Celsus 1.28, see also 1.27, 1.29, and 6.34) who “hired himself out in Egypt as a workman because of poverty” (διὰ πενίαν) (see also Against Celsus 1.38) before acquiring magical abilities and ending up emphatically “a carpenter by trade” (τέϰτων τὴν τέχνην) (Against Celsus 6.34). Similarly, Lucian's satiric Peregrinus could rise to prominence among the Christians precisely because of the naiveté of those following a crucified Palestinian (Passing of Peregrinus 11).Footnote 51 These barbs were fueled by ambiguity surrounding Jesus's education and status.
Elite Greco-Roman adherents to Christianity in the fourth century desperately needed a Jesus who reflected on them better than did this poor, bastard carpenter. I suggest that Eusebius uses the Abgar correspondence to provide precisely that.Footnote 52 Here Jesus is no illiterate carpenter; he is a writer, a member of that elite epistolary club whose methods of communication marked them as the Empire's movers and shakers.Footnote 53 Jesus's correspondent is equally noteworthy. While Celsus's caricature of Jesus has him slaving as hired help in Egypt and associating with society's dregs, Eusebius's Jesus is the authoritative correspondent of a king, a king who has sought him out in beseeching tones. Eusebius provides the definitive evidence that earlier Christian discussion had lacked.Footnote 54 By his inclusion and careful framing of the Abgar correspondence, Eusebius could respond effectively to common criticisms of Christianity as a religion of society's lowest strata that had drawn strength from suspicions about Jesus's own humble origins.
The Martyred Jesus
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are goneFootnote 55
Eusebius's picture of this epistolary Jesus is as interesting for what it omits as for what it highlights. It is a remarkable but rarely observed fact that Eusebius pays surprisingly little attention to the crucifixion in the Ecclesiastical History. Jesus's death is mentioned only in passing in the summary of Abgar's healing (EH 1.13.2) and of Thaddaeus’ preaching (EH 1.13.19), as well as in an earlier quotation from Josephus (EH 1.11.8). Book 1’s treatment of the historical Jesus instead focuses on Jesus's ministry (EH 1.10.1–6) and the call of his disciples (EH 1.10.7, 1.12.1–5). But it ends not with Jesus on the cross but in correspondence with a king. The Abgar pericope is by far the longest Eusebius tells about Jesus and comes precisely where we would expect details of his death. I suggest that Eusebius is here correcting what he perceived to be earlier Christian overemphasis on Jesus's suffering and death.
From Christianity's earliest days, Jesus was a model of imitation for Christians. And from Mark's Passion-focused Gospel on, it was Jesus's suffering and death that caught the Christian imagination and led to the “early Christian preoccupation with mimetic suffering.”Footnote 56 The motif was perhaps expressed most strongly in the zealous letters of Ignatius, who declared that his discipleship had begun only when he began to suffer (Rom. 5).Footnote 57 But a similar sentiment was repeated in numerous subsequent Christian writers (e.g., Tertullian, On Flight from Persecution 7, Origen, Exhortation to Martyrdom 36). Such suffering-based imitatio Christi found its most prevalent form in early Christian martyr narratives of the second and third centuries. These tales of Christians’ trials, sufferings, and deaths regularly described their protagonists as imitating Christ.Footnote 58 Many martyrs achieved cult status—literally—at least in part because their authority was affirmed by their echoing the suffering and death of Christ himself.
This martyr literature was not designed simply to memorialize. Recent scholarship has argued that the authors of these texts were constructing identity models for their readers. The martyrs’ powerful liminality, one foot in the grave and thus with God, made them powerful models to guide Christian readers’ self-conceptions and behaviors. In particular, martyr texts often became a literature of resistance, born of Christianity's struggle as a minority religious group under the routine brutality of Roman hegemony.Footnote 59 So, for example, Perpetua, the eponymous heroine of an early third-century North African martyr narrative, is depicted as rejecting first her father and then the Roman governor, and became in consequence a beacon of resistance both towards the family and the wider state it represented. She and her fellow martyrs symbolized Christian rejection of the status quo on the micro and macro scales.Footnote 60 And, importantly, they did so by appeal to Jesus. In her autobiographical dreamed rejection of a symbolic serpent Perpetua appeals to the name of Christ (The Passion of Perpetua 4.6) just as when, in the editorial narrative that frames it, she defiantly meets the eyes of the crowd as she is led to the arena “as a wife of Christ” (ut matrona Christi) (The Passion of Perpetua 18.2).Footnote 61 Much martyr literature questioned and ultimately invalidated the legitimacy of the Roman enterprise, and its protagonists were the symbolic vehicles for that reactionary message.
This early Christian fascination with martyrs was a mixed blessing for Eusebius. On the one hand, he saw its potential for providing the kind of powerfully emotive content that would capture readers’ imaginations. Here springing from the page were readymade heroes perfect for bringing his new narrative history alive.Footnote 62 But the martyrs also posed twin problems. First, Eusebius wrote after the cessation of persecution in 311 CE and so had little use for their pedigree as symbols of resistance. As was noted above, he was committed to compatibility, not antagonism, between Christianity and Rome. Second, Christians’ perceived enthusiasm for suffering and death was a further element in Christianity's image problem among Greco-Roman elites. Of the eleven “pagan” authors who comment on Christianity between 110 and 210, for example, all but one mention their propensity for martyrdom.Footnote 63 Lucian's Passing of Peregrinus, perhaps the most famous example, condemned Christians because “they think little of death [ϰαταφρονοῦσιν τοῦ θανάτου] and the majority deliver themselves to it readily [ἑϰόντες]” (Passing of Peregrinus 13) and mocked the titular character for his voluntary end (see too e.g., Marcus Aurelius, Meditations 11.3, Epictetus, Discourses 4.7.6, Minucius, Octavius 8).Footnote 64 Celsus too speaks of the Christian tendency to “abandon it [the body] to punishments as if it were valueless” (ὡς ἄτιμον) (Against Celsus 8.49). As above, such criticisms drew their strength from Jesus's own death. Lucian referred scathingly to “that crucified sophist” (τὸν ἀνεσϰολοπισμένον ἐϰεῖνον σοφιστὴν); Celsus to how the Christians’ “teacher was nailed to a cross” (ὁ διδάσϰαλος αὐτῶν σταυρῷ ἐνηλώθη) (Against Celsus 6.34, see also 2.44). Eusebius wanted to reassure his fourth-century elite audience that suffering was not a prerequisite for discipleship.
To do so, Eusebius needed to reimagine Christianity's martyrs as symbols of values more useful to his context. His own descriptions of martyrs’ experiences in the Ecclesiastical History alter the oppositional dynamics of earlier martyr narratives.Footnote 65 But doing so effectively meant countering the prevailing tendency of imitatio Christi in early Christian martyr literature. As Candida Moss notes, “In order for the presentation of the martyr to be effective, the rereading of Jesus must necessarily remain in close contact to those traditions with which it assumes its audience to be familiar.”Footnote 66 In other words, to modify imitatio Christi Eusebius had to change his audience's picture of Christ. The Abgar correspondence allowed Eusebius to do precisely this. Including it at the end of Book 1 introduces a different picture of the historical Jesus and therefore a new point of reference for imitation of him. In the Abgar story, Jesus's epistolary habit, pastoral care and power of conversion are emphasized over the suffering, death, and implicit resistance that would have sat uncomfortably with Eusebius's elite fourth-century Greco-Roman audience. And they undermine those opponents who critiqued Christians’ mortal-obsession on the basis of their founder.
Jesus and the Edges of Empire
Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it.Footnote 67
Eusebius largely neglects the details of Jesus death. The same cannot be said of those responsible for it. Eusebius's treatment of the Abgar correspondence echoed earlier treatments of the crucifixion in which Jesus's killer(s) had taken center-stage (the Gospels’ attempt to blame the Jews and exculpate Rome for a clearly Roman execution, for example, has long been acknowledged). In his initial epistolary request, Abgar notes, “I have heard too that the Jews are murmuring against you and are plotting to harm you” (EH 1.13.8) and offers Jesus safe haven as payment for the desired healing.Footnote 68 And in the early books of the Ecclesiastical History Eusebius repeatedly refers to Jewish guilt for the crucifixion he otherwise says so little about (EH 1.1.2, 1.11.8, 2.5.6, 2.6.3, 3.5.3, 3.5.6, 3.7.1). Pontius Pilate is not even mentioned. This lays the groundwork for subsequent attempts to blame Jews for Christians’ deaths and shift attention away from Roman involvement.Footnote 69
But the Abgar correspondence allows Eusebius to go further than simply exculpating Rome. When Thaddaeus eventually visits Abgar, the latter claims, “I have believed in him [Jesus] to such an extent that I even wished to take a force and massacre the Jews who crucified him, had I not been held back from this by the dominion of the Romans” (διὰ τὴν βασιλείαν τὴν Ῥωμαίων) (EH 1.13.16). This implies not only that the Romans are innocent of Jesus's death but that they are also the agents of the Jews’ punishment. Eusebius's reader has been expecting such a backlash since the opening lines of the Ecclesiastical History, where the initial list of promised topics includes “the things immediately falling upon the whole Jewish nation after their plot against the Saviour” (EH 1.1.2). Abgar's comment glosses this by making clear that the punishment of the Jews is to be left to the Romans. And this punishment duly follows. When he later comments on the way in which Vespasian's siege ends the plots, seditions and wars in Jerusalem, Eusebius concludes emphatically that “such then were the things executed by the divine vengeance [τὰ ἐϰ τῆς θείας μετῄει δίϰης] against the Jews for the things they undertook against Christ” (EH 2.6.8).Footnote 70 In Eusebius's vision the Romans are not simply innocent of Christ's death; they avenge it.Footnote 71
In this, Eusebius implies that the Romans are acting as agents of God.Footnote 72 This, too, is a rhetorical move repeated later in the Ecclesiastical History. In Eusebius's description of the Great Persecution in Book 8, where he must work very hard to explain away Roman agency for Christian suffering, Eusebius implies that the Christians are being divinely punished for their internal failings (EH 8.1.7–9, see too 7.30.21, 9.8.15, 10.4.14, 10.4.33–34, 10.4.59) and thus that the Romans serve as the agents of divine vengeance.Footnote 73 William Tabbernee, in a discussion of Eusebius's “theology of persecution,” argues that Eusebius viewed church and state as independent in the earlier drafts of the Ecclesiastical History, but that after experiencing the Great Persecution, he came to believe that God's purposes could be achieved through state agents.Footnote 74 But the implication that the Romans were God's agents in punishing the Jews as early as Book 1 suggests this view was more fundamental to Eusebius's approach.Footnote 75 The Abgar correspondence thus establishes a positive role for Romans in Christianity's past at a programmatic point in Eusebius's narrative.
We can go still further. The phrase “the dominion of the Romans” hints at a solution to the persistent question as to why Eusebius includes here Syriac material outside his normal sphere of interest. The Ecclesiastical History is a history of Christianity within the Roman Empire; the Abgar correspondence, given its size and prominent position, presents a significant exception.Footnote 76 Though firmly part of the Roman Empire by Eusebius's own day, at the time the narrative was set, Edessa was not. The argument that this was the only material from the region available to Eusebius is not only an argument from silence but also simply unlikely, since the Abgar correspondence came from a larger archive (EH 1.13.5). Likewise, one cannot claim that Eusebius was unaware that Edessa was not under Roman control in the first century, since he begins the story by introducing “king Abgar, holding power most notably over the nations beyond the Euphrates” (τῶν ὑπὲρ Εὐφράτην ἐθνῶν ἐπισημότατα δυναστεύων) (EH 1.13.2) and later characterizes Edessa as “at this time a city ruled by kings” (τὸ τηνιϰάδε βασιλευομένην πόλιν) (EH 1.13.5). The references to both the Euphrates, the Empire's symbolic eastern border (e.g., Herodian, Roman History 4.10.2), and to independent rule suggest that Eusebius knew this area to be outside Rome's territories.
This is confirmed by further comparison of Eusebius's account with the story's independent transmission in the Teaching of Addai. There, parts of the text depict Abgar anachronistically as a Roman governor and Edessa as a Roman city. For example, Abgar mentions his respect for “the covenant of peace which was established by me as by my forefathers with our lord Caesar Tiberius” (Teaching of Addai f.5a, see too f.24b), likely reading back into the first century a third century political arrangement. Edessa is also described as “the territory of the Romans” (Teaching of Addai f.23a–b).Footnote 77 There is no such ambiguity in Eusebius. I therefore suggest that part of the attraction of the Abgar correspondence for Eusebius was precisely because it afforded him the opportunity to reflect upon Rome's relations with nations beyond her borders.Footnote 78
In Eusebius's story, Abgar, an outsider, not only requests that a teacher from within the Empire visit him but also offers him half of his kingdom.Footnote 79 Subsequently in conversation with that leader's representative, he explicitly expresses his respect for Roman hegemony. Moreover, Eusebius initially identifies Abgar as a “king” (βασιλε-), a standard term he also applies to Roman emperors of whom he approvedFootnote 80 , but then when introducing Abgar, the letters twice designate him a “toparch” (τόπαρχ-).Footnote 81 Eusebius thus draws attention to Abgar's status as an independent ruler before encountering Jesus and his respect for Roman hegemony after it.Footnote 82 The significance of this is best appreciated, I suggest, if we consider the associations of Edessa for Eusebius's elite fourth-century audience.Footnote 83
Edessa's location just beyond the Euphrates on the Empire's very eastern edge put it on the de facto border with Parthia, Rome's old enemy. This liminal position lent it a certain ambivalence. On the one hand, it was an important stopping point on eastern trading routes and a key bastion against eastern invasion.Footnote 84 As such it was a desirable city for the Romans, who made repeated attempts to form or force alliances with Edessa. But Edessa's fluctuating loyalty to Rome and Parthia—it changed government or allegiance eight times during the imperial period—meant it was also a constant source of unease to elite Romans. It is this twofold symbolic capital into which I suggest Eusebius is tapping.
It is worth briefly reviewing Rome's checkered relationship with Edessa, since it reflects this simultaneous desire and fear. Rome's earliest interactions with Edessa, when the region was firmly linked to Parthia, are illustrative. When Tigranes of Armenia was defeated by Sextilius in 69 BCE, he was allied with Abgar I (Plutarch, Life of Lucullus 25.5–6). But his successor Abgar II kept the throne through successful negotiations with Pompey (Cassius Dio, Roman History 37.5.5). Already in these two first encounters, we see the two sides of Edessa's relationship with Rome. A decade later, the defeat of Pompey's colleague Crassus, which became such an important touchstone in the Roman collective memory, supposedly occurred because “Abgar of Osroëne did them the greatest outrage” (Cassius Dio, Roman History 40.20.1, exaggerating the account in Plutarch, Life of Crassus 21–22).Footnote 85 A Roman attempt in 49 BCE to install the client king Meherdates in Armenia was later apparently stalled “by the deceit of Acbarus” (Tacitus, Ann. 12.12), who deliberately delayed him and later abandoned him in battle (Ann. 12.14). In explaining Abgar's and Meheradates's other allies’ defections when bribed by Meherdates's opponent Gotarzes, Tacitus notes with a characteristically curt curled lip that “barbarians prefer acquiring kings from Rome than keeping them.” The reality of events here is less significant than Edessa's growing reputation as valuable and untrustworthy in equal measure.
This remains true in the high empire. When Trajan scouted the region, Cassius Dio reports that initially the Abgar of the day (VII) hedged his bets between Rome and Parthia (Roman History 68.18.1). Despite supposedly then declaring himself loyal to Trajan—again, a pledge readily accepted by the Roman leaders—his subsequent rebellion endangered the over-extended emperor (Roman History 68.29.4) leading Trajan's general Lusius to sack and burn Edessa (Roman History 68.30.2).Footnote 86 Here again Edessa marks a symbolic boundary whose loyalty even Rome's “best emperor” struggled to secure. Two years of Roman military occupation were followed by the reemergence of Edessan rulers, Ilour/Yalour and Pharnataspat, whose loyalty again seems divided (Dio Cassius, Roman History 68.33; John Malalas, Chronicle 11.6–7). Numismatic evidence certainly suggests both that Osroëne was again closer to Parthia than Rome, and that there were tensions between pro- and anti-Roman factions in the city.Footnote 87 The suggestion that Antoninus Pius took a personal interest in the Edessan throne certainly suggests its continuing importance to Rome (Historia Augusta, Life of Antoninus Pius 9.6). The subsequent return of Ma‘nu VII to the throne was aided by the siege and capture of Edessa by Lucius Verus in 165/6, supported by a pro-Roman faction within the city (e.g., Lucian, On How to Write History 22, Historia Augusta, Life of Verus 7). But this produced no lasting stability. In 194, Edessa attacked Nisibis, in alliance with Adiabene, sparking reprisals from Septimius Severus.Footnote 88 Severus's retaliation “against the barbarians” (Roman History 75.1.1) is described by Cassius Dio in identical terms to Trajan's travails in the region as coming “out of a love of glory” (Roman History 68.17.1).Footnote 89 Severus's intervention successfully annexed the region and created the new provinces of Mesopotamia and Osroëne. But Edessa's mild treatment after its revolt, in which Abgar kept his throne and met a lavish reception in Rome, indicates the continued importance of both to Rome (Roman History 80.16.2).Footnote 90 Edessa remained the symbolic boundary of Rome's eastern vanity and failure.
This unease concerning Osroëne continued even after Caracalla (somewhat deceptively) claimed it for Rome in 212/3 BCE (Cassius Dio, Roman History 78.12.1).Footnote 91 Caracalla himself was assassinated in the region in 217 BCE while preparing for an eastern campaign (having set out from Edessa for Carrhae in Cassius Dio, Roman History 79.5.3–5 and the Historia Augusta, Life of Caracalla 6.6–7.2; on an excursion from Carrhae in Herodian, Roman History 4.13.3).Footnote 92 At the death of Alexander Severus in 235 BCE, a successful revolt against Maximinus Thrax is attributed to Edessan archers (Herodian, Roman History 7.1.9–10). The Byzantine historian Syncellus recalls that unrest involving the usurpers Uranius and Antoninus centered on Edessa (Syncellus 1.674–5; see too Zosimus 1.12).Footnote 93 Finally, Valerian's infamous defeat at the hands of Shapur I supposedly occurred during the latter's siege of Edessa (according to the Greek text of Shapur I's inscription, section 9–11).Footnote 94 Again, whether these calamities in fact involved Edessa or not, it is telling that they were remembered as doing so. Though the region as a whole was troublesome to Rome, it is consistently Edessa which is associated with Rome's nadirs.Footnote 95 Edessa had become an appropriate setting for tales of treachery and woe.
By the time Eusebius wrote the Ecclesiastical History in the early fourth-century, Edessa had been part of the Empire for over a century (though its status had changed in the Diocletianic reshuffle).Footnote 96 But its reputation was long established and further exacerbated in the third century. It was this simultaneous desire and fear with which Eusebius's readers will have associated the region. In this light the Abgar correspondence acquires fresh significance. Where Roman emissaries, generals, and emperors had consistently struggled to secure the loyalty of Edessa and its rulers, in Eusebius's account Christianity's founder is actively sought out by Abgar V and voluntarily offered half of his kingdom. Later in the story, Abgar bows to Jesus's representative, to the amazement of his court: “Abgar prostrated himself [προσεϰύνησεν] before Thaddaeus, and all those standing by were astounded” (EH 1.13.14, cf. Philippians 2.10). Such prostration in the east sent a potent political message. Jesus achieves easily that with which Rome's representatives had struggled. Moreover, he is said to have done so at a time when, historically, the emperor Tiberius had been seeking the loyalty of precisely such eastern border-states (see, e.g., Tacitus, Ann. 6.31–37, 41–44).
Eusebius was here again in dialogue with a long-running concern of early Christian self-representation.Footnote 97 Celsus opens his A True Doctrine with the statement that there are some associations “which are obscure—as many as are practiced against the common laws” (παρὰ τὰ νενομισμένα) (Against Celsus 1.1). Celsus's prime charge throughout is that Christian minds and allegiances run counter to Rome and her interests (see e.g., Against Celsus 8.17, 8.73, 8.75; also Minucius, Octavius 8 and 12, Porphyry in Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History 6.19.7, and Preparation for the Gospel 1.2.1–4). Celsus's critique reveals that behind such barbs lies the fear of an emperor “abandoned, alone and deserted, and the earth's affairs falling to the most lawless and most savage barbarians” (Against Celsus 8.68).Footnote 98 Christians were thought to desire and risk the ruin of the Empire. As with Celsus's other critiques, he traces this back to Jesus, triumphantly labeling the latter's famous comment on the impossibility of serving two masters “a factious utterance” (στάσεως . . . φωνὴν) (Against Celsus 8.2, see too 3.5). Elsewhere, he describes Jesus as “the founder of their faction” (αὐτοῖς τῆς στάσεως ἀρχηγέτης) (Against Celsus 8.14). Even Tacitus's famous suggestion that Christians were convicted for their “hatred of the human race” (Ann. 15.44) comes after mention of Jesus's execution by sentence of a Roman procurator.Footnote 99 As we saw above, much Christian martyr literature of the second and third centuries had embraced that oppositionality. For Eusebius and his elite Greco-Roman audience, such an accusation therefore remained uncomfortable.
The Abgar correspondence helped Eusebius assuage this charge, as it had those concerning Christians’ low status and penchant for self-destruction. Eusebius's belief that the Empire's expansion was a divine aid to apostolic mission is well established (see, e.g., Demonstration of the Gospel 3.7.33–55) and the Abgar correspondence confirms this.Footnote 100 But it also allows Eusebius to suggest that the reverse is true—that Christianity has always furthered the purposes of Empire. In Eusebius's reimagining, Jesus and Thaddaeus successfully Christianize Edessa and are freely offered its rulers’ loyalty in the early first century, whereas in reality Edessa's inclusion in the Empire was a tortured process that was not completed until the third century. The Christians are here better able to achieve the purposes of Rome—ensuring the security of this vital but problematic region—than their non-Christian contemporaries. The Christians are not the barbarians here; nor do they risk exposing the Empire to them. Instead, they embody Rome's civilizing tendency. Rome's interests and values are and always have been best served by its Christian inhabitants. That basic principle undergirds the entire Ecclesiastical History. It is perhaps best expressed in words Eusebius quotes from Melito of Sardis:
For our philosophy formerly flourished among the barbarians, but having appeared among the nations in the great age of your ancestor Augustus it became most of all an auspicious blessing for your kingdom [τῇ σῇ βασιλείᾳ αἴσιον ἀγαθόν]. For thereafter the strength of the Romans has grown to great and splendid heights. . .. It was for the good of a kingdom well begun that our message blossomed [τοῦ πρὸς ἀγαθοῦ τὸν ϰαθ’ ἡμᾶς λόγον συναϰμάσαι τῇ ϰαλῶς ἀρξαμένῃ βασιλείᾳ]. (EH 4.26.7–8)
The Abgar correspondence demonstrated the truth of this bold claim. Eusebius introduces Abgar in grand terms we have already briefly touched upon, not as a minor client king, but as one “most notably holding power over the nations beyond the Euphrates” (EH 1.13.2).Footnote 101 Such is the audience's introduction to the eastern power broker who so willingly offers Jesus his loyalty and his kingdom.Footnote 102
Conclusion
And—which is more—you'll be a Man, my son!Footnote 103
This article has been concerned with the motivations, not for the Abgar correspondence's original composition—which must remain the subject of conjecture—but for its inclusion at the end of Book 1 of Eusebius's Ecclesiastical History. It is not there simply because Eusebius was duped into including it. Rather, it stood at this programmatic moment, just as the history of the church proper was primed to begin, as Eusebius's defining picture of Christianity's founder for his early fourth-century audience. This story represents Eusebius's definitive intervention in a series of debates about the nature of the historical Jesus and its implications for later generations of Christians. The poor carpenter celebrated for his sacrificial suffering at the hands of misguided Roman principalities and powers is gone. Instead, Eusebius presents a literate figure, the correspondent of kings who is aligned with the interests of Rome. This reimagining provided Eusebius's elite Greco-Roman audience with a history and a founder sturdy enough to withstand the stinging barbs of those critics whose prejudices and aesthetics they may well have shared.
In writing for a Christian audience, however, Eusebius intended his work to be more than just a response to certain criticisms. Like Kipling's poem, the Abgar correspondence presents an ideal to which its audience can and should aspire. Moreover, the significance of this new-look Christ resonates beyond Book 1: the Ecclesiastical History as a whole presents a series of shining biographical exemplars of Christian heroes. As with earlier texts celebrating the Christian heroes of previous generations, an implicit mimetic hierarchy encouraged the Ecclesiastical History’s readers to mimic earlier Christians who were themselves mimicking Christ.Footnote 104 Throughout the Ecclesiastical History, the reader is to emulate the Christian leaders and heroes who themselves echo the new-look Jesus of Book 1. In other words, the Abgar correspondence was Eusebius's starting point for a fundamental reimagining of Christian authority.
Eusebius's epistolary Jesus, correspondent of kings, is the model for three centuries of Christian leaders who are marked out primarily by their intellectual qualities, whose extended correspondence with each other and with the great and the good of their day does not just fill the pages of the Ecclesiastical History, but is the visible evidence of the worldwide church itself. This Jesus, whose ministry and mission overshadow his martyrdom, will be imitated in the Ecclesiastical History by three centuries of Christian martyrs who are distinguished as much for their pastoral care as for their suffering and resistance. And this Jesus who meets such welcome and success with the king of Edessa, the symbolic representative of a region key to Roman interests whose allegiance Rome had long fought to acquire, is merely the first of three centuries of Christians who exemplify Rome's values and further her interests more effectively than their non-Christian contemporaries. The Abgar correspondence gives genuinely “Christian” pedigree to a stylized model of authority writ large throughout Eusebius's ten-book magnum opus. In the Ecclesiastical History, Eusebius is not just presenting a new-look model of the church, its leaders, and their relationship with Rome to his elite audience. He is suggesting that it has always looked that way.Footnote 105
As a programmatic example of Eusebius's vision of Christian authority then, the rebranding of Jesus via the Abgar correspondence should be a catalyst to a new scholarly approach to the Ecclesiastical History. As a case study, it is a powerful example of the shortcomings of previous scholarly trends. We cannot dismiss Eusebius's agency with Bauer, rest content with views inspired by Barnes of Eusebius as documentary historian, or assume that Eusebius's literary project was a defense against a hostile pagan audience, like Mirkovic. Instead, we must read for Eusebius's active re-imagination of Christianity at this watershed moment in history. The Abgar correspondence points us towards what must be the two foci of our rereading. First, that Eusebius sought to direct Christianity's transformation from the inside. This he achieved via a thoroughgoing redefinition of what qualified Christian leaders, and ultimately emperors, for office. And second, that Eusebius wanted to write a history of Christianity fit for the Roman Empire. That meant presenting the church not only as compatible with Rome, as had earlier apologists, but also as its best representative and, ultimately, its natural heir.Footnote 106
