All our historical sources support the view taken above that Edessa, the capital of the king dom which the Greeks and Romans called Osrhoene, was the earliest seat of Christianity in Mesopotamia and the cradle of Syriac literature. But as to the date and circumstances of its evangelization we have little reliable information. The well-known legend of the correspondence of Abgar Ukkama, king of Edessa, with Christ and the mission of Addai to Edessa immediately after the Ascension was accepted as true by the historian Eusebius (d.
on the faith of a Syriac document preserved in the official archives of the city. An amplified form of the same story is fur nished by the Doctrine of Addai, an original Syriac work which survives complete in a St. Petersburg (Leningrad) ms. of the 6th century, and is also represented by fragments in other mss. of the 5th and 6th centuries. This work was probably written at Edessa about the end of the 4th century. But whether in its longer or its shorter form, the whole narrative must be pronounced un historical. In all probability the first king of Osrhoene to adopt Christianity was Abgar IX., son of Ma'nci, who reigned from A.D. 179 to 214 or 216, and the legend has confounded him with an earlier Abgar, also son of Ma'nu, who reigned first from B.C. 4 to A.D. 7 and again from A.D. 13 to 50. (See Lipsius, Die edessenische Abgar-Saga, 1880.) A contemporary of Abgar IX. at Edessa was the famous Bardaisan, himself a convert from heathenism, who was of noble birth and a habitué of the Edessene court. It was no doubt partly under his influence—also possibly in part through impressions received by Abgar during his visit to Rome about A.D. 202—that the king's conversion took place. But Christianity must have reached Edessa some 3o to 5o years earlier. Our oldest native historical document in Syriac—the account of a severe flood which visited Edessa in Nov. A.D. 201—mentions "the temple of the church of the Christians" as overthrown by the flood. The form of this notice shows, as von Gutschmid and others have re marked, that Christianity was not yet the religion of the State ; but it must for some time have had a home in Edessa. By a skilful piecing together of the data furnished by the oldest Syriac ver sions of the Bible—such as the derivation of the Old Testament version from the Jews, and the almost exclusive use of Tatian's Diatessaron as the gospel of the Syriac Church down to the be ginning of the 5th century—F. C. Burkitt has shown it to be prob able that the preaching of Christianity at Edessa reaches back to the middle of the 2nd century or even to about the year 135 (Early Eastern Christianity, Lecture II.).
The Syriac versions of the Bible are treated elsewhere (see BIBLE) and may here be dismissed with a brief summary of facts and opinions. The received Syriac Bible or Vulgate (called the Peshitta or "simple" version from the 9th century onwards) con tains all the canonical books of the Old Testament. In the New Testament, 2 Peter, 2 and 3 John, Jude and the Apocalypse were originally left out, but Syriac versions were made at a later time. The Peshitta version of the Old Testament must have been originally made mainly by Jews, of whom we know there were colonies in Mesopotamia in the 2nd century. The translation was executed entirely from the Hebrew, but underwent later revision which brought it more into conformity with the LXX.—this to a greater degree in some books than in others. The Peshitta New Testament—according to the convincing theory which at present holds the field—is not the oldest form of the Syriac version, at least as regards the Gospels. From the beginning of the 3rd to the beginning of the 5th century Tatian's Harmony or Diatessaron
originally compiled in Syriac, or compiled in Greek and translated into Syriac—was the current form of gospel in the Syriac Church. The text of the Gospels underlying it "represents
the Greek text as read in Rome about A.D. 170." Slightly later was made the Old Syriac version of the separate Gospels, which survives in two mss.—the Curetonian and the Sinaitic—in two differing forms: but this never obtained much currency. Its text • "represents, where it differs from the Diatessaron, the Greek text as read in Antioch about A.D. 200." Then at the beginning of the 5th century, by the efforts of the masterful Rabbilla, who was bishop of Edessa from 411-412 to 435, a new version or recension of the Gospels was made and incorporated in the Peshitta or Vulgate, the use of the Diatessaron being henceforth proscribed. Rabbfild's text of the Gospels "represents the Greek text as read in Antioch about A.D. 400." The history of the Peshitta rendering of the Acts and Epistles is less clear.
Of the large number of Apocryphal books existing in Syriac the majority have been translated from Greek, one or two (such as Bar Sira or Ecclesiasticus) from Hebrew, while some (like the Doctrine of Addai above referred to) are original Syriac documents. Special mention may be made here of the tale of Abikar—the wise and virtuous secretary of Sennacherib, king of Assyria—and of his wicked nephew Nadh5.n. This is the Syriac version of a narrative which has had an extraor dinary vogue in the world's literature. It is now known to have existed in Aramaic as far back as the 5th century B.c., appearing in Jewish papyri which were lately discovered by the German mission to Elephantine. It appears to be traceable in its Greek dress in writings of the philosopher Democritus and the dramatist Menander ; it was certainly known to the author of Tobit and perhaps to the author of Daniel; some would trace its influence in the New Testament, in the parable of the wicked servant and elsewhere ; it was known to Mohammed and is referred to in the Koran ; it has been included among the tales in the Arabian Nights; and it survives in a good many versions ancient and modern. The old Syriac version, which is to be found in a number of mss., was probably made from an early Aramaic version, if not from the original itself (which must surely have been Semitic). The Syriac has in turn become the parent of the Arabic, Armenian and Ethiopic—possibly also of the Greek and Slavonic-versions. (See F. Nau, Histoire et sagesse d'Ahikar l'Assyrien, 1909.) Another deeply interesting Syriac Apocryphon is the Acts of Judas Thomas (i.e., Judas the Twin), which is included in the collection of Apocryphal Acts of the Apostles. The Acts of Thomas is now generally recognized to be an original Syriac work (or "novel," as Burkitt calls it), although a Greek version also exists. It seems to have arisen in Gnostic circles, and its tendency is wholly in favour of asceticism and celibacy. Among its peculiar ities is the fact that Judas Thomas is regarded as the twin brother of Christ. The author has incorporated in it the finest poem to be found in all Syriac literature, the famous Hymn of the Soul. Lives of the Saints.—Lives of saints and martyrs form a large group among Syriac books. Among such documents con nected with the early history of Edessa we have, besides the Doctrine of Addai, certain martyrdoms, those of Sharbel and Barsamya, assigned to the reign of Trajan, and those of Gury5, and ShamOna and of the Deacon Habbibh under Diocletian and Lincinius. All these documents, like Addai, belong probably to the 2nd half of the 4th century, and are unreliable in detail for the historian though they may throw some light on the conditions of life at Edessa under Roman government. There are also accounts of martyrdoms at Samosata (Assemani, Acta Mart. ii. 123-147), including that of St. Azazail published by Macler (Paris, 1902). But the great bulk of the Syriac martyrdoms have their scene farther east, within the Persian dominions.