Jews, Christians, and the Roman Empire: The Poetics of Power in Late Antiquity

2. The Kingdom of Edessa and the Creation of a Christian Aristocracy

c h A p t e r 2 The Kingdom of Edessa and the Creation of a Christian Aristocracy wIllIAm Adler Eusebius’s Ecclesiastical History creates the impression that the history of the early church was mainly one of struggle and conflict: first with the Jews, then with heretics, and then with Rome. While that approach is of a piece with the triumphalism of the work, part of the story gets lost along the way. That includes Christians living to the east of the empire. This is regrettable because Christian interactions with centers of power there were sometimes less fraught than those with Rome. One such place was Edessa, a Silk Road caravan city on the frontier between the Parthian and Roman Empires and the capital of a small northern Mesopotamian kingdom in modern-day southeastern Turkey. Anyone who assumes that Christians of the early third century were an embattled religious minority will be hard-pressed to explain the prominence of Christian aristocrats in the court of Abgar the VIII, an Edessene king of the late second and early third century ce, also known as Abgar the Great (176–211). Julius Africanus (ca. 160–240), a Christian polymath probably best known as the author of a universal chronicle, spent time in Abgar’s court, even tutoring the king’s son Maʾnu.1 There he also struck up an acquaintance with the Christian aristocrat Bardaisan (154–222), known to Greek readers as Bardesanes. Students of early Christianity, following the testimony of later Syriac Christian sources, once ascribed Abgar’s friendship with both Africanus and Bardaisan to a shared religious identity. Francis C. Burkitt, one of the earliest exponents of this view, went so far as to suggest that Abgar legitimized his 44 Chapter 2 conversion to Christianity by propagating the legend about the conversion of the kingdom of Edessa during the reign of Abgar V “the Black” (4 Bce–7 ce; 13–50 ce).2 More recent studies of the evidence, however, have helped to discredit the notion of Abgar the Great as the first Christian king of Edessa.3 Abgar was not hostile to Christians, who, by the time of his reign, may have made up a significant segment of the Edessene community.4 But if he was a Christian, he kept his religious leanings well concealed. Coins, monuments, and funerary mosaics from Abgar’s reign suggest no change in the public face of Edessene religion or in the official status of Christianity.5 If Abgar the Great was not himself a Christian, or even, to use Burkitt’s language, “half a Christian,”6 we need to look elsewhere to grasp his relationship with his Christian courtiers. As I want to demonstrate, a better understanding of their integration into Abgar’s court has broader implications for the study of identity formation and elite culture in the Hellenistic Near East of Late Antiquity. As a means of describing the dynamic social and cultural landscape of Edessene society in the early third century, the binary categories of “pagan” and “Christian” can sometimes obscure more than they illuminate. Edessene Court Culture during the Reign of Abgar the Great Syrian Christianity of the second and third centuries produced its share of ascetics and culture warriors.7 Greek paideia was the target of some of this antipathy. Among Hellenized Syrians, Greek culture stirred both pride and anxiety. The second-century satirist and rhetor Lucian of Samosata, whose self-identification oscillates between “Greek” and “Syrian,” recalls how, as a youth, he wandered aimlessly in Ionia, still speaking with “a foreign accent” and wearing Assyrian attire; there he encountered personified Rhetoric, who cared for and educated him.8 Christianity added a third variable into the equation , offering the disaffected an outlet for cultural resentments. Tatian (ca. 120–180), for example, “born in the land of the Assyrians and educated at first in your (Greek) doctrines,” told his readers that he was opting out of Greek culture altogether and embracing the “barbarian philosophy” of Christianity (Oratio ad Graecos 42).9 Self-marginalizing behavior like that was far removed from the worldview of Christians in Abgar’s court. Julius Africanus, whose secular learning extended beyond Christian circles, wore his Greek learning with pride. Africanus ’s Edessene associate, the bilingual Bardaisan, reveals little of Tatian’s Christian Aristocracy 45 animosity to everything Greek. Later sources say that he even sent his son to Athens for a Greek...