Page 113 - Edessa, 'The Blessed City'-01, by J. B. Segal (Oxford, 1970). Chapters 1-3

ioo THE BLESSING OF JESUS AND THE TRIUMPH OF CHRISTIANITY
each confession whatever shrines were to be found in their possession; and at this time
the Great Church of Edessa . . . had passed from us. Nevertheless, the advantage to us
was not small, in that we were delivered from the cruelty of the Byzantines and from
their evil and their wrath and their bitter zeal against us, and we had rest.1
Among Monophysite Edessans, hatred of the Melkites outweighed even
their fear of the Moslems.

What was the position of the Jews during the four centuries after the end
of the kingdom at Edessa? When the Christians of Edessa, like their co-
religionists elsewhere in the Roman Empire, were persecuted by the Im-
perial authorities at the beginning of the fourth century, they had the open
sympathy of the Jews. We are told that Jews mourned at the funeral of
Habbib, one of the three martyrs of Edessa. But the Christians of Mesopo-
tamia owed more than this to the Jews. The Church of Edessa had a twofold
strain in its development, Semitic (that is Aramaean), as well as Greek.
Partly for this reason, it stood remote from the rest of Christendom, and
partly, no doubt, because of its ignorance of the Greek language. Neverthe-
less, it throve. The vitality of the Edessan church, in spite of its isolation,
may be ascribed in no small degree to the resources, both moral and theo-
logical, of the Jews of Edessa.
The influence of Jewish learning and tradition upon the early Christianity
of north Mesopotamia is apparent from the writings of Aphraates, who lived
near Mosul in the first half of the fourth century. His tractates are among the
most ancient of any Syrian Church Fathers; they made a deep impression
on his contemporaries. Aphraates was acquainted with the Targum and the
Talmud, although his acquaintance with them was not necessarily first-hand.
He employs a Jewish chronology, and even his metaphors in a few passages
are Jewish. It is possible that he had knowledge of Hebrew. There seems
little doubt that his fellow-Christians in this area, like early Christians
elsewhere, maintained Jewish practices; they avoided, for example, eating
meat before the blood had been removed, and at the Passover they ate
unleavened bread. Several of the homilies of Aphraates are, it is true, directed
against the Jews. His theological arguments follow familiar lines. He does
not spare his attacks upon the Jews—but they are upon Judaism and the
Jewish contemporaries of Jesus, not upon the contemporaries of Aphraates
himself. He writes without rancour. Several times he addresses himself to a
Jewish disputant, calling him 'doctor' or 'wise man'.
When we turn to Edessa we find that the position there was much the
same. Allusions to Jews in the Book of the Laws of Countries, whose
authorship is ascribed to the school of Bardaisan and which was written pro-
bably in the third century, are not unfriendly. They stress the observance of the

1 Mich. Syr.

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