Page 120 - Edessa, 'The Blessed City'-01, by J. B. Segal (Oxford, 1970). Chapters 1-3

PAGANS OF EDESSA 107
known there before. Certainly the festival was, as he admits, pagan and
popular. In the following year a plague of locusts seems to have caused the
cancellation of the festival; and in 502 Emperor Anastasius issued a decree
forbidding the public performance of dancing.
Jacob of Serug wrote in a letter in 521:
It is fitting that [Edessa] should be the first-born full of virtue at all times. For it is a
blessed land that has received goodly seed and produced a crop of first-fruits in true
faith. Even if there have come forth a few weeds, yet are they small in number and it is
not to be despised on their account or to be called a field of weeds.
Jacob of Serug was a kindly man who thought well of his fellows. But,
somewhat earlier, he had been obliged to write in gentle reproof to a certain
monk, Stephen bar Sudaile, known as Stephen the scribe. He urges him to
remember the penalty of sinfulness. It behoves us, he declares, not to lose,
'for the sake of an excellent life of but few days, the kingdom of heaven
which has no end; [we should] flee from pleasures of short duration, lest
through them we bring upon ourselves eternal torment.' Stephen had
expressed disbelief in the eternity of the torments of hell. We learn more
about Stephen from another letter, written by Philoxenus of Mabbog to
two presbyters of Edessa, some ten or fifteen years previously. Stephen had
once resided at Edessa, and at that time was living near Jerusalem. He had,
Philoxenus maintains, expressed blasphemous opinions in books and letters,
some of which he had sent to the presbyters. In them he taught 'impious
and foolish' doctrines. He held that all creatures can become like God, that
there is no Judgement, the same retribution being meted out to everyone,
and that even demons will be consubstantial with the divine Essence; he
preached, in fact, that all creatures will arrive at one Fulfilment, and that this
will be made known in the mystery of the First Day of the Week, when God
will be All in All, One Nature, One Essence, One Godhead. Philoxenus
warned the presbyters not to allow these books to fall into the hands of others,
particularly 'nuns dwelling within church precincts, lest they be led astray
through the simplicity and weakness natural to women'.1
Evidently, then, heretical views were known, and even originated, at
Edessa at this period. More serious was the actual performance of pagan
practices by the leaders of local society. At Constantinople a number of well-
known men and women, including physicians, sophists, and scholastics,
were arraigned before Emperor Justinian who had ordered all pagans to
accept Christianity under penalty of exile and the confiscation of their
property; these people were charged with practising 'Manichaean'—a

1 A. L. Frothingham, Stephen bar Sudaili. from certain. In a study of bar Sudaile, F. S.
Whether Stephen is to be regarded as author Marsh comes to the conclusion that, from the
of the Book of the Holy Hierotheos, as claimed little that we know of his tenets, Stephen could
by John of Dara and others, is possible but far be the author of the third section of the book.

www.knanayology.org