Page 48 - Edessa, 'The Blessed City'-01, by J. B. Segal (Oxford, 1970). Chapters 1-3

BARDAISAN 35
didst touch. Thou hast seen the height and the depth, the distant and the near, the
hidden and the manifest.1 And they supervise the uses of thy reckonings, . . . giving
rest2 . . .
We need not hesitate, then, to attribute strenuous literary activity to the
Edessa of the later years of the monarchy. Unhappily little is extant whose
authorship can definitely be regarded as Edessan. The touching epistle of
Mara bar Serapion was written by a pagan of nearby Samosata to his son as
the author was taken captive to Seleucia, possibly at the end of the second
century. The Oration to Antoninus Caesar, a discourse on free will and sin,
is ascribed incorrectly to the philosopher Melito of Sardis; it was composed
probably by a Christian, and perhaps in Osrhoene in the third century.
Edessa, or the neighbourhood, may have been the place of composition of the
Syriac text of the Acts of Thomas, written probably in an Iranian milieu and
in the first decades of the third century.3 To this epoch belong, too, the
translations into Syriac of the Old and New Testaments. Whether the
translators performed their work in Osrhoene or Adiabene cannot be de-
cided,4 but the question need not detain us. The lucid and flowing style of
much of these translations must have been the common heritage of a wide
area of Syriac-speaking Mesopotamia. That it was shared by Edessa, is
shown by the extract from the city archives describing the flood of 201 which
has already been given; this must have been written close to the event and
displays qualities of freshness and clarity.

The giant of Edessan literature in the period of the monarchy was Bar-
daisan. The names of the members of his family seem curiously allegorical.
His father is said to have been called Nuhama (revival, resurrection) and
his mother Nahshiram (hunting); his son, famous for his musical accom-
plishments, was Harmonius, and his own name means nothing more than 'son
of Daisan', the river of Edessa. Bardaisan himself, however, was real enough.
He was born at Edessa in 154, the son, it is maintained, of pagan parents who
had fled from Parthia.5 One tradition relates that he was instructed in the
lore of the heathens at Hierapolis, the famous cult centre of the Syrian
goddess, Atargatis. According to another tradition, Bardaisan was educated at
Edessa with the future Abgar the Great; certainly he frequented the court

1 Or 'rising [of the sun or stars]'. composed at Edessa; the evidence is, however,
z The Gnostic overtones of this remarkable, circumstantial and slender.
but obscure, inscription recall the remark of 4 Tatian probably composed the Syriac of
St. Ephraim on Bardaisan:' .. . he counted six the Diatessaron in the West before his return
essences; four essences he placed in the four to 'Assyria' (no doubt, this is Adiabene; see
directions (of the compass), one he placed in pp. 68-70) in A.D. 172. But the style of his
the depth, another in the height*. See also version is presumably that of his own home-
p. 38. land.
3 See p. 44 below. It has been claimed that 5 Porphyry, de Abstinentia, iv, 417, describes
the Odes of Solomon (which, like the Acts of Bardaisan as a 'Babylonian'—probably be-
Thomas, contain Gnostic expressions) were cause of his fame as astrologer; p. 50.

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