Page 88 - Edessa, 'The Blessed City'-01, by J. B. Segal (Oxford, 1970). Chapters 1-3

THE LETTER OF JESUS 75
cession of Nisibis to the enemy left Edessa in the front line as one of the
principal bulwarks of the eastern provinces of Byzantium, and it must have
appeared a miracle to the Edessans that their city remained free from attack.
The thought of Nisibis was probably present in their minds, if we may
judge from the bishop's account to Egeria of the miraculous deliverance of
Edessa from the Persians. His story is wholly inappropriate to Edessa; its
water supply could never have been derived from the Citadel mount, and
the springs of water inside the city and the fish-pools were scarcely the out-
come of miraculous intervention. But the diversion of waters played an
important part in the attack by Shahpuhr II on Nisibis in 350, described
vividly by St. Ephraim who was an eye witness of these events, and by
Emperor Julian in his panegyric in honour of Constantius.
We may safely ascribe to the end of the fourth century the insertion of
the final sentence of the letter. By the fifth century the legend of the corres-
pondence between Abgar and Jesus was popular and widely credited, in
spite of its official rejection by Pope Gelasius in 494. The date of the inclusion
in the letter of the promise of Jesus to Abgar is confirmed on archaeological
grounds. Copies of the letter inscribed in Greek have been found on two
stones at Euchaita in northern Anatolia, on a stone at Philippi in Macedonia,
and finally on a stone at Kirk Magara near Edessa itself; none appears to have
been discovered in Syriac. The function of the Euchaita inscriptions is
uncertain, but the Kirk Magara inscription was standing by a grave, while
that at Philippi was on the city gate. All, significantly enough, contain the
sentence about the impregnability of Edessa; all belong to the fifth century,
if not earlier.1 A copy of the correspondence was discovered also at Ephesus
on a stone over the door of a house, but this is of later date. The Greek
text of the letter of Jesus has been found also written on papyrus, perhaps as
an amulet. Here the last sentence takes another form, reminiscent of Jesus
as the Light of the World. Texts of the Abgar-Jesus correspondence are
frequent in Coptic, and in many forms—on stone, on parchment, on ostraca,
and as amulets on papyrus. One text, written by a monk in Upper Egypt,
should even be dated, it has been suggested, to the middle of the fourth
century. All these copies give both letters of the correspondence, and usually
they contain the last sentence of the Greek 'letter of Jesus'. Various forms of
the legend, much expanded, are extant in Ethiopic and Arabic. In pre-
Norman England the story of Abgar was translated from Latin into Anglo-
Saxon at about A.D. 1000 and appears in the local liturgy of the time.2

1 One of the inscriptions at Euchaita is tion from Kirk Magara is shown on PI. 316.
badly mutilated; the letter of Abgar is missing, z The story of Abgar reappears elsewhere in
and part only of the letter of Jesus remains. The the West far from Edessa in, for example, the
latter, however, contains the sentence about the Passion of St. Eutropus of Saintes; Eutropus,
impregnability of Edessa. See further von Dob- like Hannan, visits Jesus at Jerusalem before
schutz, Christusbilder, and Kirsten. The inscrip- the crucifixion.

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