Edessa

Eusebius, writing early in the fourth century, says he found in the archives of Edessa a correspondence between the city's king Abgar and Jesus: the king, ill, asks him to come and heal him; the reply declines, promises to send a disciple after the ascension, and blesses those who believe without seeing. Eusebius presents this as a document he translated himself. Modern scholarship treats the letters as a composition of the third century that gave the Edessene church an apostolic charter, though the tradition of an early mission by Addai to the city rests on more than the letters alone.

A later Syriac version, the Doctrine of Addai, adds a painted portrait made by the king's messenger. Later still the portrait becomes an image imprinted on cloth by Christ himself, an image not made by hands, and the city held it as a protecting relic; a Persian siege was said to have failed because of it.

In 944 a Byzantine army obtained the cloth in exchange for prisoners and concessions and carried it to Constantinople, where it was received in a state ceremony and kept among the imperial relics until the sack of 1204, after which it disappears. Its importance for religious history is doctrinal rather than sentimental: an image believed to originate with Christ himself was the strongest available argument for the defenders of icons during the Byzantine iconoclast controversy, since it made images something God had permitted rather than something people had invented. Claims connecting it to the Shroud of Turin have been argued for decades and remain unproven.

Edessa gave Christianity a third language. Syriac, the literary form of the Aramaic spoken there, became the medium of a body of theology, poetry, biblical translation and later of science and philosophy, and it carried the faith east into Persia, Central Asia, India and China. The Peshitta, the standard Syriac Bible, took shape in this environment, as did the Diatessaron, a single narrative woven from the four gospels that was read in Syriac churches for centuries before being suppressed in favour of the separated gospels.

Ephrem moved to Edessa in 363, when Nisibis was ceded to Persia, and spent his last decade there. He wrote theology in verse, in hymns built on repeated images rather than on definitions, and he is recorded as having trained choirs of women to sing them, which in the fourth century was both a pastoral method and a polemical one, since the followers of Bardaisan had used hymns effectively before him.

The school of Edessa taught in the Antiochene manner and translated Theodore of Mopsuestia into Syriac. When that tradition fell under suspicion after the condemnation of Nestorius, the emperor closed the school in 489, and its teachers crossed the frontier to Nisibis in Persian territory, where they refounded it. That relocation is why the Church of the East, outside Roman control, became the custodian of Antiochene exegesis and the missionary church of Asia. The modern city, Sanliurfa, venerates a cave as the birthplace of Abraham and draws pilgrims to the pools of fish beside it.