The Abgar Letters.

        The third century witnessed a marked rivalry among leading Christian centers regarding their apostolic founders: Rome took pride in the names of Peter and Paul; Ephesus rejoiced in the memory of John or Luke; and Alexandria, probably quite groundlessly, claimed the name of Mark. But the quaintest and boldest of such claims was that of the Syrian church of Edessa, which went straight back to Jesus himself. Syriac Christianity documented this great claim by two letters, believed to have been exchanged between Jesus and Abgar the Black, king of Edessa in A.D. 13-50. Abgar wrote to Jesus as follows:

Abgar, ruler of Edessa, to Jesus the excellent Savior, who has appeared in the country of Jerusalem, greeting. I have heard the reports of you and of your cures as performed by you without medicines or herbs. For it is said that you make the blind see and the lame walk, that you cleanse lepers and cast out foul spirits and demons, and that you heal those afflicted with lingering diseases, and raise the dead. After having heard all these things about you, I have concluded that one of two things must be true; either you are God, and having come down from heaven you do these things, or else you who do these things are the son of God. I have therefore written to you to ask you to take the trouble to come to me and heal the disease I have. For I have heard that the Jews are murmuring against you and are plotting to injure you. But I have a very small yet noble city, which is large enough for us both.

To this charming letter, Jesus is said to have replied:

Blessed are you who have believed in me without having seen me. For it is written of me, that those who have seen me will not believe in me, and those who have not seen me will believe and be saved. But in regard to what you have written me, that I should come to you, it is necessary for me to fulfil all things here for which I was sent, and after I have fulfilled them thus to be taken up again to him that sent me. But after I have been taken up I will send to you one of my disciples to heal your disease and give life to you and yours.

Syrian Christianity did not begin until about A.D. 172, with Tatian, and did not reach the stage of ecclesiastical consciousness implied in these letters until the middle of the third century, when they were probably written. Eusebius found them in the archives of Edessa and translated them from Syriac into Greek (Church History 1. 13). They were early embellished with the story that Abgar's messenger painted a portrait of Jesus and took it back to Edessa. The fuller form of the correspondence, the Teaching of Addai, passed into Armenian and Greek. The original story became widely known in the West through Eusebius' account of it, especially in Rufinus' Latin version of Eusebius'. Jesus' letter has been found in a cave inscription at Edessa, and both letters in an inscription at Philippi. The Gelasian Decree stigmatized them as apocrypha.