EDESSA

EDESSA. Founded by Seleucus in 304 B.C., now the Turkish city of Urfa, Edessa was the early “capital” of Syriac-speaking Christianity in Syria and Mesopotamia (q.v.). According to a popular tradition, its Nabataean king, Abgar, was converted on receiving a miraculous image impressed upon a towel from the still living Jesus of Nazareth. It is certain that Christians were present in the city from very early times. Bardesanes, a gnostic, was the first of its famous Christian writers in the late 2nd c. The church building there, destroyed in A.D. 201, is the oldest known Christian structure. Edessene Christianity appears to have been marked in its earliest stages by a great variety of different and mutually antagonistic groups. By the late 3rd c. its catholic bishop had been attached to the oversight of Antioch (q.v.). St. Ephrem (q.v.) lent his presence to the city from 363 to 373, and apparently assisted in the formation of a school of exegesis that would exercise great influence for about seventy years. The city also hosted a Nestorian “Persian School” until 489 and was a center for “monophysitism” (q.v.) down through the Arab and Byzantine occupations until the present century.