Bardaisan
Syriac-speaking Christian thinker of Edessa, born in 154. He wrote against the followers of Marcion and argued for human freedom against astral fate. Eusebius judged that he never wholly left the teaching of Valentinus.
The Chronicle of Edessa gives his birthday as 11 Tammuz in year 465 of the Seleucid era, which is 11 July AD 154 (Chronicle of Edessa 6). Eusebius describes him as a most able man and a skilled disputant in Syriac, who wrote dialogues against the followers of Marcion and others, among them a dialogue On Fate, and whose many pupils turned his works into Greek. He adds that Bardaisan had once followed Valentinus and never wholly freed himself from that teaching (Eusebius, Church History 4.30).
In the dialogue from his school cited here, he argues that neither nature nor the stars take away human freedom, and points to the Christians, who keep the same way of life in every country under every sky (Book of the Laws of the Countries).
In the timeline
- about AD 201, estimated dateChristianity Takes Root in Edessa
A flood report of November 201, kept in the archives of Edessa, lists a church of the Christians among the buildings destroyed. It is dated evidence of a church in the Syriac-speaking East, where a later tradition traced the church back to a letter from Jesus.