The Chronicle of Edessa
A short anonymous Syriac chronicle of the city of Edessa, running to AD 540. Its long opening entry copies an archive record of the flood of November 201, which names a church of the Christians among the buildings destroyed.
The chronicle is a list of dated notices about Edessa and its bishops, compiled by an unknown writer in the sixth century; the last event it records belongs to AD 540. It counts by the Seleucid era, the “year of the Greeks”, which began in the autumn of 312 BC: year 513 began in October AD 201.
Most entries are a line or two. The exception is entry 8, a detailed report of a flood of the river Daisan in the reign of the emperor Severus and of King Abgar, which ends with the names of the two scribes who wrote it down and of the two keepers of the city archive who filed it. The compiler has plainly copied a document. In the list of damage it says that the waters destroyed “the temple of the church of the Christians”. That phrase, in a record deposited in the city’s archives, is a dated mention of a church building at Edessa. Walter Bauer suspected that the sixth-century compiler added it (Orthodoxy and Heresy in Earliest Christianity, 1934; English translation 1971, chapter 1); the translator, B. H. Cowper, took it as part of the record.
The chronicle says nothing of the letters between Jesus and King Abgar or of the mission of Thaddaeus, which Church History reports (1.13). The first bishop it names is Conon, who laid the foundations of a church in year 624, that is AD 312–313 (entry 12).
Cited in
- about AD 201, estimated date