Chapter 17: Three Local Christianities: Edessa and Bardesane, Alexandria and Origen, Antioch and Paul of Samosate

While the New Prophecy would, for the first time and despite the dissent of a minority of the bishops, concretize the project of a Christianity that wished to conquer the Greco-Roman Empire and ended up unifying the rival churches, there were three cities in which the oldest Judeo-Christian traditions guarded their particularities and perpetuated their privileges as ancient communities.

Such was the case with Edessa, Alexandria and Antioch, the fortresses of Esseno-Nazarenism.

Bardesane Of Edessa

Starting from the First Century, Edessa was a hub of Christian expansion.

“The structure of the archaic Christianity of Edessa,” Drijvers writes, “shows the existence of varied groups with diverse opinions that fought against and complained about each other.”[271]

Here, in the First Century, was implanted — at the same time that it agitated spirits in Alexandria, Antioch and Ephesus — a system of beliefs that issued from Essenism and engendered, on a foundation of local particularisms, churches that were obedient to their own laws and doctrines.

The communities or ekklesia of Edessa were placed — no doubt by the missionary activity of some disciple of Thomas — under the patronage of Jude or Thomas, mythically elected “witness” of the Lord.

Jude or Thomas’ organization navigated in the [turbulent] current of the Second Century according to the logia attributed to Joshua/Jesus and supposedly compiled by Matthew or Thomas. The churches of Edessa perpetuated a Judeo-Christianity of the Elchasaite type, no doubt evolving towards anti-Semitism without, it seems, tipping over into Marcionism or Montanism.

In Edessa in 201, the first building designed for meetings of the believers and taking the name ‘church’ was constructed. It was destroyed shortly afterwards by a flood, the sign of a singular carelessness on the part of the tutelary God.[272]

Around 180, one of the churches, led by Bishop Palut, attempted to impose its authority on all Christians. His adepts called themselves “Palutians.” The struggles for precedence among the diverse churches of Edessa would last until the Fifth Century: the Palutian faction assured themselves of power and, rallying to the theses of Nicaea, embraced Catholicism. Consequently, this faction would hasten to label as heretical the churches that had in the past shown hostility towards it.

Thus it would be the work of Bardesane or Bar Daysan, who offered an original example of one of the many syncretisms, the successive stratifications of which would compose the Christianity of the first four centuries.

Born in Edessa in 144 or 155, Bardesane belonged to the aristocracy and received a serious philosophical education before converting to the new religion in 180. (For a time, he adhered to the Valentinian school.) His vast learning also embraced astrology, ethnology and history. With his son Harmodius, he composed some 150 hymns honored by the Syrian churches.

His Dialogue on Destiny and Book of the Laws of Nations, from which his disciple Philippe compiled his teachings, did not escape the destruction ordered by the Church, although Eusebius did authorize the citation of a few extracts.[273]

When Caracalla dealt a mortal blow to the independance of Edessa in 216, Bardesane went into exile and went to Armenia, where, according to Moses of Chorene, he pursued historical research and worked for the propagation of Christianity. Thereafter his teachings accorded a growing place to the idea of liberty.

One can not exclude an encounter between Bardesane and an Indian ambassador sent by the Emperor Heliogabale around 218. One believes that he died in 222, leaving behind disciples and Christian communities that continued to exist until the Fifth Century.

Bardesane’s philosophical Christianity situated itself at an equal distance from the New Prophecy, the ascetic rigor and fantastic masochism of which he took exception to, and from an ecclesiastical current that aimed to integrate itself as a recognized authority in the social order of Rome.

If he adapted the trinitarian conception — Father-Son and Pneuma-Spirit (Spirit), which would triumph at Nicaea — from the Valentinian Theodotus, Bardesane was opposed to Marcion and he rejected the Demiurgical creation. According to Bardesane, the world was the work of a Good God, because, despite its imperfections, salvation enters into mankind’s possibilities. Thus it was incorrectly that Ephrem the Syrian denounced the influence of Bardesane on Mani, the founder of the Manichean religion. If the Bardesanites excluded from their canon the two epistles of Paul to the Corinthians, no doubt it was due to Marcionism, which presented versions anterior to the Catholic corrections.

Bardesane did not divide men into three classes, according to the common Gnostic opinion of the Second Century — hylics, psychics and pneumatics — but distinguished in each person three levels on the ladder of consciousness: the soma, the psyche, [and] the pneuma. Through the Christ, God gave the model of a gradual elevation that traces the road of salvation.

The Bardesanites obviously knew nothing of the canonical gospels, but referred to the Acts of Thomas and to the logia that composed the gospel attributed to the mythical apostle of Edessa.

Drijvers detects the influence of Philo of Alexandria, transmitted by the Jewish milieus, well implanted in Edessa.[274] The Essene and Judeo-Christian doctrine of the two roads, Light and Darkness, left traces in Bardesane’s conception of liberty.

This proceeded from a spirit of divine origin, which, uniting with the soul, descended through the seven spheres of the planets (the Hebdomade) so as to implant itself in the human body at the moment of birth. The soul submits to the influence of planetary forces, which it must wheedle [amadouer] at the time of its future ascension, the hour of birth thus determining the course of existence and distributing fortune and misfortune.

In his goodness, God nevertheless permits man to escape from the ineluctable. United with the soul, the spirit arrogates for itself the privilege of influencing circumstances. Knowledge of the horoscope intervenes in salvation in a decisive manner. Adam made bad use of such a gift and did not authorize his soul to return to the place of its divine origin, which Bardesane called the “nuptial chamber of Light.”[275] (The Gospel attributed to Philippe, from the same era, evokes the relations between redemption and koinon, “nuptial chamber,” in which the union with the Plerome, the Divine Totality or Ogdoade, takes place. The soul, the spirit and the body give birth to a quite piquant anecdotal translation: “Three walk with the Lord at the same time: Mary, his mother, his sister and Madeleine, whom one calls his companion. Because Mary is his sister, mother and companion” [Section 32].)

The coming of the Christ — still conceived as angelos-christos, not as historical founder of a religion — unveiled to the soul the road of salvation, the manner of untangling obscurity and darkness so as to vanguish the determination of the planets and to assure the soul’s final redemption. Here Bardesane expounded the theory of free will, battle-horse of the future Catholicism.

The envoy of God, Jesus filled no other mission than indicating, through the sacrifice of his flesh, the salvational road and the gnosis that taught one how to leave the obscure chaos of the body. Not an extreme asceticism, as required by the New Prophecy, but a sacrificial exercise that elevated the spirit and united it with the breath of the soul, which thereby obtained the power to vanquish the conjuration of the planetary injunctions and return to the light. He who identifies with the Christ modified the astrological laws and increased his power over the macrocosm. Such were the teachings of Bardesane. It is the thought of Simon of Samaria, inverted by its antiphysis and denatured by the Christic example. A thought that, if Christianized, did not remain any less unacceptable to ecclesiastical authority, since Bardesane entrusted the work of redemption in the hands of each person, without the help of any church.

Audi

If one believes Michael the Syrian, the Archdeacon Audi (or Audie) belonged to the Bardesanite communities at the end of the Third Century or the beginning of the Fourth. To support his legitimate authority, he produced apocalypses and the Acts of the Apostles, which the Constantinian Church — adopting the political line of the “Palutians” — would condemn as “apocryphal.”

Gregoire Bar-Hebraeus, an Arab theologian from the Seventh Century, attributed to Audi ninety-four apocalypses or revelations. Underneath a scornful and anecdotal reduction that Bar-Hebraeus imposed on Audi’s ideas, the Bardesanite doctrine of the descent and resurrection of the Spirit confronting the planetary Eons shows through: “(Audi claimed) that the Christ descended to all of the firmaments and that their inhabitants did not know him, and that his body was celestial, and that it was injured by the lance, and that it was not injured, that it was hung from the wood and that it was not hung.”[276]

Audi’s conception was not essentially different from that of Arrius, the quarrel about whom — at the same time — irritated the emerging tyranny of the Catholic, apostolic and Roman Church. Audi would reject the decisions made in Nicaea. Exiled to Scythia, he would propagate his Christianity among the Goths.[277]

Origen Of Alexandria

The fate reserved for Origen and his work unveiled the work of falsification that was accomplished by the Church after the Constantinian turn. An authentic Christian martyr and a philosopher in the service of faith, he was condemned for heresy because, despite the revisions of his doctrine, his Christology was still that of an angel-messiah and his Jesus found his source in Joshua. In addition, he had sympathies for the New Prophecy, and he devoted himself to asceticism with a disconcerting rigor, which authorized him to scorn the apostate clergy of his era — the heritage of which the Constantinian Church would claim.

Origen’s work was reduced, as if by chance, to tiny fragments and held in several large volumes, so that the zeal of Rufin and other guardians of orthodoxy could take care to reconstitute it and rectify it according to the correct dogmatic line.

Born around 185 to Christian parents in Alexandria, the city of all the doctrines, Origen was in his adolescence when his father, Leonides, surrendered to punishment in 201, then perished in the persecutions of the New Prophecy.

Origen was initiated into Neo-Platonist philosophy, which he tried to accord with Christianity. A disciple of Clement of Alexandria, he combated the work of Celse, The True Discourse, directed against the new religion. In Rome he met Hippolyte, a bishop and philosopher, to whom the Elenchos is sometimes attributed. In the same way that Hippolyte (like Tertullian and the Montanists) vituperated the laxity of another bishop of Rome, Callixte — whom many historians take for a pope — Origine, who succeeded Clement as the head of the Christian didaskale of Alexandria, entered into conflict with the bishop [named] Demetrius. It is true that Origen pushed the concern for chastity to the point of self-castration, so as to resist, without beating around the bush, the temptations of the flesh. Forced into exile in Cesarea in 231, he would die following tortures inflicted around 254 under the persecutions of Dece.

Badly noted by the clerical party of the lapsi, Origen drew upon himself — a century after his death — the displeasure of Epiphanius of Salamis, before being officially condemned by the Emperor Justinian the First, at the second Council of Constantinople in 553.

The Church reproached Origen for having neglected the historical character of Jesus-Christ, no doubt too recently invented, which the skill of Rufinus — who amended, expurgated and corrected everything that did not agree with the dogma — did not succeed in introducing.

Interpreting the Bible in an allegorical sense, Origen identified the Christ with an eternal Logos named Joshua, who returned to the Father without ceasing to be present in the spirit of the Christians. His commentaries on Jesus, son of Noun, explain that “God gave the name that is above names to Jesus-Christ our Lord. Therefore, the name that is above all names is Jesus [...] And because this name is above all names, over the generations no one has received it.” And interpreting the Bible in an allegorical sense recalls the first mention of Jesus. It is found in Exodus: “God summoned Jesus and sent him to fight against Amalec.”

In her preface to Homelies on Joshua/Jesus, Annie Jaubert emphasizes the importance of the typology of Joshua: “The reason is that this typology constituted itself precisely in opposition to Judaism. No one being greater for the Jews than Moses, prophet and legislator, the Christians had to prove that the Old Testament, through the person of Jesu Nave, had already manifested the superiority of Jesus over Moses.”[278]

How can we not infer from such reasoning the appearance of Jesus as the mythical founder of Christianity at the beginning of the Second Century, a double of Moses whom the Greco-Roman remake [English in original] would erect as a Montanist agitator and then founder of the Roman Church?

Origen actually conserved a Christianity of which the spirit was originally formed in Alexandria, in the circles of Essene, Nazarene, Philonian and Elchasaite speculations. Like Clement, he remained a Gnostic in the sense that knowledge unveiled to consciousness what the faith of the New Prophecy revealed to the body, that is, a purification in which access to salvation resides. At this price, God, in the infinity of his love, would accord a universal redemption in which the demons and the Devil himself would be saved.

Despite the calumnies of the so-called “Church Fathers,” the least limited of whom admired his erudition, Origen would be perpetuated in the works of Pseudo-Denys the Areopagite, Gregoire of Nysse, John Scot Erigene, nay, Hildegarde von Bingen and Eckhardt.

Paul Of Samosate, Bishop Of Antioch

At the beginning of the Fourth Century, in Edessa, King Abgar — converted to the religion that had recently been recognized by the State — circulated personal letters addressed to Jesus-Christ and to which he had obligingly responded. Thus Abgar reengaged for his own profit the operation engaged in by the Church so as to loan to Jesus, Paul and Peter the status of historical personages. Rejected much later as gross fakes, these letters only differed from the New Testament by their (quite elevated) degreee of improbability.

Like all of the potentates touched by the racketeering of Rome, King Abgar used Catholicism as an instrument of power. He reorganized the clergy of the city, conferred upon it a monarchal form, transformed the temples into churches, the traditional festivals into consecrations of the saints, and religiously furnished the space and time of the city, as the Church would undertake to do at the level of the Imperium Romanum.[279]

Paul of Samosate, bishop of Antioch in 260, anticipated King Abgar’s reforms by 50 years. To the authority of the governor of the Church of Antioch, he added that of the governor of the Syrian province of Commagene and secretary of finances to Queen Zenobia of Palmyra.

Personage of the first rank in the region, Paul of Samosate was on the best terms with Zenobia, and favored a Syrian nationalism that aroused the suspicions and encouraged the rebellions of his peers and ecclesiastical rivals. A synod united in Antioch deposed him in 268.

Paul of Samosate’s doctrine showed the line of uncertainty in which the debate on the nature of the Christ was still stuck. For Paul of Samosate, God engendered the Logos that could be called the Son. The Logos inspired Moses and the prophets, then Jesus, who was only a man when, during baptism, the Logos entered him and transformed him into a perfect being. From then on, he accomplished miracles, triumphed over sin in himself and all men, with the result that his death redeemed and saved all of humanity. He preexisted and judged the living and the dead.

Ironically, the synod that deposed Paul of Samosate would reject the term homoousios (consubstantial) by which he designated the identity of God and the Christ; this was the same quality that the Church would impose in the Fourth Century as the only trinitary truth.

His conception of the Trinity, it is true, took a personal turn that was not compatible with the idea that the Church would forge in the Fourth Century. According to Leontus of Byzantium, “he gave the name of Father to God, who created all things; the name of Son to himself, who was purely a man; and Spirit to the grace that resulted from the apostles.”[280]

Theodore of Mopsueste attributed to Paul of Samosate a remark, the echo of which — a thousand years later — would still reverberate among the Amaurians and the partisans of the Free Spirit: “I do not envy the Christ because he had been made God, but because such as he was made, I was made, since he is found in my nature.”[281]

The enemies of Paul of Samosate did not exaggeratedly yield to the facilities of the lie when they affirmed that, in Antioch, the psalms that were sung were less in honor of God than in his honor. Paul accorded a place for women in religious offices, but nothing permits one to affirm that this was not in the manner of the Montanists and their virginal prophetesses.

The heresiologues detected his influence in the Nestorianism of the Fifth Century and in the Paulician movement that struggled against Byzantium in the Eighth Century.