The Abgar Legend: From Locative Foundation to Identity in Locative Voice

Among the faithful of the Assyrian Church of the East (ACOE) it is well-known fact that their traditional liturgical language—Syriac—is “the language Jesus spoke.”  (Syriac is a dialect of Aramaic, after all, unlike Greek and Latin.)  Among the faithful of the ACOE it is also a well-known fact that Jesus founded the church in Osrohene (Edessa) in Syria around the year 30 CE in his correspondence with King Abgar V Ukama.  Well, actually the church was more formally established when the apostle Addai was sent to Edessa (either by the apostle Thomas or by Jesus himself) to cure Abgar of his disease after Jesus had been crucified and resurrected.  At any rate, the ACOE was established by Jesus, through the apostles’ authority, immediately after Jesus’ earthly life.  Among the points of pride the faithful of the ACOE tally to their church’s credit, this is among the most important.  Jesus did not correspond with Tiberius Caesar, nor deliberately send an apostle to Rome; Peter took on the task of founding the church in Rome.  But Jesus founded the church in Edessa.

Among the Gentiles

Luke Timothy Johnson’s Among the Gentiles is an illuminating comparative study.  Johnson’s goal is to demonstrate that although Greco-Roman religion and early Christianity disagreed on many specific beliefs and practices, their ways of being religious (i.e. their approaches to divine power) were fundamentally congruous.  

In the first three chapters Johnson addresses the debate to which he hopes to contribute, the method and perspective he follows, and the model he employs.  Tracing the polemic of Christianity against “pagan” religion from the first century CE to the present, Johnson suggests in the first chapter that such debates about the relationship between the two religious complexes have proven unfruitful and not a little dissimulating.  Chapter two outlines a fresh approach to the discussion from the field of religious studies.  Johnson provides a definition of religious experience that understands religion as a collection of human responses to what is perceived as ultimate power (often referred to throughout the book as “divine dynāmis”), a definition he has also argued for elsewhere.