The Abgar Documents Chapter 1

Editor's note

This is the oldest written form of the tradition the Church commemorates on the twenty first of August, and Eusebius is explicit about his method: he says he took the documents out of the Edessene archive and translated them from Syriac. Historians read the correspondence as a document of the church of Edessa rather than a transcript of a first-century exchange. It is printed here as Eusebius printed it, and the reader is left to weigh it.