PREFACE.

wrote, as he himself afterwards did, on the affairs of Abgar, and the origin of the Church at Edessa. It is, indeed, conjectured by Grabe and others that Eusebius might have got the substance of what we find in the thirteenth chapter from the Chronographia chronicle of Sextus Julius Africanus; but I can find very little evidence to support that conjecture. It is much more probable that Eusebius would have before him a work professing to have been written by a contemporary of Addai, and written too in Syriac, the language of the country. He himself says that what is contained in his chapter from the letter of Abgar to the end was translated from Syriac into Greek.

But the part of the work which Eusebius translated does not appear to contain any thing, which would warrant us to regard it as an interpolation. We cannot, therefore, say whether the interpolations existed in the Syriac text used by Eusebius; but the following evidence renders it highly probable that they did. In p. 19 of the French translation of the Armenian version is the following note :—

“ Moses of Khoren, in his account of the journey of the Holy Rhipsimeans, cites both Petronice and the Holy Cross, of which she carried a piece, which afterwards by inheritance arrived at Rhipsime, but furthermore it is mentioned in the ancient ecclesiastical calendar, attributed to St. Isaac the great-grandson of St. Gregory the Illuminator, who occupied the patriarchal chair from 389 to 439; one reads there, on May 17: Feast of