CHRONICON EDESSENUM.

1 Year two hundred and sixty-six.
Augustus Caesar reigned.

2 Year three hundred and nine.
Our Lord was born.

3 Year four hundred.
King Abgar built a temple and tomb for himself.

4 Year four hundred and forty-nine.
Marcion departed from the Catholic Church.

5 Year four hundred and sixty-five.
On the eleventh of Tammuz, Bardesanes was born.

II. In the two hundred and sixty-sixth year, Augustus Caesar reigned.

III. In the three hundred and ninth year, our Lord was born.

IV. In the four hundredth year, King Abgar built a mausoleum for himself.

V. In the four hundred and forty-ninth year, Marcion departed from the Catholic Church.

VI. In the four hundred and sixty-fifth year, on the eleventh of July, Bardesanes was born.

VII. Lu-

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1 Year 266. This was, according to the opinion of the Edessenes, the forty-third year before the birth of Christ, as stated above in number 2. The beginning is taken from the death of Julius Caesar, which fell on the 15th of March; and thus the birth of Christ, according to the Syriac writers, is assigned to the 44th year of Augustus; which was also the opinion of the Western Church. See Pagi in his Apparatus, number 157.

2 Year 309. Gregory Barhebraeus affirms the same regarding the year of Christ's birth in the Storehouse of Mysteries in the Chronological Table, which he puts before his Exposition of the Gospels, and elsewhere passim. And this was the common opinion of the Syrians, although we noted above in number 2 that their three hundred and ninth year corresponds to the three hundred and eleventh year.

3 Abgar. This was the nineteenth King of Edessa, concerning whom below.

4 Marcion. Different authors establish different beginnings for this heresy. St. Cyprian, in his epistle to Pompeius, seems to affirm that Marcion propagated his heresy under Pope Hyginus: For not yet (he says) had Marcion emerged from Pontus, whose master, Cerdon, came to Rome under Hyginus, who was then the ninth bishop in the city; Marcion followed him, and with added increases to the crime, began to blaspheme more impudently and abruptly against God the Father, the Creator. St. Epiphanius (Heresy 42) reports that this happened after the death of Hyginus: When therefore (he says) Marcion had not obtained from him (that is, from the bishop father) what he sought through flattery, not bearing the mockery of many, he fled from his city and came to Rome when the Roman bishop Hyginus had died, etc. But even before the death of St. Hyginus, in the year of Christ 138, Marcion had begun to disseminate his heresy, as is shown—besides the testimony of the Edessene Chronicle—by St. Justin Martyr, who makes mention of Marcion in two places in his first Apology, written around the year 139 of Christ. Furthermore, Philastrius (book On Heresies, chapter 46) writes that Marcion first taught errors in Asia, and having been convicted there by the disciples of John, came to Rome. Therefore, before his arrival in Rome, he had already promulgated the heresy in Asia, and this under the Emperor Hadrian and Pope Hyginus, as Petavius rightly observes in his Animadversions on Epiphanius, Heresy 46. Wherefore Marcion (to conclude with the words of Pagi for the year 144, number 3) first preached his nefarious dogma in Syria (after, clearly, he had been expelled from the Church by his father because of incest), and this while Hadrian was emperor, or at least at the beginning of Antoninus Pius; and afterwards he came to Rome after the death of Pope Hyginus, where, when the presbyters who governed the Church would not wish to innovate anything, and Marcion had not even obtained access to the Church, he returned to Pontus, and drawing greater spirits, began to lean more vehemently into the same errors. St. Epiphanius, in the place cited, recounts and refutes his errors in the Holy Scriptures, whether through addition or subtraction; to this also refer the Hymns of St. Ephrem from page 128, where he compares evangelical truth to the letters of the Alphabet, to which it is permitted neither to add nor subtract anything.

5 Bardesanes. He was a friend of Abgar, son of Maanu, as St. Epiphanius testifies (Heresy 56). He urged him to enact a law that no one in the future should castrate himself, as Eusebius writes in book 5 of the Preparation, chapter 10. He lived after the death of him (that is, King Abgar) up to the times of Antoninus Caesar, not called Pius but Verus, says the same Epiphanius in the same place. However, these words cannot agree either with the Patriarch Dionysius or with our Edessene Chronicle if the death of Bardesanes is placed under Antoninus Verus, that is, the Emperor M. Aurelius. For this emperor, as Tertullian and Dio testify, departed from the living on the 17th of March, in the year of Christ 180, according to Pagi, number 2. But the author of our Edessene Chronicle reports that Bardesanes was born in the year of the Greeks 465, that is, 154 of Christ.