Like Harran, its immediate neighbour, Edessa lay on the fault-line between the rival empires of Rome and Persia; but unlike Harran, which positively revelled in her idolatrous reputation, Edessa was famed among Christians everywhere as the “Blessed City.” Christ Himself, so it was said, had penned a missive to one of her kings. The very document itself was still to be found in the city’s archives: sure proof against scepticism. Nor was that all. Edessa laid claim to an even more sensational souvenir of Christ’s correspondence: His only known self-portrait, painted and sent by Him, so it was said, in response to a royal fan-letter. No wonder, given these indubitable marks of divine favour, that Christians should have believed that Edessa was destined never to fall. Certainly, the protective sympathy extended by her rulers towards the Church had enabled the city to become a veritable hot-house of Christian scholarship. The hymns, and the prayers, and the translations written there would serve to make Syriac, the language spoken by the Edessans, the lingua franca of the entire Christian Near East.
As the rabbis hunkered down inside their own schools, the influence of Edessa was already palpable in the streets that stretched beyond their walls. All very well for the rabbis to meet this challenge with an icy show of silence—but that hardly served to make it go away. A Christian, after all, was likely to have none of the compunctions about converting a Jew that a Jew might have about converting a Christian. Increasingly, in the competition between the two faiths for proselytes, it was clear which one was winning.
Yet mortal though the enmity between the rabbis and the leaders of the Gentile Church had certainly become, it was haunted by paradox. Relations between these two implacable rivals were shaped by a truth that neither could possibly acknowledge: both, in their struggle to define themselves, had need of the other. The more that Christians scorned the Jews as a people unchanged from what they had ever been, clinging blindly and obdurately to the wreckage of a superseded faith, so the more, ironically enough, did it serve to burnish the rabbis’ self-image. Here, from their bitterest opponents, was confirmation of their own most prized conceits: that they were the guardians of a timeless law; that there was no hint of novelty attached to their current project; and that the ancient prophets—Daniel, Abraham, Adam—had all been rabbis exactly like themselves. Christians, however, were not the only ones to have given their foes an involuntary boost. The rabbis, by refusing to engage in open combat with the Christian heretics, were effectively declaring that the minim no longer ranked as even faintly Jewish—and not to rank as Jewish was, of course, to a rabbi, a truly terrible fate. This, however, was not at all how the minim themselves saw things. The only effect of Jewish scorn on a Gentile bishop was to boost his self-confidence, and flatter his pretensions. “Do not marvel,” Christ had declared, “that I said to you, ‘You must be born anew.’ ”75 To the Gentile Church, the sense of itself as a daughter sprung from the womb of a withered and unregenerate mother had become a precious conceit. Just as the rabbis had every interest in dismissing Christians as bastard and unwanted spawn, so did Christians have no less an interest in casting the faith of their Jewish contemporaries as the failed parent of their own. Both, though, were wrong. The relationship between the rival faiths, that of the rabbis and the bishops, was not one of parent and child. Rather, it was one of siblings: rival twins, doomed like Romulus and Remus to mutual hatred, yet bred all the same of the identical womb.76
And there were still places, to the disgust of both rabbis and bishops, where a strong sense of this endured. Three centuries on from the supposed arrival in Edessa of Christ’s letter, and there were few better spots from where to gauge the potentially infinite variety of human belief than “the Blessed City.” To stand on its citadel and gaze around at the horizon was, for a Christian sage, to be conscious of just how various was God’s creation. To the east was the empire of the Persians; to the west, that of the Romans. On the margins of the first, in Khorasan, it was the habit of “a single man to take many wives”; on the margins of the second, in Britain, “many men together take a single wife.”77 The glory of the Christian faith, so it seemed to the scholars of Edessa, was that it provided all of humanity with a means of transcending such differences of custom: of giving people, no matter where they lived, one common identity as the children of Abraham. Yet what was the Christian faith? To lower the gaze from the distant horizon, to look down into the teeming warren of Edessa’s streets, was to doubt that there could be any single answer. There were some Christians walking the city who followed the doctrines of Marcion, and others who denied that Christ had suffered on the cross, and others yet who believed that the four earliest gospels should be read in the form of a single digest. To be sure, there was no lack of Christians either who were proud to account themselves members of a worldwide, orthodox Church—and yet their traditions were no less fiercely local for that. In every Christian community, not just Edessa, the cast of what people believed, and how they behaved, might be influenced by much more than their bishop. The festivals that were held in a city’s streets, the languages that were spoken in its markets, and the stories that were shared around its evening fires: all might serve to influence the character of its Church. This was why, in Edessa and in cities across Mesopotamia, it mattered a very great deal that the Jews were people of flesh and blood, and not mere faceless bogeys. They might be neighbours, colleagues—even friends.78 The Christians of the East, almost without realising it, bore the unmistakable stamp of this. Certainly, to visitors from other Churches, they were liable to appear quite disconcertingly Jewish.
In Mesopotamia, for instance, Christians still refused to eat meat that had not first been drained of all its blood, exactly as prescribed by the Torah.79 They celebrated the resurrection of Christ on a date arrived at by a specifically Jewish method of calculation.80 Even the title by which they habitually addressed their priests—rabban—sounded similar to, and had the same meaning as, rabbi. Granted, none of this implied any sense of kinship between Jewish and Christian leaders. Quite the contrary: the rabbis’ and priests’ consciousness of what they shared only made them all the more determined to draw rigid dividing-lines between their two faiths. Yet, in reality, those dividing-lines were often blurred. In Edessa, for instance, the mutual obsession of Jewish and Christian scholars with one another’s labours bore a particularly spectacular fruit: for the first translation of the Old Testament into Syriac was most likely made, not by Christians at all, but by Jews, who then subsequently converted and made a gift of their work to the Church.81 Yet in truth, to many Jews, it was not always apparent that an acceptance of Jesus as the Messiah did necessarily require them to stop being Jewish. Likewise, among the ranks of Christians, there were many who persisted in obeying the Torah and who regarded Paul, not as a saint, but rather as “a renegade from the Law”82—the heretic of heretics. Some, indeed, saw no contradiction in hedging their bets even more comprehensively by invoking both the One God of the Jews and the Trinity of the Christians simultaneously. “By the name of I-Am-That-I-Am, the Lord of Hosts,” as one particularly all-inclusive curse ran, “and by the name of Jesus, who conquered the height and the depth by his cross, and by the name of his exalted father, and by the name of the holy spirits forever and in eternity …?”83 Well, then, might those who sought to patrol the dividing-line between the two faiths have been appalled. “It is monstrous to talk of Jesus Christ, and yet to behave as a Jew.”84 This assertion had been made by a celebrated saint of the early Church, Ignatius, a man supposedly appointed bishop of the great Syrian city of Antioch by Simon Peter himself; and yet it might just as well have been made by a rabbi. Jewish and Christian leaders alike, both had the same frontier policy: to create a no-man’s land. Both were equally threatened by an open, porous border.