Earliest known Syriac author. He was active at the court of Abgar VIII (177–212) inEdessa, where the chronicler Julius Africanus met him in 195 (Kestoi I.20), and recorded his skill at archery. Bardaiṣan’s name derives from that of the river Daiṣan (GreekSkirtos ‘Leaper’) which in his day flowed through Edessa. His own writings, which included works againstMarcion and the Chaldeans (that is, astrologers), are unfortunately lost, since his views on cosmology were later considered unorthodox. What survives is a philosophical dialogue on fate and freewill in which Bardaiṣan is the protagonist; this work, probably by his pupil Philip, is generally known as the ‘Book of the Laws of the Countries’, due to a section on ethnography (whose accuracy in the passage on Ḥaṭra is now confirmed by a Ḥaṭran inscription, no. 281). The work was translated into Greek, and quotations from it are given inEusebius’s ‘Preparation for the Gospel’ (VI.10.1–48) and the ‘Pseudo-Clementine Recognitions’ (IX.19–29). His teaching, some of which was conveyed in verse as well as in prose, has to be reconstructed from later hostile sources (above all,Ephrem); it was evidently syncretistic in character, with elements drawn from Greek philosophy and Iranian and Gnostic cosmology; it may have servedMani as a partial model. The teaching on freewill in the ‘Book of the Laws of the Countries’ has been shown to be largely dependent on Alexander of Aphrodisias.
Sebastian P. Brock
