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  • Chapter 13 - Bardaisan’s Disciples and Ethnographic Knowledge in the Roman Empire
  • from Part III - Cultural Translation and Transformation
  • Edited by Alice König, University of St Andrews, Scotland, Rebecca Langlands, University of Exeter, James Uden, Boston University
  • Book: Literature and Culture in the Roman Empire, 96–235
  • Published online: 28 April 2020
  • Print publication: 30 April 2020, pp 291-308
  • View extract

    Summary

    What were the sources for the ethnographic knowledge of Bardaisan of Edessa (active c. 200 CE) and his literary circle? This chapter maintains that such ethnographic knowledge, as exhibited by Bardaisan’s surviving historical fragments and the Syriac Book of the Laws of the Countries, was much more indebted to intertextual engagements with Greek and Latin material available to a contemporary Roman readership than to information collected from ‘eastern’ contacts and connections, as scholars sometimes surmise. Roman imperial networks in fact enabled the circulation of ethnographic information that served the authorial strategies of Bardaisan’s literary circle. Yet, Bardaisan’s circle attributed such knowledge, whether implicitly or explicitly, to eastern literary and oral sources and thus framed themselves as ‘eastern’ experts for both local Edessene and broader Roman audiences. In this way, they navigated the intricate space between ‘Roman’ and ‘Other’.

The Journey of Christianity to India in Late Antiquity
  • The Journey of Christianity to India in Late Antiquity
  • Networks and the Movement of Culture
  • Nathanael J. Andrade
  • Published online: 03 May 2018
  • Print publication: 19 April 2018
  • View description
    How did Christianity make its remarkable voyage from the Roman Mediterranean to the Indian subcontinent? By examining the social networks that connected the ancient and late antique Mediterranean to the Indian Ocean, central Asia, and Iran, this book contemplates the social relations that made such movement possible. It also analyzes how the narrative tradition regarding the apostle Judas Thomas, which originated in Upper Mesopotamia and accredited him with evangelizing India, traveled among the social networks of an interconnected late antique world. In this way, the book probes how the Thomas narrative shaped Mediterranean Christian beliefs regarding co-religionists in central Asia and India, impacted local Christian cultures, took shape in a variety of languages, and experienced transformation as it traveled from the Mediterranean to India, and back again.

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