Did Jesus have good penmanship?
There is a legend that Jesus wrote his own letter.
Sounds crazy, right? But did you know that there is a tradition in Christianity where he did? People had it, read it, preserved it, and shared it.
The setting is the turn of the first century, roughly 170 to 215 CE. A king named Abgarus IX reigned in the city of Edessa, in the region now called Turkey. Long before the Roman Empire embraced Christianity, Edessa embraced Christianity as the state religion, becoming arguably the first city to do so fully. But why would this random city in southern Turkey embrace Christianity when the empire as a whole at that time was sporadically persecuting the new faith? That story traces even further back, to the time of Jesus’ lifetime.
The story goes like this. The current king of Edessa, King Abgarus V, suffered from leprosy and sent a letter to Jesus asking him to come and cure it. Instead of coming personally, Jesus sent Thaddeus, his disciple, with a letter to Abgarus. The letter goes like this:
Blessed are you who have believed in me without seeing me.
It is written concerning me that those who have seen me will not believe, and that those who have not seen me will believe and live.
As for what you have written to me, that I should come to you, it is necessary for me to fulfill all things here for which I was sent, and after I have fulfilled them, to be taken up to him who sent me.
When I have been taken up, I will send to you one of my disciples to heal your sickness and give life to you and those with you.
The words of Jesus quoted in the correspondence come from the writings of Eusebius. He claimed to have found the exchange in the archives of Edessa and translated it from Syriac into Greek. By the time he was writing his Ecclesiastical History, however, Edessa had already been a Christian city for generations. The letter did not create the faith of the city, but it became part of the story the city told about itself.
By late antiquity, the letter attributed to Jesus had moved beyond historical curiosity and into devotional use. In several manuscript traditions, copies of the letter were carried as protective texts during war, illness, and plague. Like other sacred writings in the ancient world, it functioned not only as theology, but as protection.
So what are we to make of this? Is it true that Jesus wrote a letter and that people believed it to be authentic?
I asked historian Dr. John Dickson this question in 2005. I appreciated his response. He said, “We do not know. But what we do know is that Eusebius believed that what he had and what he quoted from was authentic."
It is interesting to think that a third century historian had what he believed to be an authentic letter written by the hands of Jesus. Imagine some scrap yard somewhere in southern Turkey holding a papyrus discarded for centuries that actually contains words written by Jesus himself.
How cool would that be? Fun to imagine, for sure.
Sources
Justo L. González, The Story of Christianity, Volume 1: The Early Church to the Dawn of the Reformation
Eusebius of Caesarea, Ecclesiastical History, Book 1, Chapter 13
The Doctrine of Addai (Syriac text, likely 4th to 5th century)
I’m Just Saying is a weekly email where I share a thought I’m wrestling with in real time. It is an invitation to pause, reflect, and reconsider the way we think about faith, the Bible, Jesus, and the Church. No pressure. Just an honest thought, once a week.
