ENCRATITES

One of the earliest Asian church fathers, Tatian (ca. 110-180) was a biblical scholar,
linguist, and ascetic. He was born of pagan parents in the ancient Assyrian territory of
northern Mesopotamia (modern Iraq). About 150, having come to Rome for study, he
became a pupil of Justin Martyr, a firm defender of Christian orthodoxy during the 2nd
century. When Justin was scourged and beheaded about 165, Tatian opened a school of
his own. But some time about the year 172 he shook the dust of the West off his feet and
returned to Assyria to open a theological school or perhaps simply a self-sustaining
Christian community. Through it, Tatian proceeded to stamp his own stern image on the
character of eastern Syrian and northern Persian Christianity for years to come.

Tatian is also remembered for his firm – though seemingly exaggerated – emphasis
on the merits of radical asceticism, an emphasis that deeply affected character of the
early Eastern Church. Western theologians who attacked it named it as the heresy of
Encratism. The word means “self-control” but as used in this connection it signifies
strong denial and an insistence on the separation of Christians from the world because
of the belief that matter is evil, which taints it with a touch of Gnosticism.

According to his opponents in the Western church, such as Jerome, Tatian was there-
fore a heretic. His Western opponents charged him with expressing even more extreme
theological positions. It is in these writings that he is said to have forbidden the eating of
meat, the drinking of wine, and even the joys of marriage. Jerome, for example, writes:

Tatian . . . the very violent heresiarch of the Encratites, employs an argument of this sort: “If
any one sows to the flesh, of the flesh he shall reap corruption”; but he sows to the flesh who
is joined to a woman; therefore he who takes a wife and sows in the flesh, of the flesh he
shall reap corruption.

Tatian has been defended from the attacks of his Western critics on the grounds that
ascetic self-denial is thoroughly scriptural and that even if he did carry his renunciation
of the world further than the scriptural norm, his position was not at all abnormal
judged by Asian religious ideals.

The opponents of Tatian labeled him as “the father of the Encratites,” the radical as-
cetics of the Syrian deserts and mountains. Whatever their motives, good or bad,
whether they were zealously eager to follow biblical patterns of self-denial or were led
astray by a less than Christian desire for merit or by philosophic (and Gnostic) distrust
of the world of physical matter, the Encratite hermits quickly became the popular mod-
els of sainthood in the Syrian church.

Ascetic monasticism, in fact, may actually have originated in Syria rather than in
Egypt, as is usually stated. Athanasius (ca. 295-373) called St. Antony of Egypt “the
founder of asceticism.” But it was not until 270 that St. Antony renounced the world for
the lonely life and fought against demons in the desert, whereas Tatian, the father of the
Encratites, lived a whole century earlier. The solitary recluses of the Syrian wastes were
even more fanatical than their Egyptian counterparts. They chained themselves to
rocks. They bent their bodies under iron weights. They walled themselves up in caves.
The earliest of them, according to later tradition, was Atones (or Aones) who is said to
have lived like a wild beast in the caves near Edessa, by the well where Jacob met Ra-
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chel. The only food he allowed himself to touch was uncooked grass.

The same tone of atypical self-denial runs through the Acts of Thomas, which is as
important for the way it mirrors the popular faith of early Syrian Christians in Edessa at
the end of the second century as for the clues it gives to the history of the Thomas Chris-
tians in India. This is how it describes Thomas:

Continually he fasts and prays, and eats only bread and salt and drinks water, and he wears
one garment whether in fine weather or foul, and takes nothing from anyone for himself,
and what he has he gives to others. (Acts Thom. 2:19-20; 9:104)

According to the same account, Thomas the apostle behaves much like the later En-
cratites. He considers marriage sinful. He is invited to sing at the wedding of a royal
princess and his song speaks so persuasively of the only “incorruptible and true mar-
riage,” which is union with God and not with man or woman, that the royal bride and
groom renounce the joys of married life and consecrate themselves in perpetual virgini-
ty to Jesus Christ, the Heavenly Bridegroom (Acts Thom. 1:5-16).

Encratism, as described in such apocryphal Acts of the apostles, was an old heresy. It
was much like what Paul condemns in 1 Timothy 4:1-6:

The Spirit has explicitly said that during the last times there will be some who will desert
the faith and choose to listen to deceitful spirits and doctrines that come from the devils . . . ;
they will say marriage is forbidden, and lay down rules about abstaining from foods which
God created to be accepted with thanksgiving by all who believe and know the truth. Every-
thing God has created is good…

Nevertheless, it was just such an unorthodox asceticism, tainted by its apparent link
with Gnostic heresy, that spread from Syria and Egypt and persisted well into the fourth
and fifth centuries. Irenaeus, writing about 185, found it as far west as Gaul and blamed
it on Tatian, the Easterner, for it was in the East that it put down its deepest roots and
appeared in so many forms that it is often difficult to distinguish between what was
considered orthodox and unorthodox in the asceticism of the Eastern church.

Asceticism and Asian Missions

Not all the discipline of the early Asian church was centered on separation and with-
drawal from the world. There was a missionary dynamic also in its faith that sent be-
lievers out into the pagan world to preach the gospel. And though Edessa of Osrhoene
was traditionally the first base of missionary expansion to the East, Arbela of Adiabene
was also to become a major center for missions beyond Mesopotamia into eastern Per-
sia and central Asia.

In the very earliest Christian documents of the East, the call to ascetic self-denial is
almost always associated with the call to go and preach and serve. This seems to have
been the most striking difference between Syrian and Egyptian saint-ascetics. Egypt,
more solidly agricultural, valued stability and tended to withdraw from outside contacts
and movements. Its saints ignored the world and retreated to their caves and cells. Syr-
ia, on the other hand, with its travel and trading traditions, stressed mobility and out-
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reach. Its ascetics became wander-

ing missionaries, healing the sick,
feeding the poor, and preaching
the gospel as they moved from
place to place. R. Murray describes
them as “homeless followers of
the homeless Jesus on . . . cease-
less pilgrimage through this
world.”

In the traditions of the first

missionaries of the East there is
the same note of wandering mis-
sion, of moving out across the
world for Christ. Thomas in India
gives thanks that he has become . .
. an ascetic and a pauper and a
wanderer for God (Acts Thom.
6:60-61; 12:139, 145, and pas-
sim.). And Addai refuses to receive silver and gold from the king of Edessa, saying that
he has forsaken the riches of this world “because without purses and without scrips,
bearing the cross upon our shoulders, we were commanded to preach the Gospel in the
whole creation.” The Gospel of Thomas, that mixture of tradition and nonconformity
found in Egypt but attributed to Edessa, exhorts the faithful to “become wanderers,”
perhaps as a call to mission. It declares that traveling and healing are higher calls than
fasting, praying, and giving alms. And it quotes the Lord’s call to missionary action—
”The harvest is great but the laborers are few” —and repeats it again with a dramatic
twist, “Many are round the opening but nobody in the well” (Gos. Thom. 9, 112, 77, 78).

The early traditional histories name Addai, Aggai, and Mari as the first missionaries
to the farther east. The Doctrine of the Apostles relates that Addai was the pioneer who
planted the church in Edessa, in Nisibis (Soba), and in Arabia and the borders of Meso-
potamia. His disciple, Aggai, is credited with the apostolate to “the whole of Persia of the
Assyrians and Armenians and Medians, and of the countries round about Babylon, the
Huzites and the Gelai [i.e., on the Caspian Sea], even to the borders of the Indians, and
even to the country of Gog Magog.” Another line of tradition centers around the mis-
sionary, Mari, another disciple of Addai.

Perhaps Aggai and Mari were both early missionaries to Persia beyond the Tigris,
though the accounts are unreliable and the sweeping geographic references must be
treated with caution. There is something appealingly believable, however, about the
story of Mari. In the tradition, this disciple of Addai, the disciple of Thomas, was, like the
doubting apostle himself, a reluctant missionary. Sent out from Edessa “to the regions of
the east,” he became discouraged and begged the church at home to release him from
his mission and allow him to return. But the church ordered him to persist. So obe-
diently but grudgingly he set himself to the evangelization of Persia and set off on an ar-
duous series of missionary journeys that brought him almost to India. There, when as he
said he “smelt the smell of the Apostle Thomas,” he felt at last that he had done his duty
and had gone far enough.
 [4]

There is even more reliable evidence than the reports of those questionably accurate
early histories that before the end of the Parthian dynasty the Christian faith had not
only penetrated Persia but had moved beyond into the steppes of central Asia. In what
has been called “the oldest document in Syriac literature relating to Christianity in cen-
tral Asia,” a “memorable sentence” from Bardaisan’s Book of the Laws of Countries, writ-
ten about 196, he mentions Christians living as far to the east as Bactria, which is now
known as northern Afghanistan. From Mesopotamia to Persia, and before if end of the
second century to the Turkic tribes of the heartland of Asia, the faith was unquestiona-
bly spreading across the great continent of the East as vigorously as it moved westward
into Europe.

By the year 225, as the Parthian dynasty fell before the Persian Sassanids, Christian
missionaries had planted communities of the faith from the Euphrates to the Hindu
Kush and from Armenia to the Persian Gulf. The Chronicle of Arbela reports that by that
time there were already more than twenty bishops in Persia, with jurisdictions from the
mountains of Kurdistan in the east to the Caspian Sea in the west. “Churches multiplied,
monasteries increased and on every mouth could be heard words of glorification,” it
said.

That report may not be completely reliable, but independent historical evidence
supports the assertion of extensive Christian penetration of Persia by 225. The monu-
ment of a Christian bishop, Abercius of Hierapolis in Phrygia Salutaris (Asia Minor),
erected perhaps as early as the middle of the second century and not discovered until
the nineteenth century, gives remarkable contemporary proof of the spreading pres-
ence of Christians beyond the Euphrates. The bishop composed his own unusual epitaph
centering around his great journey west as far as Rome and east to Nisibis. “I saw the
Syrian plain and all the cities, [even] Nisibis, having crossed the Euphrates. Everywhere
I found people with whom to speak (i.e., Christians).” An expanded version of the epi-
taph tells how he met the great Bardaisan in a delegation of Christians, distinguished
from all the rest by his noble bearing. The language of the bishop is guarded, for the age
of persecutions was not over, but he mentions celebrating the sacraments with those he
met, referring to the Eucharist symbolically in terms of “the Fish” and the chalice.

This early presence of a Christian community in Nisibis between Osrhoene and Adi-
abene is more than another evidence of Christianity’s missionary flow eastward. It sug-
gests the possibility that Arbela, the capital of Adiabene, if not prior to Edessa as a Chris-
tian center, could well have been an independent focus for a missionary thrust in all di-
rections throughout the Persian Empire.

In less than two hundred years after the death of Christ, Syrian Christians were be-
ginning to carry the faith not just across the Asian borders of Rome, and not into Persia
alone, but out across the continent toward the steppes of the central Asiatic nomads and
the edges of the Hindu Kush.