(b Edessa [now Urfa], 11 July 154; d Edessa, 222). Syrian hymnographer, astrologer and philosopher. Born into a pagan priestly family, he was educated by a pagan priest but baptized as a Christian, and in 179 he was ordained deacon and priest. Later denounced as a heretic and excommunicated (c216), he fled to Armenia and there taught a kind of astrological fatalism. Bardaisan has been erroneously regarded as a leader of the oriental school of gnosticism founded by Valentinus. His theology, which in fact combined Christian doctrine with astrological and philosophical speculation, is known from the works of later Christian writers such as Eusebius and Ephrem Syrus, who strongly denounced it, and from Bardaisan’s own Dialogue with Antonius concerning Destiny (or Book of the Laws of the Lands), which is the oldest surviving document in Syriac.
Bardaisan wrote many hymns (madrāshe) in Syriac, which his disciples translated into Greek. They included 150 psalms in pentasyllabic metre, reportedly modelled on those of David, through which he popularized his heretical doctrines (Bardaisan’s son Harmonius is said to have written the tunes). The stanzas of the madrāshe, probably sung by soloists, were followed by a fixed choral response; they were constructed on isosyllabic principles, the patterns ranging from the very simple (e.g. five four-syllable lines to each stanza) to the highly complex and diffuse. There is, however, no reason to suppose that in Bardaisan’s time isosyllabic poetry was an altogether novel phenomenon. His madrāshe were very successful and continued to be sung in Edessa probably until the first half of the 5th century; they earned him the title ‘Father of Syriac Poetry’. By way of retribution, Ephrem composed other (orthodox) madrāshe based on the same metre and with equivalent verse structure. None of Bardaisan’s hymns survives, except for some excerpts cited by Ephrem, although there is a hymn that may be his in the 3rd-century apocryphal Acts of Thomas ascribed to circles under Bardaisan’s influence. His historical works on India and Armenia are also lost.
O. Bardenhewer: Geschichte der altkirchlichen Litteratur (Freiburg, 1902–32/R), i, 337ff
F.C. Burkitt: Early Eastern Christianity (London, 1904), 155–227
H.J.W. Drijvers: Bardaisan of Edessa (Assen, 1966)
S.P. Brock: ‘Syrian and Greek Hymnography: Problems of Origin’, Studia patristica, xvi (1985), 77–81
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