Abdias of Babylon

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Abdias, bishop of Babylon (Obadiah) was an apocryphal writer, said to have been one of the Seventy Apostles mentioned in the Gospel of Luke 10:1 – 20. Abdias would be the first Bishop of Babylon, consecrated by Saint Simon Zelotes and Saint Jude. Nothing certain is known about him.

His role in history is limited to his putative authorship of a single work. The ten books called Historia Certaminis Apostolici (often referred to as the "Apostolic History of pseudo-Abdias") are ascribed to him. It is a major collection of the New Testament apocrypha, which tells of the labors and miracles, persecution and deaths of the Apostles, exhibiting a taste for the marvellous that places the narratives in the genre of heroic Romances, of which "these stories came at length to form a sort of apostolic cycle," M. B. Riddle noted in his Introductory Notice to Apocrypha of the New Testament (1870) [1].

This compilation purports to have been translated from Hebrew into Greek by "Eutropius", a disciple of Abdias, and, in the third century, from Greek into Latin by (Julius) Africanus, the friend of Origen, or as reported in Legenda Aurea by his disciple Tropaeus Africanus [2]. But it is really in origin a Latin work, for in it are cited, with the Vulgate of St Jerome, the Ecclesiastical History of Rufinus and his Latin translation of the Recognitiones of Clement.

The interest of the work is due to what the author claims to have drawn from the ancient Acta of the Apostles, and to many ancient legends which have survived in this collection. The text of the compiler who may then be called the "pseudo-Abdias" may be found in Tischendorff though there are parallel texts of single books printed in the Bollandists' Acta Sanctorum.

According to R.A. Lipsius, the work was compiled during the latter half of the sixth century, in an unidentified Frankish monastery, for the purpose of satisfying the natural curiosity of Western Christians. At the same time he used much older pseudo-Apostolic materials that he abridged or excerpted to suit his purpose, and often revised or expurgated to conform them to Catholic teaching, for not a few of the writings that he used were originally Gnostic compositions, and abounded in Gnostic speeches and prayers.

[edit] External links

• Catholic Encyclopedia: Abdias of Babylon
• Smith, Dictionary of Greek and Roman Biography and Mythology
• Thirteen apocryphal Acts of apostles from the collection: as printed in Ante-Nicene Fathers, vol. VIII

This article incorporates text from the public-domain Catholic Encyclopedia.