Jesus and the King of Edessa

Eusebius wrote his church history sometime in the early 4th century. Towards the beginning of his work, there is an excerpt from some curious correspondence which purports to be between Jesus and the King of Edessa, a city in present-day southeastern Turkey.1 It’s unknown whether this correspondence is authentic, but Eusebius claimed to have translated the text from Syriac himself. Even if it isn’t original, it’s a curious piece of work captured in the earliest history of the Christian church ever written outside the Holy Scriptures:

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