Page:The Greek and Eastern churches.djvu/492

466 at all events not detected. But in the year 172 he was excommunicated. Then he went to live in Syria, not far from Antioch, and later perhaps at his old home Edessa, where he is said to have died. All we know of his "heresy" is associated with the Roman period of his life. The omission of the genealogies of Jesus from his Harmony is an indication that his divergence from accepted doctrines had at least begun when he compiled that work. According to Irenæus, he was a leader of the Encratites, or "Abstainers," people who repudiated marriage, meat, and wine. Irenæus also associated him with the Gnostics as inventing a doctrine of invisible aeons, like the followers of Valentinus, while in his asceticism he resembled Marcion. Origen attributes to him a doctrine of the demiurge, saying that he understood the words "Let there be light" as a prayer of the creating god of this world to the supreme God. These statements are not supported by evidence, and they are not confirmed by Tatian's extant writings. His omission of the genealogies from the Diatessaron may indicate his agreement with Marcion's Docetism, but that is all; we have no trace here or elsewhere in his extant writings of any nearer approach to Valentinian Gnosticism. It may well be that, leaving Rome under a cloud, Tatian carried with him to the East some notions that were unpopular with the ecclesiastical authorities in the West. But when he found himself again among his simple-minded fellow-countrymen in distant Edessa, he was not suspected of heresy, or his Harmony would not have been acceptable there; nor is there any reason to suppose that he spread very peculiar ideas or founded a school of heterodox teaching. Certainly these Syrian Christians did not become Encratites.

A little later the Church at Edessa obtained a notable convert in the person of Bardaisan, who was born in the year