According to an ancient tradition of the Armenian Apostolic Church, he was martyred for his faith in the Artaz region in the year AD 50. But according to others[citation needed] he reposed peacefully in Edessa or in Beirut on September 3, 44 AD.
Life
Thaddeus (St Addai) of the Seventy Disciples was born as a Jew in Edessa.
After Pentecost, Thaddeus preached the Gospel in Mesopotamia, and built up the Church there, supported, as some hagiographies note, by the other Thaddeus, Jude the Apostle also known as "Jude the Brother of the Lord".
Thaddeus is known as one of the great apostles to Syria and Persia. He is considered to have been one of the early Catholicoses of the East, following Saint Thomas the Apostle.
The Syriac liturgy referred to as the Divine Liturgy of Addai and Mari, originated around the year 200 A.D. and is used by the Assyrian Church of the East, that claims a connection to Mar Addai as catholicos and patriarch of the church.
Healing of King Abgar
Among the Eastern Orthodox faithful, Saint Addai was a disciple of Christ[2] sent by St. Thomas the Apostle to Edessa in order to heal King Abgar V of Osroene, who had fallen ill. He stayed to evangelize, and converted[3] Abgar—or Agbar, or in one Latin version "Acbar" — and his people including Saint Aggai and Saint Mari. The identity of the specific Agbar/Abgar however is open to interpretation: see Abgar.
The legendary tale of how King Abgarus V of Edessa and Jesus had corresponded was first recounted in the 4th century by the church historian Eusebius of Caesarea[4] In the origin of the legend, Eusebius had been shown documents purporting to contain the official correspondence that passed between Abgar and Jesus, and he was well enough convinced by their authenticity to quote them extensively in his Ecclesiastical History. According to Eusebius: "Thomas, one of the twelve apostles, under divine impulse sent Thaddeus, who was also numbered among the seventy disciples of Christ, to Edessa, as a preacher and evangelist of the teaching of Christ." (Historia Ecclesiastica, I, xiii)
The story of the healing Thaddeus' evangelizing efforts resulted in the growing of Christian communities in northern Mesopotamia and in Syria east of Antioch. Thaddeus' story is embodied in the Syriac document, Doctrine of Addai, which recounts the role of Addai and makes him one of the 72 Apostles sent out to spread the Christian faith.[5]
By the time the legend had returned to Syria, the purported site of the miraculous image, it had been embroidered into a tissue of miraculous happenings:[6]
^Herbermann, Charles George (1913). The Catholic Encyclopedia. Encyclopedia Press. p. 282. ((cite book)): Cite has empty unknown parameter: |coauthors= (help)
^Walter Bauer, Orthodoxy and Heresy in Earliest Christianity, 1934, (in English 1971) (On-line text)
^Robert Eisenman, James the Brother of Jesus : The key to Unlocking the Secrets of Early Christianity and the Dead Sea Scrolls, 1997 (Viking Penguin). Especially the section "Thaddeus, Judas Thomas and the conversion of the Osrhoeans", pp 189ff.
