ABSTRACT
The past influence and popularity of the Abgar Story are hard to exaggerate.1 Describing one episode in the life of the historical Jesus of Nazareth, this New Testament apocryphon was widely disseminated in diverse Christian traditions from late antiquity, throughout the Middle Ages, and well beyond.2 It was integrated in a broad range of contexts including ecclesiastical history, religious controversies, sacred iconography, popular beliefs, imperial ideology and diplomacy – to list but a few.3 Moreover, a lively history of creative adaptation associated with the Abgar Story is abundantly attested in the Syriac, Greek, Coptic, Armenian, Latin, Persian, Arabic and Slavonic linguistic areas.4 Expressed through text, image, devotional object, symbol and ritual, this para-scriptural legend conveyed multiple messages to a wide spectrum of recipients. Unsurprisingly, this narrative has attracted considerable interest among modern scholars, who have often noted the importance of public display for the promulgation of the Abgar Story.5 And yet, remarkably, this aspect of transmission has been overlooked in the one field that stands to benefit most from considering such evidence: epigraphy. The Greek traditions of the Abgar Story in particular, being by far the most elaborate and best documented, shed significant light on the issues that find themselves in the centre of modern epigraphic research, such as the materiality of text, the interplay between writing, inscribing, depicting and ritual action, and the effect that these practices, individually and taken together, had on late antique and Byzantine epigraphic culture.6 Built out of a series of shorter sections, this study calls attention to numerous insights that the Abgar Story brings to our understanding of medieval inscriptional habits,7 and reflects in particular on their emergence and development, while examining all facets of their captivating diversity.
