The Great Cloud of Witnesses · The Martyrs' Church
Archelaus of Carrhae
died c. 278Early Church
The Mesopotamian bishop remembered for the church's oldest and fiercest argument against Mani.
Pictured: the era he stood in — The Christian Martyrs' Last Prayer — Jean-Léon Gérôme (1863–83), public domain
Summary
- Lived died c. 278.
- Stood in The Martyrs' Church (AD 100–313).
- Hangs on The Fathers.
- Tradition: Early Church.
The life
In the third century a Persian prophet named Mani announced a new religion. It taught two eternal powers, light and darkness, locked in a war that had produced the world; it treated the God of the Old Testament as the enemy; and it claimed Jesus, Buddha, and Zoroaster as its own forerunners. Manichaeism spread from Persia to Rome to China and lasted a thousand years. Augustine spent nine years inside it before he became a Christian.
The church's first great answer to Mani carries the name of Archelaus, bishop of Carrhae in Roman Mesopotamia, the city the book of Genesis calls Haran, where Abraham's family stopped on the way to Canaan.
The book is called the Acta Archelai, the Acts of Archelaus. It stages a public debate between Mani and Archelaus before a panel of pagan judges in a Mesopotamian town, with the bishop taking Mani's system apart point by point and Mani finally fleeing. Along the way it preserves a long summary of Manichaean cosmology and a hostile biography of Mani himself.
The debate as staged is almost certainly not a transcript. Scholars have questioned it since Isaac de Beausobre in the eighteenth century, and the consensus now is that the work was composed in Greek in the fourth century, probably by a writer named Hegemonius, and that the debate scene is a literary frame. Jerome, listing Christian authors, credited the book to Archelaus and said it had been translated out of Syriac, a detail later scholarship has not been able to confirm.
What is not in doubt is the book's weight. It is the oldest substantial anti-Manichaean writing the church produced, and for centuries it was the main thing Greek and Latin Christians knew about Mani. Epiphanius quoted large stretches of the Greek into his own catalogue of heresies, which is why any Greek survives at all; the complete text comes down in an early Latin translation.
So the man is thin and the argument is thick. A bishop of a frontier town on the edge of the Persian empire gave his name to the church's first serious reckoning with the religion that nearly kept Augustine.
Sources: Hegemonius, Acta Archelai; Jerome, On Illustrious Men 72; Epiphanius, Panarion 66; Samuel N. C. Lieu and Mark Vermes, Acts of Archelaus (Manichaean Studies).
What was happening while he lived3 moments · AD 100–313
- c. 203Perpetua and Felicity die in the arenaVibia Perpetua, a young mother of good family in Carthage, and Felicity, a pregnant slave woman, were arrested with several companions. Perpetua kept a prison diary that survives inside *The Passion of Perpetua and Felicity*, one of the earliest firsthand writings we have from a Christian woman. Felicity gave birth in prison days before they were sent out to the beasts.
- 250Decius orders the whole empire to sacrificeFor the first time the persecution was universal by decree: every inhabitant had to sacrifice before a commission and receive a signed certificate proving it. About forty-odd of those certificates have been dug up in Egypt on papyrus, ordinary paperwork of a very hard year. Fabian, bishop of Rome, was killed in January 250; thousands of others simply signed and lived, and the church spent the next decade arguing about what to do with them.
- 257–260Valerian targets the leadershipValerian went after the church's structure rather than the crowd: bishops, priests, and deacons first, then Christians of senatorial and knightly rank, and the cemeteries where they met. Cyprian, bishop of Carthage, was beheaded on September 14, 258; Sixtus II of Rome was seized in a catacomb the same year. When Valerian was captured by the Persians, his son Gallienus reversed the policy in 260, and the church got about forty years of quiet.
Go further
Read them yourself. Public-domain works are free to read in full; the rest open where the book can be found.
Search Archelaus of Carrhae at the Internet Archive · every work MannaFest cites
Why this one hangs here
Debated Mani himself, and the church kept the record of that argument for centuries.
Hangs on The Fathers: The men who carried the faith out of the apostles' hands, and wrote down what they had received.
Standing beside himThe Martyrs' Church · 40 on this stretch of wall
A 22-year-old mother who kept a diary in prison and walked into the arena at Carthage singing.
Stayed with his people through plague and persecution, then walked to his own beheading and paid the executioner.
Traced his teaching straight back to the apostle John through Polycarp, and wrote the first great takedown of the gnostics.
Kept wearing his philosopher's cloak after he met Christ, argued the faith to the emperor's face, and was beheaded for it.
Wanted to die with his martyred father as a boy, and spent the rest of his life laying six versions of the Old Testament side by side.
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The lawyer who gave the church the word Trinity and told Rome that the blood of the martyrs is seed.