Rhodopa and Early Christianity

Abstract

It has become a trend to present Rhodopa as a “blank” region in history. Yet this trend represents an inaccurate picture of the past. As a result, Rhodopa is currently an area that requires more research. This article addresses this need. It traces some of the sources on the Rhodopean pre-Christian and early Christian past. It then presents some evidence of the preaching of Jesus’s apostles in Rhodopa, as well as a discussion of the language of Rhodopa’s early Christians. After outlining the structure of the Diocese of Rhodopa, the article focusses on the diocese’s relations with the Holy Land and North-Eastern Africa (e.g. Ethiopia, Egypt). The article places the presented data within the broader context of the fourth to sixth century in discussing Constantine’s fifty Bibles, the Council of Serdica, the Biblia Bessica, and the Bessi’s churches in the Holy Land, as an instrument of the Eastern Roman Empire’s Christianisation policy. Some questions of both segmental and universal Christian value are addressed.