As WITH SO MANY other Syriac texts, the Gospel of the Twelve Apostles, published by J. Rendel Harris in 1900, has not received the attention it deserves. Apart from Harris’ short introduction to his edition, only Harald Suermann has studied the work, and then only in a rather superficial and unsatisfying manner. But since this Syriac apocalyptic text, short though it is, reflects the thought of Syrian Christians in northern Mesopotamia in the early Islamic period, it merits more detailed study, the more so since the ideas it contains were not restricted to northern Mesopotamia.

The Gospel of the Twelve Apostles occupies folios 47r to 58r of Syriac Ms. 85 of the Rendel Harris collection, now in the Harvard College Library. The manuscript, very incompletely preserved, also contains a series of questions on canonical matters put to Jacob of Edessa by the priests Addai and Thomas and John the Stylite, together with Jacob's answers and a series of short chapters containing the replies of the holy fathers to questions sent to them by the Christians in the Orient (the madnḥayē).

This material precedes the Gospel of the Twelve Apostles, which is followed by an extract from the Doctrina Addai, part of the farewell address of the apostle to his flock before his death. The passage, evidently meant as some sort of consolation, deals with the immortality of souls as they depart from human bodies, arguing that the thoughts and knowledge of the soul are the image of the immortal God. Then follows an extract from the 38th discourse of Severus of Antioch against Grammaticus on the origin of the Nestorian heresy, and a series of apostolic canons and canons of synods ̶ Nicaea, Ancyra, Neocaesarea, Gangra, Antioch in encaeniis, Laodicaea, Ephesus, and Chalcedon ̶ followed by a libellus for those recanting from heresy.

Though the codex is mutilated, its main contents are clear enough: the Gospel of the Twelve Apostles, preceded and followed by canonical material, mainly from Jacob of Edessa and from the synods. The inclusion of a passage from the Doctrina Addai, located in the city of Edessa, also points to an Edessan origin for the collection. It stems from Monophysite circles, and may well have been put together to bring apostates back to the true faith and teach them discipline and church order. In other words, the selection and order of the different elements preserved in this unique manuscript are not coincidental, but rather a matter of deliberate choice. Harris dates the origin of the Gospel of the Twelve Apostles and possibly of the manuscript itself to the middle of the eighth century, but we shall see that an earlier date is much more likely.