Abdias

Abdias (Obadiah) is, according to legend, the first bishop of Babylon and one of the Seventy apostles mentioned in the Gospel of Luke (10:1-20). Saints Simon and Jude are said to have consecrated him bishop; he is also linked with Saint Thomas and Saint Addai, regarded as the first patriarch of the Church of the East in Syriac Christianity.

The name Abdias was set at the head of an apocryphal work in ten books, the "History of the Apostolic Contest" (Historia Certaminis Apostolici), which tradition ascribed to the bishop. It tells of the labors, miracles, persecutions and deaths of the apostles and belongs among the great collections of New Testament apocrypha, in the manner of heroic romances. Scholars have established that it was written in Latin, perhaps about the year 910, or, according to R. A. Lipsius, in the latter half of the sixth century, in a Frankish monastery; long after the death of Abdias. Its author, called "Pseudo-⁠Abdias", used older apocryphal materials, which he abridged and purged of Gnostic teaching. This shows that the "Abdias" of the work is an invented name, so that his existence as a historical person remains uncertain. He is commemorated on 28 October, by the Western calendar.