Il ciclo degli ‘Atti’ dell’apostolo Addas. Narrazioni sulla conversione dei monarchi nel Vicino Oriente romano tra Persia, Mesopotamia ed Egitto

This paper will examine the sources relating to the figure of the Manichaean missionary Addas and his encounter with the court of Palmyra. He is the missionary whom Mani himself allegedly sent to the West to evangelize the territories of the Roman Empire, and who, according to Manichaean sources, even managed to convert the future queen Zenobia of Palmyra, and perhaps even Odenathus. Given its obvious hagiographic implications, the story has attracted more interest from Manichaean scholars than from ancient history scholars, and yet it is not at all impossible that this narrative (at least partly legendary) may yield some truly historical elements of great interest. This paper will highlight the “hybrid” nature of this story. The narrative is evidently stylized according to the model of the narratives of the conversions of monarchs by Mani, attested only in the East (in the territories orbiting the Sassanid Empire), and in Eastern sources (Arabic, Iranian and Coptic), and yet the unprecedented contextualization in the Roman Empire gives the narrative an unprecedented character, because in it emerges the symbolic and practical importance at the same time of the introduction of the Manichaean mission in the ‘Western’ territories: on the one hand a narrative and historical counterpart parallel to Mani’s work in the East, on the other the necessary completion of this missionary work.