Bardaisan and the Bardaisanites

Bardaisan of Edessa was a courtier, an archer of some reputation, a philosopher, and by his own lights a Christian. He wrote against Marcion, he was baptised in the Edessene church, and he ran a school whose hymns Ephraim would later complain were better than the orthodox ones - which is why Ephraim wrote hymns. What he actually taught is hard to recover. The Book of the Laws of Countries, written by his pupil Philip, presents him arguing that human freedom is real against the fatalism of the astrologers, which is a thoroughly Christian argument. Ephraim, writing a century and a half later in the same city, presents him as a heretic with a cosmology of primordial beings and a defective doctrine of the body's resurrection. Both cannot be the whole truth, and the sources that would settle it are gone.