ABDIA (PSEUDO). — First (imaginary) bishop of Babylon, elected by the apostles Simon and Judas.
Around the middle of the sixteenth century, the Viennese scholar Volfango Lazius attributed to him the authorship of a collection of apostolic legends, which he entitled De historia certaminis apostolici, published in Basel in March 1552 (the preface bears the date 1 August 1551). A. was supposed to have written this work in Hebrew; it was then translated into Greek by Eutropius, his disciple, and into Latin by Giulio l'Africano.
In reality, however, it is an anonymous work written in Gaul in the sixth century in two stages. The first version must have contained only the passions of the twelve apostles, drawing for Pietro, Paolo, Giovanni, Andrea, and Tommaso on the collection of Leucio Carino, and on other accounts for the remaining apostles (Gregorio di Tours alludes to it in the preface to his Liber de miraculis s. Andreae); the second, in addition to the passiones, included the virtutes et miracula, particularly for Andrea and Tommaso, drawing on the works of the same titles attributed to Gregorio di Tours. Hence the variety of its content in the manuscripts and the various names by which it is called: Passiones, or Miracula, or Virtutes Apostolorum.
The Auxerre reviser (592–600) of the Martirologio geronimiano (cf., for example, the notices of 1 July and 28 October concerning the feasts of ss. Simon and Judas) and Venanzio Fortunato (Carm., VIII, vv. 147–50) drew inspiration from this collection. From a literary point of view, A.’s work is useful for understanding the transmission of various apostolic apocrypha.