His history commences with the foundation of the world and runs up to his own times. The portion dealing with the Arab period is extant only in a single
manuscript and breaks off in the second year of the caliphate of
al-Mahdi (160AH = 776–7 AD) and during the time when Emperor was
Leo IV (775–780). For the early history of Christianity, Agapius made use uncritically of apocryphal and legendary materials. For the following secular and ecclesiastical history, he relied on Syriac sources, in particular the World Chronicle of the
Maronite historian
Theophilus of Edessa (d. 785) for the end of the
Umayyad period and the beginning of the
Abbasids. He made use of
Eusebius's
Church History only through an intermediary compilation of short extracts. This he supplements from other sources. He gives an otherwise unknown fragment of
Papias; and a list of Eastern Metropolitans. He uses the lost History of
Bardaisan, but many of his sources remain unknown. He was the first Eastern writer to call
Tatian a heretic The
History has been published with a French translation in the
Patrologia Orientalis series and with a Latin translation in the
Corpus Scriptorum Christianorum Orientalium series. His history contains a version of the
Testimonium Flavianum that lacks many of the most clearly Christian elements of the text in surviving Josephus manuscripts. __NOTOC__ ==Notes==