Armenia becomes the first Christian state

By the late third century Armenia was a buffer kingdom between Rome and Sasanian Persia, ruled by a branch of the Parthian Arsacid dynasty. Christianity had reached it early: Armenian tradition says the apostles Thaddeus and Bartholomew preached there, which is why the church calls itself Apostolic, and there were Christian communities in southern Armenia well before any king converted.^•

The story Armenians tell

The story, as recorded by the fifth-century history attributed to Agathangelos, centres on two men. Trdat (Tiridates) III regained his father’s throne with Roman help. Gregory, the son of the Parthian noble who had murdered Trdat’s father, had been raised a Christian in Cappadocia and came to serve the king. When he refused to make offerings to the goddess Anahit, Trdat had him tortured and thrown into a deep pit at Artashat, where he survived, the tradition says, for thirteen years. The king also martyred a group of Christian virgins led by Hripsime and Gayane, who had fled Rome. Struck by madness, Trdat was cured only when Gregory was brought out of the pit. The king, his family and his nobles were baptised, and Gregory, now called Lusavorich, “the Illuminator”, became the first head of the Armenian Church.^•

The pit is now the monastery of Khor Virap, below Mount Ararat, one of the most visited places in Armenia. The mother cathedral at Etchmiadzin, near Yerevan, is still the seat of the Catholicos of All Armenians, and the churches of Saints Hripsime and Gayane stand nearby.^•

What historians say

Armenian tradition gives the date as 301, and Armenia celebrated its 1,700th anniversary as a Christian nation in 2001. Some historians, noting the chronology of Trdat’s reign and Gregory’s consecration at Caesarea, prefer around 314. Either way, Armenia adopted Christianity as a state religion before the Roman Empire, which only made it official in 380. Conversion was also a political choice: it set Armenia apart from Zoroastrian Persia, even as it tied the kingdom more closely to the Christian Roman world.^•

The new faith did not sweep away the old overnight. Pagan temples were destroyed or turned into churches, but some rituals survived inside Christianity: the animal sacrifice called matagh, still offered at some churches, and the summer water-splashing festival of Vardavar, linked to the Transfiguration, both have pre-Christian roots.^•

A national church

Within two centuries the church had become distinctively Armenian. After the Council of Chalcedon in 451, which Armenians did not attend because they were fighting Persia at Avarayr, the Armenian Church rejected its definition of Christ’s nature, and at the councils of Dvin in the sixth century it broke with Constantinople. Today it is one of the Oriental Orthodox churches, in communion with the Coptic, Ethiopian and Syriac churches but separate from both Rome and Eastern Orthodoxy.^•

That separation mattered enormously. For most of the next 1,500 years Armenians had no state, and the church, with its own language, calendar, saints and hierarchy, did the work of a state: keeping records, running schools, representing Armenians to sultans and shahs. In the Ottoman Empire, the Armenian Patriarch was the official head of the Armenian millet. That is why many Armenians see the church as the guardian of the nation, and why being Armenian and being a member of the Apostolic Church are, for many, almost the same thing, even for those who rarely pray.^•

Why it matters today