Armenia adopts Christianity

The traditional account comes from the History of the Armenians attributed to Agathangelos, a 5th-century work that mixes fact and legend. Gregory, a son of the Parthian noble Anak who had murdered Trdat’s father, was raised as a Christian in Caesarea in Cappadocia. When Trdat regained his father’s throne with Roman help, he at first followed Diocletian’s anti-Christian policy: Gregory refused to sacrifice to the goddess Anahit and was tortured; when Trdat learned that Gregory was the son of his father’s murderer, he had him thrown into a deep pit at Khor Virap near Artaxata, where by tradition he spent thirteen (or fifteen) years, and a group of Christian nuns, among them Hripsime and Gayane, was put to death. In the legend Gregory is brought out of the pit after a vision of the king’s sister and heals Trdat, who had been turned into a boar. The king and his court accepted the faith; Gregory destroyed pagan temples, was consecrated bishop of Armenia at Caesarea by Leontius, raised churches in place of the temples and baptised the king and his army in the Euphrates. The first seat of the Armenian Church was at Ashtishat, west of Lake Van; Vagharshapat, where according to Agathangelos Gregory raised shrines to the martyred nuns, later became the home of the mother church of Etchmiadzin.

The year is disputed. The traditional date is 301, but dates from 284 to 314 have been proposed. Many modern scholars prefer 314: Bishop Leontius and a church council at Caesarea in that year are independently attested, and a client king of Rome is unlikely to have made Christianity his state religion while Rome was persecuting Christians, before the Edict of Milan (313). The conversion was no later than 325, when Gregory’s son and successor Aristakes attended the Council of Nicaea.

Christianity took root slowly: the liturgy was in Greek and Syriac, and many nobles resisted. It spread more widely only after Mesrop Mashtots devised the Armenian alphabet around 405. The new faith bound Armenia more closely to Rome and became one of the causes of Shapur II’s wars.