Frederick Cornwallis Conybeare

“ As late as 1165 their patriarch Nerses defends the Armenian custom of keeping Christmas on the 6th of January on the express ground that as he was born after the flesh from the Virgin, so he was born by way of baptism from the Jordan. The custom from the first, he says, had been to feast on one and the same day the two births, much as they differed in sacramental import and in point of time. We see how deep the early Adoptianism had struck its roots, when a primate of the 12th century could still appeal to the baptismal regeneration of Jesus. ”

“ From such a standpoint the baptism of Jesus was the moment of the divine incarnation. The man righteous above all others was then reborn of the Spirit, was illuminated, was spiritually anointed, became the Christ and Son of God. In effect the fathers of the Armenian church often fell back into such language, far removed as it is from orthodoxy; and they emphasized the importance of the baptismal feast of the Epiphany on the 6th of January by refusing to accept the feast of the physical birth of the 25th of December. ”

“ The press which has done most in printing Armenian authors is that of the Mechitharists of Venice. Here in 1836 was issued a magnificent thesaurus of the Armenian language, with the Latin and Greek equivalents of each word. At that time there was no dictionary of any language and literature to be compared with this for exhaustiveness and accuracy. There are now Armenian presses all over the world, reprinting old books or issuing new works, often translations of modern writers, English, French, Russian and German. ”

“ Another survival in the Armenian church was the hereditary priesthood. None but a scion of a priestly family could become a deacon, elder or bishop. Accordingly the primacy remained in the family of Gregory until about 374, when the king Pap or Bab murdered Nerses, who had been ordained by Eusebius of Caesarea (362-370) and was over-zealous in implanting in Armenia the canons about celibacy, marriage, fasting, hospices and monastic life which Basil had established in Cappadocia. ”

“ The Eucharist was, therefore, long associated with the matal or animal victim, and only in the 8th century do we hear of an interval of time being left between the fleshly and the spiritual sacrifices, as the two rites were then called. The Basilian service of the Eucharist was used in the 5th century, but superseded later on by a Byzantine rite which will be found translated in F. E. Brightman’s Eastern Liturgies. The Eucharist was no doubt the one important sacrifice in the minds of the clergy who had attended the schools of Constantinople and Alexandria ”

“ Modern Persian similarly has lost gender; and in both cases the liberation must have been due to attrition of other tongues which had a different system of gender or none at all. So the Armenians were ever in contact on the north with the Iberians of the Caucasus who had none, and with the Semitic races on the south and east which had other ways of forming genders than the Indo-European tongues.
From the original Armenian stock can be readily distinguished a mass of Old and Middle Persian loan-words. These are so numerous that for a time Armenian was classed as an Iranian tongue. ”

“ Much remains to be done in the way of collecting Armenian dialects, for which task there are written materials as far back as the 12th century over and above the work to be done by an intelligent traveller armed with a phonograph. Two main dialects of Armenian are distinguishable to-day, that of Ararat and Tiflis, and that of Stambul and the coast cities of Asia Minor. The latter is much overlaid with Tatar or Turkish words, and the Tatar order of words distinguishes the modern Armenian sentence from the ancient. ”

“ The worship of images never seems to have taken root among Armenians; indeed they supplied the Greek world with iconoclast soldiers and emperors. The worship of crosses into which the Spirit or Christ had been inserted by the priest must have satisfied the religious needs of a people who, save in architecture, showed little artistic faculty. ”

“ The march of Arab conquest kept the Armenians friendly to Byzantium for a few years; but in 718 the catholicus John of Odsun ascended the throne and at the council of Manazkert in 728 repeated and confirmed the anathemas against Chalcedon and the tome of Leo, that had been first pronounced by the catholicus Babken in 491 at a synod held in Valarshapat by the united Armenian, Georgian or Iberian, and Albanian churches. The Armenians marked their complete disruption with the Greeks by starting an era of their own at the synod of Dvin. ”

“ No one might kill his own meat and deprive the priest of his due; but this rule did not apply to the chase. The earliest Armenian rituals contain ample services for the conduct of an agapē (q.v.) or love feast held in the church off sacrificial meat. The victim was slaughtered by the priest in the church porch before the crucifix, after it had been ritually wreathed and given the holy salt, by licking which it appropriated a sacramental purity or efficacy previously conveyed into the salt by exorcisms and consecration. ”

“ There were many Christians in Melitene at the time of the Decian persecution in A.D. 250, and two bishops from Great Armenia were present at the council of Nice in 325. King Tiridates (c. A.D. 238–314) had already been baptized some time after 261 by Gregory the Illuminator. The latter was ordained priest and appointed catholicus or exarch of the church of Great Armenia by Leontius, bishop of Caesarea in Cappadocia. This one fact is certain amidst the fables which soon obscured the history of this great missionary. Thus the church of Great Armenia began as a province of the Cappadocian see. ”

“ In some of the Armenian villages they answered him in Persian. The Persian loan-words already present in Armenian as early as A.D. 400 mirror the earlier political and social life of Armenia. Thus many of their kings and nobles had Persian names; Persian also were most words used in connexion with horses and the chase, with war and army, with dress, trade and coinage, calendar, weights and measures, with court and political institutions, with music, medicine, school, education, literature and the arts. Many everyday words were of the same origin, e.g. ”

“ The hymns used in Armenian worship rarely go back to the 5th century; and they were still few in number and brief in length when Nerses the Graceful and his contemporaries more than doubled their number and bulk in the 12th century. ”

“ To this century also seems to belong the Armenian version of a *history of the Iberians, by Djuansher, a work full of valuable information.
The early 8th century was a time of great literary activity. Gregory Asheruni wrote an important *commentary on the Jerusalem Lectionary, and his friend *John the catholicus (717–728) commentaries on the other liturgical works of his church; he also collected all existing canon law, Greek or Armenian, respected in his church, wrote *against the Paulicians and Docetae, and composed many beautiful hymns. ”

“ Zenobius, Homilies (? from Syriac) ; the History of Julius Africanus was perhaps also translated in this century, but it is lost. To the 5th century belong the versions of the Nicene canons, of which the Armenian text as preserved is barely intelligible, of the eucharistic rites called of *Basil, *Chrysostom, *Ignatius and others; also the *Hours or Breviary, the *Rites of Ordination, Baptism, of the making and release of Penitents, of Epiphany, and perhaps the many rites of animal sacrifice, for these are partly originals, partly versions of lost Greek texts. ”

“ Because the Spirit worked with him, he was able to vanquish Satan and all desires, and because of his righteousness and good works he was made worthy of grace and became a Temple of God the Word, which came down from heaven in Jordan, dwelt in him and through him wrought miracles. ”

“ From Persia also the Armenians took their names for surrounding races, e.g. Tatshik or Tajik, first for Arab and then for Turk, Ariq for Persians, Kapkoh for Caucasus, Hrazdan, Vaspuragan, &c. The Armenians call themselves Hay, plural Hayq ”

“ Irenaeus, Adversus Haereses and Ad Marcianum (recently found) ; *Hippolytus’ commentaries on the Song of Songs and Daniel, and many fragments; *Timotheus’ life of Athanasius; Theophilus of Alexandria, various homilies; *Eusebius of Gabala or Severianus, fifteen Homilies ”