D "J^me thtfi Bootes - for the. founeUng of a. CeUige w, tail Colony" D THE KEY OF TRUTH CONYBEARE YALE HENRY FROWDE, M.A. PUBLISHER TO THE UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD LONDON, EDINBURGH, AND NEW YORK THE KEY OF TRUTH A MANUAL OF THE PAULICIAN CHURCH OF ARMENIA ZU dKrtnenian Z^)ct EDITED AND TRANSLATED WITH ILLUSTRATIVE DOCUMENTS AND INTRODUCTION FRED. C. CONYBEARE, M.A. FORMERLY FELLO'W OF UNIVERSITY COLLEGE OXFORD €);>;for5 AT THE CLARENDON PRESS 1898 PRINTED AT THE CLARENDON PRESS BY HORACE HART, M.A, PRINTER TO THE UNIVERSITY fc Jr -^ "^ -^ v^^-^^^Ju iJc:^ oLJx. tc:.^^ d^^^^^^Ji ty fc o..^^ PREFACE In the autumn of the year 1891, 1 went to Armenia for a second time, in the hope of finding an ancient version of the Book of Enoch, and of recovering documents illustrative of the ancient heretics of that land, particularly of the Paulicians. For Gibbon's picture of their puritanism, fresh and vigorous in an age when Greek Christianity had degenerated into the court superstition of Constantinople, had fascinated my imagination; and I could not believe that some fuller records of their inner teaching did not survive in the Armenian tongue. In this quest, though my other failed, I was rewarded. I learned during my stay at Edjmiatzin, that in the library of the Holy Synod there was preserved a manu script of The Key of Truth, the book of the Thonraketzi or Paulicians of Thonrak, with whom I was familiar from reading the letters of Gregory Magistros, Duke of Mesopotamia in the eleventh century. I was permitted to see the book, of which a perfunctory exami nation convinced me that it was a genuine monument, though, as I then thought it, a late one of the Paulicians. For I found in it the same rejection of image-worship, of mariolatry, and of the cult of saints and holy crosses, which was characteristic of the Paulicians. I could not copy it then without leaving unfinished a mass of other work which I had begun in the conventual library; and I was anxious to get to Dathev, or at least back to Tiflis, before the snow fell on the passes of the anti-Caucasus. However, I arranged that a copy of the book should be made and sent to me ; and this I received late in the year 1893 from the deacon Galoust T^r Mkherttschian. My first impression on looking into it afresh was one of disappointment. I had expected to find in it a Marcionite, or at VI PREFACE least a Manichean book; but, beyond the extremely sparse use made in it of the Old Testament, I found nothing that savoured of these ancient heresies. Accordingly I laid it aside, in the press of other work which I had undertaken. It was not until the summer of 1896 that, at the urgent request of Mr. Darwin Swift, who had come to me for information about the history of Manicheism in Armenia, I returned to it, and translated it into English in the hope that it might advance his researches. And now I at last understood who the Paulicians really were. All who had written about them had been misled by the calumnies of Photius, Petrus Siculus, and the other Greek writers, who describe them as Manicheans. I now realized that I had stumbled on the monument of a phase of the Christian Church so old and so outworn, that the very memory of it was well-nigh lost. For The Key of Truth contains the baptismal service and ordinal of the Adoptionist Church, almost in the form in which Theodotus of Rome may have celebrated those rites. These form the oldest part of the book, which, however, also contains much controversial matter of a later date, directed against what the compiler regarded as the abuses of the Latin and Greek Churches. The date at which the book was written in its present form cannot be put later than the ninth century, nor earlier than the seventh. But we can no more argue thence that the prayers and teaching and rites preserved in it are not older, than we could contend, because our present English Prayer Book was only compiled in the sixteenth century, that its contents do not go back beyond that date. The problem therefore of determining the age of the doctrine and rites detailed in The Key of Truth is hke any other problem of Christian palaeontology. It resembles the questions which arise in con nexion with the Didache or The Shepherd of Hermas ; and can only be resolved by a careful consideration of the stage which it represents in the development of the opinions and rites of the church. In my prolegomena I have attempted to solve this problem. I may here briefly indicate the results arrived at. The characteristic note of the Adoptionist phase of Christian opinion was the absence of the recognized doctrine of the Incarna tion. Jesus was mere man until he reached his thirtieth year, when he came to John on the bank of the Jordan to receive baptism. Then his sinless nature received the guerdon. The heavens opened and the Spirit of God came down and abode with PREFACE VU him. The voice from above proclaimed him the chosen Son of God; a glory rested on him, and thenceforth he was the New Adam, the Messiah ; was the power and wisdom of God, Lord of all creation, the first-born in the kingdom of grace. Of divine Incarnation other than this possession of the man Jesus by the divine Spirit, other than this acquiescence of it in him, who had as no other man kept the commands of God, the Adoptionists knew nothing. And as he was chosen out to be the elect Son of God in baptism, so it is the end and vocation of all men, by gradual self-conquest, to prepare themselves for the fruition of God's grace. They must believe and repent, and then at a mature age ask for the baptism, which alone admits them into the Church or invisible union of the faithful ; the spirit electing and adopting them to be sons of the living God, filled like Jesus, though not in the same degree, with the Holy Spirit. ' Et ille Christus, et nos Christi^' For those who held this faith, the Baptism of Jesus was neces sarily the chief of all Christian feasts ; and the Fish the favourite symbol of Jesus Christ, because he, like it, was born in the waters. Hence it is that when we first, about the end of the third century, obtain a clear knowledge of the feasts of the church, we find that the Baptism stands at the head of them. It is not until the close of the fourth century that the modern Christmas, the Birth of Jesus from the Virgin, emerges among the orthodox festivals, and displaces in the minds of the faithful his spiritual birth in the Jordan. First in Rome, and soon in Antioch and the nearer East, this new festival was kept on Dec. 25. In the farther East, however, in Egypt, ' The phrase is that of the Spanish Adoptionists. But the thought ¦was fully expressed five centuries earlier by Methodius, Conviv. viii. 8 : ^ iicic\r)aia OTTapya xcd uiSivti, fiixp'trep 6 X/wffTos kv fifuv /.toptpuB^ yevvrjBeis, oirais txaffTos tS)v afuav t^ lierix^'" XpKrroO XpitrrSs yivvijS^, 'The Church is big vi^ith child, and is in travail, until the Christ in us is fully formed into birth, in order that each of the saints by sharing in Christ may be born a Christ,' that is, through baptism. And just below he continues thus: ' This is -why in a certain scripture we read, " Touch not my Christs . . ." ; vfhich means that those vi^ho have been baptized by participation of the Spirit into Christ, have become Christs.' Haniack ¦well sums up the teaching of Methodius as follows {IDogmengesch. bd. 1. 746 (701) : ' For Methodius the history of the Logos-Christ, as Faith holds it, is but the general background for an inner history, which must repeat itself in every believer : the Logos must in his behalf once more come down from heaven, must suffer and die and rise again in the faithful.' So Augustine, in loh. /n 21, n. 8 : ' Gratias agamus non solum nos Christianos factos esse, sed Christum.' Such then was also the Paulician conviction. vm PREFACE in Armenia, and in Mesopotamia, the new date for the chief festival was not accepted, and the commemoration of the earthly or human birth of Jesus was merely added alongside of the older feast of his Baptism, both being kept on the old day, Jan. 6. We are only , acquainted with the early Christianity of the Jewish Church through the reports of those who were hostile to it, and who gave to it the name of Ebionite, signifying probably such an outward poverty in its adherents, and such a rigid simplicity in its liturgy and rites, as characterized the Paulician Church, and provoked the ridicule of the orthodox Armenian writers. It is certain, however, that the christology of this church was Adoptionist. Through Antioch and Palmyra this faith must have spread into Mesopotamia and Persia ; and in those regions became the basis of that Nestorian Christianity which spread over Turkestan, invaded China, and still has a foothold in Urmiah and in Southern India. From centres like Edessa, Nisibis, and Amida it was diffused along the entire range of the Taurus, from Cilicia as far as Ararat, and beyond the Araxes into Albania, on the southern slopes of the Eastern Caucasus. Its proximate centre of diifusion in the latter region seems to have been the upper valley of the great Zab, where was the traditional site of the martyrdom of St. Bartholomew, to whom the Armenians traced back the succes sion of the bishops of the canton of Siuniq, north of the Araxes. In Albania, Atropatene, and Vaspurakan to the east of Lake Van, and in Moxoene, Arzanene, and Taraunitis to its south and west, as most of the early Armenian historians admit, Christianity was not planted by the efforts of Gregory the Illuminator, but was long anterior to him and had an apostolic origin. That it was a faith of strictly Adoptionist or Ebionite type we know from the Disputation of Archelaus with Mani. For Archelaus, though he wrote and spoke in Syriac, was the bishop of an Armenian see which lay not far from Lake Van ^ 1 The identification (see pp. cii, ciii) of the See of Archelaus is somewhat confirmed by the fact (communicated to me by Father Basil Sarkisean) that Karkhar is the name of a hilly region (not of a town) in the vilayet of Bitlis, about one hour south of Van. But De Morgan's map {Mission Scientifique en Perse, 1896) of the country east of Lake Urmiah inclines one to identify the Karkhar of Archelaus with that of Wardan, which certainly lay in the canton of Golthn, on the Araxes. For this map marks a town called Arablou (i.e. Arabion castellum) on the north bank of the river Karanghou (which PREFACE ix The Taurus range thus formed a huge recess or circular dam into which flowed the early current of the Adoptionist faith, to be therein caught and detained for centuries, as it were a backwater from the main stream of Christian development. Here in the eighth and ninth centuries, even after the destruction of the Mon- tanist Church, it still lingered in glen and on mountain crest, in secular opposition to the Nicene faith, which, backed by the armies of Byzantium, pressed eastward and southward from Caesarea of Cappadocia. The historical Church of Armenia was a compromise between these opposed forces ; and on the whole, especially in the monasteries, the Nicene or grecizing party won the upper hand; dictating the creed and rites, and creating the surviving literature of that Church. But the older Adoptionist Christianity of south-east Armenia was not extinct. In the eighth century there was that great revival of it, known in history as the Paulician movement. A Paulician emperor sat on the throne of Byzantium; and away in Taron, about 800 a.d., the old believers seem to have organized themselves outwardly as a separate church; and a great leader stereotyped their chief rites by committing them to writing in an authoritative book. That book survives, and is The Key of Truth. In the West the Adoptionist faith was anathematized at Rome in the person of Theodotus as early as 190 a.d., h __t before it had left a lasting monument of itself, namely. The Shepherd of Hermas. It still survived in Moorish Spain, and was there vigorous as late as the ninth century; and it lived on in other parts of Europe, in Burgundy, in Bavaria, and in the Balkan Peninsula, where it was probably the basis of Bogomilism. It is even not improbable that may be the modem form of Stranga), halfway from its source in the Sahend hills (due south of Tabreez) towards Sefid, near Resht, where it flows into the Caspian. This Arablou is about 100 miles, or three days' ride, south of Urdubad on the Araxes, the traditional site of the evangelizing activity of St. Bartholomew. Cedrenus (xi. 575) indicates that the Stranga was the boundary between Persia and Roman Vaspurakan in the eleventh century just as it had been in the third. This view would still locate the See of Archelaus in Pers-Armenia, on the borders of Albania and Siuniq, and in the very region where King Arshak (see p. cxiii), the enemy of SL Basil, found heretically minded bishops ready to consecrate as catholicos his own nominee. In the absence of surveys and better maps .it is difficult to decide between these alternative views ; but one or other of them must be correct, and they .both prove that Archelaus was an Armenian bishop. X PREFACE it was the heresy of the early British Church. But it has left few landmarks, for the rival christology which figured Jesus Christ not as a man, who by the descent of the Spirit on him was filled with the Godhead, but as God incarnate from his virgin mother's womb, advanced steadily, and, like a rising tide, soon swept over the whole face of Christendom ; everywhere effacing literary and other traces of the Adoptionist faith, which seems thenceforward to have only lived on in Languedoc and along the Rhine as the submerged Christianity of the Cathars, and perhaps also, among the Waldenses. In the Reformation this Catharism comes once more to the surface, particularly among the so-called Anabaptist and Unitarian Chris tians, between whom and the most primitive church The- Key of Truth and the Cathar Ritual of Lyon supply us with two great connecting links. How, it may be asked, could such a revolution of religious opinion as the above sketch implies take place and leave so little trace behind ? But it has left some traces. The Liber Sententiarum is the record of the Inquisition of Toulouse from 1307-1323, and for that short period its 400 closely printed folio pages ^ barely suffice to chronicle the cruelties perpetrated in the name of the God of mercy by the clergy of the orthodox or persecuting Church of Rome. A hundred such volumes would be needed to record the whole tale of the suppression of the European Cathars. And if we ask what has become of the literature of these old believers of Europe, an examination of the lately found eleventh-century MS. of the Peregrmatio of St. Sylvia suggests an answer. This precious codex contained a description of the Feast of the Baptism, the old Christmas day, as it was celebrated on Jan. 6 in Jerusalem towards the close of the fourth century. It was the one tell-tale feast, the one relic of the Adoptionist phase of Christianity which the book contained; and the details of its celebration would have had an exceptional interest for the Christian archaeologist of to-day. But the particular folio which contained this information, at some remote period, and probably in the monastery of Monte Casino where it was written, has been carefully cut out. If such precau tions were necessary as late as the twelfth century, what must not have been destroyed in the fourth and fifth centuries, when the struggle between the rival christologies raged all over the East '¦ I refer to Limborch's edition. PREFACE xi and West? Then it was that the bulk of the Christian literature of the second and early third centuries perished, and was irrevo cably lost. Because I have sometimes referred to the Adoptionists as heretics, I trust I may not be supposed to have prejudged the case against them. In doing so I have merely availed myself of a conventional phrase, because it was convenient and clear. For it has been no part of my task to appraise the truth or falsehood of various forms of Christian opinion, but merely to exhibit them in their mutual relations; and, treating my subject as a scientific botanist treats his flora, to show how an original genus is evolved, in the process of adaptation to different circumstances, into various species. It rests with the authoritative teacher of any sect to determine, like a good gardener, which species he will sow in his particular plot. The aim of the scientific historian of opinion is only to be accurate and impartial; and this I have tried to be, moving among warring opinions, ' sine ira et studio, quorum causas procul habeo.' If I have occasionally waxed warm, it has been before the spectacle of the cruel persecution of innocent people. And of a truth a pathetic interest attaches to such a book as this Key of Truth, in which, in tardy fulfilment of Gibbon's hope, the Paulicians are at last able to plead for themselves. It was no empty vow of their elect ones, ' to be baptized with the baptism of Christ, to take on themselves scourgings, imprisonments, tortures, reproaches, crosses, blows, tribulation, and all temptations of the world.' Theirs the tears, theirs the blood shed during more than ten centuries of fierce persecution in the East ; and if we reckon of their number, as well we may, the early puritans of Europe, then the tale of wicked deeds wrought by the persecuting churches reaches dimensions which appal the mind. And as it was all done, nominally out of reve rence for, but really in mockery of, the Prince of Peace, it is hard to say of the Inquisitors that they knew not what they did. Even while we reprobate the tone of certain chapters of The Key, in which the orthodox churches are represented as merely Satanic agencies, we must not forget the extenuating fact that for over five centuries the Adoptionists had in Rome and elsewhere been under the heel of the dominant faction. If we hunt down innocent men like wild animals, they are more than mortal, if they do not requite many evil deeds with some few bitter words. And one point in their favour must be noticed, and it is this. Their xii PREFACE system was, like that of the European Cathars, in its basal idea and conception alien to persecution ; for membership in it depended upon baptism, voluntarily sought for, even with tears and supplica tions, by the faithful and penitent adult. Into such a church there could be no dragooning of the unwilling. On the contrary, the whole purpose of the scrutiny, to which the candidate for baptism was subjected, was to ensure that his heart and intelligence were won, and to guard against that merely outward conformity, which is all that a persecutor can hope to impose. It was one of the worst results of infant baptism, that by making membership in the Christian Church mechanical and outward, it made it cheap ; and so paved the way for the persecutor. Under this aspect, as under some others, the Adoptionist believers, and the Montanists, and certain other sects, passed with the triumph and secularization of Christianity under Theodosius into the same relative position which the early Christians had themselves occupied under the persecuting Roman government ; whose place in turn the dominant or orthodox church now took in all respects save one, — namely, that it was better able to hunt down dissenters, because the In quisitors knew just enough of the Christian religion to detect with ease the comings in and goings forth of their victims. Built into the walls and foundations of a modern church we can often trace the fragments of an earlier and ruined edifice, but are seldom privileged to come upon a complete specimen of the older structure. Now into the fabric of many of our beliefs to-day are built not a few stones taken from the Adoptionists; often retrimmed to suit their new environment. In The Key of Truth we for the first time recover a long-past phase of Christian life, and that, not in the garbled account of an Epiphanius, or in the jejune pages of an Irenaeus or Hippolytus ; but in the very words of those who lived it. A lost church rises before our eyes ; not a dead anatomy, but a living organism. We can, as it were, enter the humble congregation, be present at the simple rites, and find our selves at home among the worshippers. And it is remarkable how this long-lost church recalls to us the Teaching of the Apostles. There is the same Pauline conception of the Eucharist indicated by the stress laid on the use of a single loaf, the same baptism in living water, the same absence of a hierarchy, the same description of the President as an Apostle, the same implied Christhood of the elect who teach the word, the same claim to possess the Apostolical PREFACE xiii tradition. It is no far-fetched hypothesis that the DidacM is itself the handbook of an Adoptionist Church. My Introduction contains many hints towards a history of the feast of Christmas ; but I have mostly confined myself to Armenian sources inaccessible to many scholars. The Greek evidence is well gathered together in Prof. Hermann Usener's suggestive study on the subject ; and I have hardly noticed it, lest my book should assume unwieldy dimensions. Another work to the author of which I am under obligations is the Dogmengeschichte of Prof Harnack. In my discussion of the origins of the Armenian Church I have been largely guided by the luminous tract of Prof Gelzer on the subject. Of other works consulted by me I have added a list at the end of my book. I feel that many of the views advanced in my Introduction will be sharply criticized, but I do not think that my main conclusions in regard to the character of the Paulician Church can be touched. The intimate connexion between adult baptism and the school of Christian thought represented by Paul of Samosata is evidenced in a passage of Cyril of Alexandria's commentary on Luke, first published by Mai^. In it Cyril assails Paul of Samosata's inter pretation of the word apxiiavos in Luke iii. 23, namely, that the man Jesus then began to be the Son of God, though he was, in the eye of the law (as ivofii^eTo), only son of Joseph. There follows a lacuna ^ in which Cyril coupled with this interpretation a form of teaching which he equally censured, namely, that all persons should be baptized on the model of Jesus at thirty years of age. This teaching was plainly that of the Pauliani, and we find it again among the Paulicians. ' Notia Biblioth. Pairurn, torn, ix; reprinted in Migne, Pair. Gr. vol. 72, col. 524. The Syriac version (edited by R. Payne Smith) has not this passage, which however seems to me to be Cyril's. 2 Cyril continues : ' Thus much harm and unexpected results from such a delaying of the grace through baptism to a late and over-ripe age. For firstly, one's hope is not secure (i. c. a man may die prematurely), that one will attain one's own particular ¦wishes ; and even if in the end one does so gain them, one is indeed made holy ; but gains no more than remission of sins, having hidden away the talent, so that it is infructuous for the Lord, because one has added no works thereunto.' Mai's note on the above is just : ' Uidetur in praecedentibus (nunc deperditis) Cyrillus uerba eomm retulisse, qui ut baptismum differrent, Christi exemplum obiiciebant anno aetatis trigesimo baptizati.' xiv PREFACE Where my conclusions are at best inferential, I have qualified them as such. To this class belongs the view that Gregory the Illuminator was himself an Adoptionist. I agree with Gelzer that his Teaching as preserved in the Armenian Agathangelus or in the independent volume of his Stromata cannot be regarded as altogether authentic. It would be interesting to know in what relation the fragments of his Teaching preserved in Ethiopic stand to the Armenian documents. An Anaphora ascribed to him is also found in the Ethiopic tongue, but is so common in collections of Ethiopic liturgies that it is probably worthless. It is, however, remarkable that no trace of it remains in Armenian. My suggestion that the European Cathars were of Adoptionist origin also rests on mere inference. But they had so much in common with the Paulicians, that it is highly probable. My kindred surmise that the early British Church was Adoptionist seems to be confirmed by two inscriptions recently communicated to me by Prof J. Rhys. These were found in North Wales and belong to the sixth to eighth centuries. They both begin with the words: 'In nomine Dei patris et filii Spiritus Sancti^.' This formula takes us straight back to The Shepherd of Hermas^, in which the Son of God is equated with the Holy Spirit ; and it ' These inscriptions occur on archaic crosses and are figured in Prof. West- wood's work. He agrees with Prof. Rhys about their date. Filii in one of them is represented only by an E, detected by Prof. Rhys alone. In the other the word Sancti is barely legible. The same formula, ' Sanctus Spiritus, Dei filius,' occurs in the Adoptionist tract, De Montibus Sina et Sion, c. 13, quoted in my Introduction, p. ci. The formula ' In nomine Dei summi ' also occurs four times in these early Christian inscriptions of Wales, and seems to be both anti-Trinitarian and connected with the series of inscriptions in honour of Scor vifiiaros, found in Asia Minor and referred by Schurer {Sitzungsber. der Akad. d. Wiss. zu Berlin, March 4, 1897, t. xiii. p. 200) and Franz Cumont (fyUfpUm. h la Revue de V instruction publique, Bruxelles, 1897) to Jewish influence. The occurrence of the same formula on early crosses in Wales shows that it may have been used in Asia Minor by Christians ; and Gregory of Nyssa {c. Eunom. xi, sub fin.) accuses the ' Arians,' i. e. the Adoptionists of Asia Minor, of baptizing not in the name of Father, Son, and Holy Ghost ; but of the Creator and Maker only, whom they, like the author of the Key (p. 1 15), • regarded as not only the Father, but as the God of the only-bom Son.' The survival of such formulae on these old Welsh crosses explains why Bede rejected the baptism of the British Christians, and why Aldhelm (a. d. 705) denied that they had the ' Catholicae fidei regula ' at all. " See Hermae Pastor (edit. Oscar de Gebhardt and Ad. Hamack, Lipsiae, 1877), Sim. V. 5, with the editors' notes. PREFACE XV also exactly embodies the heresy of which Basil deplored the prevalence in the eastern regions of Asia Minor'. These inscrip tions therefore rudely disturb the ordinary assumption that the early Celtic Church was ' catholic in doctrine and practice^,' as if Bede had meant nothing when he studiously ignored St. Patrick and denied that the British bishops even preached the Word. In the Appendices which follow the text of the Key, I have translated from old Armenian authors such connected notices of the Paulicians as they preserve. I have also added the letter of Macarius to the Armenians, because of the light which it sheds on their early Church. The Provengal Cathar ritual of Lyon, which I also include, has never been translated into English ; though it is an unique monument of the forerunners of the European reformation. It remains for me to thank those who have helped me with their advice and encouragement. Mr. Rendel Harris read the transla tion of the text and made many valuable suggestions. Most of all my thanks are due to the Clarendon Press for their liberality in publishing my book, and to the deacon Galoust Ttx Mkherttschian, who both copied for me the Edjmiatzin MS. of The Key of Truth and collated my text with it after it was in print. I earnestly hope that there may be found a second MS. of the book, which, by filling up the large lacunae of this, may clear up the many points which because of them remain obscure. ' See below, p. cxiv. ^ I quote Warren's Liturgy and Ritual of the Celtic Church, p. 45. CONTENTS PAGE Preface v Summary of the Introduction xvii Introduction xxiii-cxcvi Armenian Text 1-66 Translation of the Armenian Text .... 67-124 Appendix I. The Letter of Gregory of Narek . 125 „ IL Excerpts from Aristaces of Lastivert 131 III. Excerpts from Gregory Magistros . 141 „ IV. Excerpts from John of Otzun . . 152 „ V. Excerpts from Nerses Shnorhali . 155 „ VI. The PROvENfAL Ritual of the Albigeois 160 „ VII. Excerpts from Isaac Catholicos . 171 „ VIII. Excerpts from Paul of Taron . . 174 „ IX. Macarius' Epistle to the Armenians . 178 Excursus on the Armenian Style of The Key of Truth 187 Note on the Transliteration of Armenian Names . 190 Index igi List of Works consulted 202 ERRATUM. P. 124, 1. 18, for the ivords ' were elected by us. But because of their being elected ' substitute the follo'wing: ' besought us. But because of their beseeching ' ERRATUM Page Ixi, 1. 9 from foot, for a.d. 72T read a.t>. 821 The Keyo/TnUh SUMMARY OF THE INTRODUCTION (P. xxiii) Armenian Paulicians, called Thonraki, emigrate from Khnus in Turkey, and settle in Akhaltzik in Russian Armenia, a.d. 1828.— (xxiv) The Synod of Edjmiatzin appeals to the Russian Government to suppress them. An Inquisition opened, 1837. — (xxv-xxvi) Four confessions made of Paulician tenets.— (xxvii) The Key of Truth admitted to be their authoritative book.— (xxviii) The Russian Court at Tiflis fines the Paulicians, 1843.— (xxix) The Key of Truth is seized during this Inquisition. Description of it. Its age attested both by the colophon, and — (xxx) by the style. — (xxxi) The liturgical parts of the book are older than the rest, and belong perhaps to fourth century. The exordium the work of a great Paulician leader,— (xxxii) probably of Smbat, A. d. 800-850. Evidence on this point of Gregory Magistros.— (xxxiii-xl) The teaching of the Key is summarized under thirty-seven heads and shown to conform with the notices of Paulicians given in Armenian writers of the eighth to the twelfth centuries ; — (xii) and equally with the Greek sources in respect of the following points, viz.: their claim to be the Catholic Church, their rejection of similar claims on the part of the orthodox, their Adoptionist Christology, and belief that Jesus Christ was a crea ture only, — (xlii) their rejection of Mariolatry and of intercession of saints and of cult of the cross, — (xliii) their canon of Scripture, their view of the Eucharist, their hatred of monks, and — (xliv) their appeal to Scripture. The Escurial MS. of Georgius Monachus is the oldest Greek source and best agrees with the Key. The Paulicians not Mani cheans. — (xiv) Loose use of ' Manichean ' by orthodox writers in dealing > with opponents. — (xlvi) Did Paulicians hold that Jesus took flesh of the virgin?— -(xlvii) Their Eucharist not merely figurative. They only rejected orthodox rites because the orthodox had lost true baptism. — (xlviii) The Paulicians were ' old believers.' The report of the Inqui sition of Arkhweli in 1837 fills up lacunae in the Key, — (xlix) as to Paulician baptism and Eucharist. Baptism at thirty years of age. — (1) Nocturnal Eucharistic celebrations. Baptism in rivers. — (li) Nature of Paulician elect ones. Evidence on this point of letters of Sergius, and — (Iii) of exordium of Key. — (Iii) Were the elect ones adored as •v V < b xviii THE KEY OF TRUTH Christs, because Christ was immanent in them ?— (liii) The Eucharistic elements in becoming the body of the elect became the body of Christ, and vice versa. — (liv) But the Paulicians admitted a metabolism of the blessed elements. St. Paul on immanence of Christ. — (Iv) Re semblance with the Paulician of the view of the Eucharist taken by Eckbert's Rhenish Cathars in 1160.— (Ivi) Proof from the Liber Sententiarum (1307) that the Cathars adored their elect ones. — (Ivii) Relation of Greek to Armenian sources about Paulicians. Analysis of John of Otzun's account, A.D. 719.— (Iviii) He seems to refer the heresy back to fourth century, and notices the solidarity of Albanian with Armenian Paulicians. — (lix) He evidences that they already sought the protection of the A.rabs. Paulicians called Thonraki from Thonrak. — (Ix) Description of Thonrak, their centre. — (Ixi) Reasons for identifying Smbat of Thonrak with Smbat Bagratuni, adduced from Mekhitar, 1300, from Gregory of Narek, c. 975. — (Ixii) But Gregory Magistros does not favour this identification — (Ixiii) Evidence of Constantine Porphyrogenitus, c. 958 ; of Thomas Artsruni, c. 940, and — (Ixiv) of other Armenian chroniclers is favourable. History of Smbat Bagratuni. He was martyred by the Arabs, c. 854, and — (Ixv) avenged by the men of Sasoun. The charge of apostasy made against him points to his having been a Paulician. — (Ixvi) Smbat must have belonged to the Bagratuni clan. — (Ixvii) Evidence that he was an earlier Smbat, and minister of Chosrow, c. 648. List of heresiarchs who succeeded Smbat. — (Ixviii) The Sergius of the Greek sources unknown to the Armenians. — (Ixix) Aristaces' narrative, where laid. Topography of Harq and Mananali. Photius' error as to Mananali. — (Ixx) Topography of Tdjaurm. Paulicianism rife in entire upper valleys of Euphrates and Tigris. — (Ixxi) Policy of Byzantine emperors to drive the Paulicians out of the empire. Magistros' campaign did not get rid of them. Their recrudescence in Taron in eighteenth century, — (Ixxii) under the abbot John, the copyist of the Key. — (Ixxiii) Geographical diffusion in Asia Minor of the Paulicians. — (Ixxiv) The Greek writers familiar with those of the Western Taurus, the Armenians with those of the Eastern only. Solidarity of Paulicians in West with those in East of the range. — (Ixxv) Their destruction by the Greek emperors' paved the way for the Mohammedan conquest. — (Ixxvi) A Greek summary of Paulician tenets preserved in Isaac Catholicos, twelfth century. — (Ixxvii-lxxx) Translation with comments of Isaac's summary.— (Ixxxi) The evidence of John of Otzun [c. 700) agrees point for point with the above summary, especially in respect of the Paulician rejection,— (Ixxxii) of stone altars and fonts, — (Ixxxiii) of adult baptism. The union of Agapg and Eucharist. Agreements of Isaac's summary with the DidacM.— (ix-xxy) Evidence of the Canons of Sahak (c. 425) as to union of Agapg and Eucharist.— (Ixxxv) Early Armenian fasts. Isaac's summary borne out by Nerses of Lambron's picture of Armenian Christianity in Cilicia in twelfth century. (Ixxxvi) The place of Paulicianism in the general history of Christian SUMMARY OF THE INTRODUCTION xix opinion. Its antiquity evidenced by John of Otzun, and by-(Ixxxvii) Lazar of Pharp {c. 480). The organic unity of beliefs with rites seen in the Key is a proof of age and primitiveness.— (Ixxxviii) Coherence of Paulician Christology with baptismal usages and with rite of election. — (Ixxxix) The Key a monument of the Adoptionist Church, of which The Shepherd of Hermas is also a monument. — (xc) The Christology of latter book examined and shown to agree with that of Theodotus. - — (xci) Traces of Adoptionism in Justin Martyr. — (xcii) Its identity with Ebionite Christology. Hippolytus' account of Theodotus.— (xciii) Proba bility that Theodotus, like the Paulicians, accepted John's Gospel ; though the Alogi, his predecessors, rejected it. — (xciv) Adoptionism in Melito. Condemnation of Paul of Samosata. — (cxv) The latter's teaching. — (xcvi) Traces of Adoptionism in Lactantius. Evolution of Christian dogmas in the great centres of culture. — (xcvii) The Disputa tion of Archelaus with Mani is an Adoptionist monument, for it teaches that Jesus was merely man before his baptism— (xcviii) and that he was not God incarnate. It excludes the ordinary interpretation of the miraculous birth. — (xcix) Jesus was filius per profectum. Parallel descent of Holy Spirit on the faithful.— (c) Jesus became Christ and Son of God at his baptism. — (ci) Karkhar the see of Archelaus was near Arabion Castellum on the Stranga, or — (cii) upper Zab ; — (ciii) and was therefore an Armenian see. Antiquity of Christianity in south east Armenia. — (civ) The early Christianity of the Taurus range was Adoptionist, and — (cv) the name Paulician originally meant a follower of Paul of Samosata. — (cvi) The Paulicians, therefore, the same as the Pauliani of the Nicene fathers and of Ephrem. The Paulianist heresy reappeared in the empire in eighth century as a characteristically Armenian heresy. — (cvii) Early conflict in Armenia of the Adoptionist Christology with the Nicene, which came in from Cappadocia. — (cviii) The Adoptionists under name of Messalians condemned in Armenian council of Shahapivan (A. D. 447). Lazar of Pharp's descrip tion (a. D. 480) of Armenian heresy. — (cix) The heresy condemned at Shahapivan was the primitive Syriac Christianity of south-east Armenia, which — (ex) the grecizing Armenian fathers ignored, though it provided them with their earliest version of New Testament. — (cxi) Gregory the Illuminator was probably an Adoptionist believer, but his 'Teaching' has been falsified. — (cxii) Evidence of St. Basil's letters as to the conflict in Armenia in fourth century of the rival schools of Christology. St. Nerses (died c. 374), Basil's lieutenant, de posed by King Pap, who — (cxiii) effected thefinal rupture with Caesarea. — (cxiv) Basil's description of the popular heresy of Armenia proves that it was Adoptionist. — (cxv) It affirmed, like Eunomius' creed, that Jesus Christ was a created being. — (cxvi) The orthodox Armenians shifted their ecclesiastical centre to Valarshapat from Taron, because of the prevalence of Adoptionists in latter region. Constantine V a Paulician. — (cxvii) The r61e of Smbat. He did not create the heresy of the Thonraki, but only organized the old believers of Taron, — b 2 XX THE KEY OF TRUTH (cxviii) under a primate of their own. Till then the old belief had lurked among isolated clans.— (cxix) As their first primate he wrote down their rites in an authoritative book.— (cxx) The Thonraki claim to be the catholic church of St. Gregory, and to have the apostolical tradition. They repudiated the sacraments and orders of the grecizing Armenians as false.— (cxxi) The archaic nature of their baptismal views proved by their agreement with TertuUian, who— (cxxii) like them denounced infant-baptism. — (cxxiii) Macarius of Jerusalem (iT. 330) on 'Arian' heresy in Armenia. Pauhcians hostile to a real hierarchy and to monks. — (cxxiy) The Paulician ' elect ' one the synecdemos of the Greek sources. Were the ' rulers ' in the Paulician Church Elect ones ? — (cxxv) Use of the phrase ' original sin ' in the Key. — (cxxvi) The Paulicians borrowed it from the West, where it was already used in fifth century, — (cxxvii) and where the Latin Adoptionists may have originated it. — (cxxviii) Paulician system was opposed to hereditary priesthood and to blood-offerings in expiation of the sins of the dead. — (cxxix) Why the Western Paulicians renamed their con gregations. No trace of this Schwdrmerei among the Thonraki. — (cxxx) Their hostility to papal usurpation mistaken by their enemies for hostility to St. Peter. — (cxxxi) Differences between the Elect of the Manicheans and the Elect of the Paulicians. — (cxxxii) Both Churches held that Christ is immanent in the Elect. The real Manicheans of Armenia. — (cxxxiii) The immanence of Christ in the Elect exampled from the New Testament, and— (cxxxiv) from early Christian writers ; especially TertuUian, — (cxxxv) whose views of the Virgin Mary and of the Eucharist were also shared by the Paulicians. ^(cxxxvi) TertuUian, like them, held that the elements are typicaUyand yet in some sense really the body and blood of Christ. — (cxxxvii) De portation to Thrace of Pauhcians of the Taurus, — (cxxxviii) where they created the Bogomile Church and survived into the last century. — (cxxxix) Crusaders met with Paulicians in Syria. First mention of them in Europe.— (cxl) Eckbert's description of Rhenish Cathars indicates a sect akin to the Paulicians.— (cxli) The Cathar ritual of Lyon is an Albigeois book and has affinities with the Paulician ordinal, — (cxiii) though in some respects it is more primitive. Did the Albigeois baptize with water ?— (cxliii) The common ritual use of the name Peter in the Albigeois Consolamentmn and Paulician election service proves their common origin.— (cxli v) Both sects had the same conception of the Church as the communion of saints.— (cxiv) The Albigeois were not Manicheans, nor did they advocate the suicide of persons consoled. — (cxlvi) Diff"erences in respect of baptism between the Lyon ritual and the A>)/.— (cxlvii) A knowledge of the Paulicians was brought to Europe by the Crusaders,— (cxlviii) and there is no affiliation of the Cathars to the Bogomiles before Reinerius Saccho in 1254.— (cxlix) The Consolamentum was a general form of laying on of hands in order to the reception of aU gifts alike of the Spirit.— (cl) Possibility that Armenian refugees and colonists in Europe contributed to the Anabaptist move- SUMMARY OF THE INTRODUCTION xxi ment. — (cii) Wiszowaty on the origin of the Anabaptists and Unitarians. (ciii) The Pauliani were quartodecumans. Adoptionist festival of the Baptism of Jesus on sixth of January.— (cUii) The Bezan reading of Luke iii. 22. The Fish an Adoptionist emblem of Christ. The Gospel of the Baptism read on sixth of January. — (cliv) Testimonia concerning the feast on sixth of January from canons of Clemens, Macarius, — (civ) from Nectarius and Hippolytus.— (clvi) Artemon, the reputed founder of the Christmas feast on December 25. — (clvii) Testimony of Melito, Cyprian, Marutha.— (clviii) The Syrian doctors on origin in Sun- worship of the Roman Christmas. — (clix) Isaac Catholicos on heretical character of Armenian feasts. — (clx) List of Armenian feasts in canons of Sahak. — (clxi) Was the Sabbath observed in the early Armenian Church ? — (clxii) Was the later Lenten fast evolved out of the forty days' fast of the Adoptionists ?— (clxiii) The Paulician Eucharist a sacred meal symbolic of Christian unity. — (dxiv) The matal or eating of the flesh of a victim. St. Sahak's conception of 'Church' the same as that of the Paulicians. — (clxv) Use of the terms synagogue and pros- eucha in early Armenian Church. — (clxvi) The wanq or shelter- houses. Dislike of Paulicians for churches of wood and stone evidenced by — (clxvii) Nerses of Lambron, c. 1170. Dislike of vestments and ceremonies, universal among— (clxviii) Armenians of Western Taurus. • — (clxix) Faustus the Manichean witnesses to the changed Christology of the Catholics of fourth century. — (clxx) Survival of Adoptionism in Spain, c. 800. Elipandus and the Pope. — (clxxi) Elipandus appeals to use of adoptiuus in Muzarabic liturgy. — (clxxii) Felix of Urgel explicitly Adoptionist in his views. — (clxxiii) He was controverted by Heterius and Alcuin. — (clxxiv) The heresy was not devised by Felix by way of converting Arabs. — (clxxv) Elipandus' formula Christus inter Christos. — (clxxvi) Resemblance with Archelaus of Elipandus and Felix. — (clxxvii) Elipandus overlaid his Adoptionism with Nicene faith. — (clxxviii) But Heterius and Alcuin detected his heresy. — (clxxix) The early British Church was probably Adoptionist. — (clxxx) This implied by Bede's persistent attacks on Adoptionism. — (clxxxi) Early faith of Gascony and Bavaria Adoptionist. The immanence of Christ in the preacher taught in the Didache and in The Shepherd of Hermas. — (clxxxii) Origen's view of the Incarnation agrees with that of the Adoptionists. — (clxxxiii) Montanists held the same view of the immanence of Christ, and extended it to women. — (clxxxiv) Traces of a similar view in Mani and the heretic Marcus. (clxxxv) Were the Paulicians in communion with the remnant of the Montanists? — (clxxxvi) Two ways of eliminating original sin in Jesus: to deny, like Marcion, that he took flesh from his mother; or — (clxxxvii) to affirm with the Latin Church the immaculate conception of his mother. The former view may have been taken by the author of the Paulician Catechism. — (clxxxviii) Traces of an older Adoptionism in the existing rites of orthodox Armenians, e. g. in their Baptismal Service, which — (clxxxix) is meaningless, except in relation to adults ; — xxii THE KEY OF TRUTH (cxc) and in their ordinal. The two rival Christologies foreshadowed in Philo. — (cxci) Recapitulation of Adoptionist conceptions of priest hood, of baptism, and of Eucharist. — (cxcii) Probability that the Adoptionists used and disseminated the Western Text of New Testa ment. Traces of the same in the Key. — (cxciii) The Adoptionist Christian year compared with that of the orthodox Churches. Philo on Epiphanies of the Logos. — (cxciv) Docetic tendencies inherent in the Incarnation-Christology ; — (cxcv) both in respect of the body and of the mind of Jesus. Reasons why this Christology allied itself with infant-baptism. — (cxcvi) Retrospect of the history of the Adop tionist Church. INTRODUCTION At' the end of the Russo-Turkish war in 1828-1829, a number of Turkish Armenians settled in the newly- acquired Russian terri tory between Akhaltzik and Erivan, under the leadership of their bishop Karapet. In February, 1 8 3 7 , this bishop warned the Synod of the Orthodox Armenians in Edjmiatzin that in the village Arkhw61i in the province of Shirak there were twenty-five families of refugees from the village of Dj^wiurm in the canton of Khnus, who were Thondraketzi ^ or Paulicians of Thondrak or Thonrak. He complained that these heretics were carrying on a propa ganda among their simple-minded neighbours, although in the presence of civil or ecclesiastical functionaries they feigned adhesion to the orthodox Armenian Church. ' Some of our villagers,' he wrote, 'inform us how they openly, in the presence of the simple-minded, deny that the saints help us, deny the value of fasting, the benefit of prayer, and the like. . . And, although they have a priest, whom I saw in Khnus, and who is wholly without a knowledge of letters, he cannot lead them straight. Perhaps he does not care, for until now he keeps his peace.' The bishop then prays the Synod to send to Arkhwili a learned priest, to combat the spread of heresy. Two priests armed with authority were, in consequence of these representations, sent to the neighbourhood, but they could get no other answer from the persons suspected than : ' We are children of the Illuminator'.' However, others, who had listened ¦ For most of the historical matter in pp. xxiii-xxviii I am indebted to an article published by M..A. Eritzean, of Tiflis, in the journal called Phords, Tiflis, 1880, under the title ' The Armenian Thonraketzi.' ' In general I shall drop the general termination -tzi, and speak of the Thonraki or Thondraki, though of course Thonraketzi is the only Armenian equivalent for a dweller in Thonrak. ^ See p. 132 for the testimony of Aristaces to the fact that the Paulician Church was one with the church founded by Gregory the Illuminator ; and compare Gregory Mag., p. 147, ' We are of the tribe of Aram, and agree with them in faith.' xxiv THE KEY OF TRUTH to their attacks on religion, admitted that a false elder, preaching the heresy, had appeared in Khnus, and had wished to enter their houses; but they averred that they had repelled him with anathemas. Five men pleaded that they had received the false teaching not knowing that it was opposed to that of the Armenian Church, and sued for forgiveness. This was on April 13, 1837. Not content with repressing the movement in Arkhw61i, the Holy Synod, through the Catholicos, made representations to the Bishop of Erzeroum in Turkey, requesting him to send agents to Khnus, which was in his diocese, and where a priest, since dead had spread the heresy. These agents were to root out the heresy, if it still survived there. The aid of the Russian Government was also invoked in the person of Baron Posen, Governor of the Caucasus, to put down the sectaries of Arkhweli. The Governor in reply asked in what consisted the heresy of these villagers, and was informed that ' they rejected the intercession of the saints and spurned their images, denied the value of fasts and the benefit of prayer, disbelieved in the immaculateness of the holy Virgin, Mother of God, repudiated the sacrament of baptism, and the rest.' About the same time an inhabitant of Giumri (now Alexan- drapol) named Karapet Mkrttchean, in a death-bed confession, revealed to an orthodox priest that he, with six others, some with their households, and some apart, had joined the Thonraki sect, being converted by persons from Arkhweli, which is in the neighbourhood. His written confession was sent to the consistory of Erivan. He could read and write, and it runs as follows : — 'In 1837, at the feast of the Transfiguration in the month of June, Kirakos of Giumri Qosababayean, after hearing George the elder of Arkhweli preach, renounced the holy faith, and also preached to me, Karapet, that Christ is not God. Through the preaching of Kirakos, Tharzi Sarkis with his family, Dilband Manuk, Grigor of Kalzwan with his household, Jacob Ergar, Avon of Kalzwan, and I, met in the room of Grigor of Kalzwan ; and we took oath one with another not to disclose our secret to any. They in particular told me to inform no man of it. They ' I. convinced me that Christ is not God; ' 2. made me blaspheme the cross, as being nothing ; ' 3. told me that the baptism and holy oil of the Armenians is false ; and that ' 4- we must rebaptize all of us on whose foreheads the sacred oil of the wild beast is laid. INQUISITION OF ARKHWELI, 1837 xxv ' 5. The mother of God ' is not believed to be a virgin, but to have lost her virginity. ' 6. We reject her intercession ; and also ' 7. whatever saints there be, they reject their intercession. ' 8. They reject the mass and the communion and the confession, but say instead (i.e. to the orthodox) : " Confess to your stocks and stones, and leave God alone." ' 9. Moreover, those who choose to communicate eat the morsel and drink down the wine upon it, but do not admit the communion of the mass. ' 10. They say that we are the only true Christians on earth, whereas Armenians, Russians, Georgians, and others, are false Christians and idolators. 'II. On our faces we make no sign of the cross. ' 12. Genuflexions are false, if made superstitiously. '13. During fasts they eat. ' 14. The canon-lore of the holy patriarchs they reject, and say that the councils of the patriarchs were false, and that their canons were written by the devil.' After making this confession, Karapet affirmed his penitence and sought forgiveness. Three other confessions were obtained about the same time, which we give in the order in which M. Eritzean has printed them. The following is the deposition of Manuk Davthean of Giumri, who could not write : — 'In 1837, in February, during Shrovetide, on the first of the week, in the chamber of Grigor Kalzwan, I saw Tharzi Sargis reading the Gospel. First he read it, and then explained it. ' I. He told us not to worship things made with hands; that is to say, images (or pictures) of saints and the cross, because these are made of silver, and are the same as idols. ' 2. Christ is the Son of God, but wasiorn a man of Mary, she losing her virginity, as it were by the earthly^ annunciation of Gabriel. '3. After suffering, being buried, and rising again, he ascended into heaven, and sat on the right hand of the Father, and is our Intercessor. ' The word answers to Theotokos, and was conventionally used by these late Paulicians to denote the mother of Jesus. They of course reject the idea con veyed in it. ^ The text has holelln = earthly, or made of dust ; but hogeUn = ' spiritual,' should perhaps be read. On the heresy involved, see below, p. clxxxvii. xxvi THE KEY OF TRUTH '4. Except Christ we have no other intercessor; for ' 5. the mother of God they do not believe to be virgin ; nor ' 6. do they admit the intercession of saints. ' 7. Neither are fasts ordained of God, but prelates have in geniously devised them to suit themselves ; wherefore it is right to break the fasts as we will. When you go into church, pray only to God, and do not adore pictures. ' 8. In the time of baptism it is unnecessary to anoint with oil, for this is an ordinance of men, and not of God. ' 9. Ye shall not commit sin : but when ye have committed sin, whether or no ye confess to priests, there is no remission. It only avails you, if you pour out your sins to God. ' 10. Genuflexion is unnecessary. '11. To say "Lord, Lord," to priests is not necessary, but it is meet to say regularly that God and not man is Lord. '12. Nor is it necessary to go to places on vows. ' 1 3. Last of all he told me that Christ is not God, and then I understood the falsity of their faith.' The third recantation written down was that of Av6s Marturosean of Giumri, who could not himself write. He deposed that in 1837 in February, in the chamber of Grigor of Kalzwan, he not only heard the teaching already detailed in the second recantation, but the following as well : — ' I. Ye shall keep the ten commandments which God gave to Moses. ' 2. Christ is not God, but the Son of God and our Intercessor, sitting on the right hand of God. ' 3. Ye shall know Christ alone, and the Father. All other saints which are or have been on the earth are false. ' 4. There is no need to go on vows to Edjmiatzin or Jerusalem. ' 5. Ye shall confess your sins in church before God alone. ' 6. The holy oil of Edjmiatzin is false, nor is it necessary unto baptism; but whenever ye pour one handful of water over the catechumen, he is baptized. For Christ commanded us to baptize with water. ' 7. Ye shall always go to church; and to the priest at the time of confession ye shall not tell your sins, for they do not understand. But talk to them in a general sort of way. ' 8. Always go to church, not that our kind considers it real ; but externally ye shall perform everything, and keep yourselves concealed, until we find an opportunity ; and then, if we can, we PAULICIAN TENETS CONFESSED xxvii will all return to this faith of ours. And we swear, even if they cut us to pieces, that we will not reveal it.' ' Gregory of Kalzwan said as follows : " Behold, I am the Cross ; light your tapers on my two hands, and give worship. I am able to give you salvation, just as much as the cross and the saints." ' The fourth confession referred to four of the persons whose names are given in the first. Two of them could read. Kirakos Khosay Babayean, already mentioned, deposes in his own writing to the truth of the previous recantations, and attests that he learned of Tharzi Sarkis Haruthiunean ; and the latter, also in writing, admitted all, and added that he had learned everything in 1835 from George the church-singer (or elder) of Arkhweli, who had in his possession a MS. called The Key of Truth ', in which ' every thing was written.' It was this George who taught that all are false Christians, except the Nemetzni "^ who are true Christians. These revelations led to increased activity on the part of the synod of Edjmiatzin. Fresh representations were made to the Russian Governor of the Caucasus to put down the sectaries of ArkhwSli, and also to suppress the newly-arrived German Protestant missionaries, with whose activity the recrudescence of ancient heresy was alleged to be connected'. There were thirty families of Paulicians in Arkhweli, who pretended that they had given up the heresy ; and they had even built an orthodox church in their midst in order to avoid suspicion. Also five of the inhabitants had drawn up a document, entitled, ' About the causes of the heresy of the new Manicheans and their followers.' This they sent to the Government. In it was stated that 'in the province of Khnus in the village of Djaurm (or Tschaurm) fifty- five years previously, a certain Armenian priest Ohannes (i.e. John) had joined the sect, and composed a book called The Key of Truth. This Ohannes, under pressure from the Osmanli Government, had afterwards, along with his companions, accepted the Mohammedan ' Cp. p. Ixxii below. ' That is, the German Millennarists from Wurtemburg who were settled in the Caucasus in 1817. They chose the Caucasus because they believed that at the end of the world Christians would find a place of refuge near the Caspian. See Missionary Researches in Armenia, by Eli Smith and H. G. O. Dwight. London, r834. ' These missionaries came from Basle, and, with the approbation of the Czar ^ Alexander, settled at Shusha, a little south of the present city of Elizabetpol, in 1827. There they set up an Armenian and Tartar printing-press, which before long was forbidden. xxviii THE KEY OF TRUTH faith.' Of this Ohannes we shall give further details later on from another source ^ It is enough here to remark that he was only the copyist, and not the composer of The Key of Truth, as his own colophon therein sufl3ciently proves. In June, 1838, in consequence of fresh representations on the part of the Holy Synod of Edjmiatzin, the governor of Tiflis ordered an inquiry to be opened in Arkhweli, to which the Erivan consistory was invited to send a deputy who could speak Russian, and should be versed in the doctrines of the orthodox Armenian Church. What came of this inquiry we do not know. In 1841, in consequence of fresh reports of the activity of the Paulicians of Arkhweli in baptizing and communicating the peasants, the Erivan consistory once more petitioned the Holy Synod to set the civil power in motion. It is to the credit of the latter synod that, before taking so extreme a step, they advised the consistory to replace the incompetent orthodox priest of the village with one who could preach and had zeal and intelligence. The consistory rephed that there was no priest in the diocese possessing such qualifications. It appears notwithstanding that the civil power was once more invoked; for in 1841 the military governor of Tiflis, General Praigon, ordered the local judge, of Alexandrapol to decide the - matter ; and the latter had actually drawn up a voluminous report, when a general letter of amnesty was issued by the new Czar, April 16, 1841. In this amnesty the sectaries were included along with other offenders, and so gained a brief respite from the malice of their own countrymen. The Holy Synod, however, did not rest until in February, 1843, it procured that the sectaries should be excluded from the benefits of the amnesty, and the judicial inquiry into their doings, afl;er all, carried out. The result M'as that in 1845 the criminal court of Tiflis fined the sectaries accused forty roubles, ordered them to conform to the orthodox Armenian Church, and forbad their ministrant to call himself a deacon. The synod represented that this punishment was quite incommensurable with the heinous character of the offenders ; but their representations had no effect, and they do not seem to have since resumed these petty persecu tions of their own compatriots. Perhaps one should be grateful to them for having, in the course of the struggle in 1837, seized and kept safe until now the Paulician manual of which I now proceed to speak in detail. ' See below, pp. Ixxi, Ixxii. THE KEY OF TRUTH SEIZED xxix The copy of The Key of Truth, now preserved in the Archives of the Holy Synod of Edjmiatzin, is a small octavo MS. on paper, written neatly in what is called notergir or minuscule in Taron in 1782. Many leaves are missing, about 38 out of the 150 which the book originally contained. According to the 'Acts of the Holy Synod ' they were torn out by George of Arkhweli, the owner of the book, when he found that he was detected and feared that it would be seized. The pages torn out were certainly those of which the contents were likely to give most offence. For the context shows that the lost leaves contained attacks on the abuses of the orthodox churches and doctrinal expositions, especially of the Christology of the sect. It is unfortunate that so much is lost, along with the liturgy of the mass which the copyist of 1782 also transcribed ; the first half of the colophon is also lost. These lost portions, if we only had them, would have furnished decisive evidence in regard to a point which must be raised at the offset, namely this : Can this Key of Truth be regarded as a monument of the Paulicians of the eighth to the twelfth centuries? That it was composed long before 1782 is evident from the colophon, in which the copyist deplores the shortcomings, the faults of spelling, composition, and grammar in the book ; and declares that they have all been introduced into it by unpractised copyists. He was conscious therefore that the work, before it reached his hands in 1782, had been handed down through at least several generations. The many omissions in scripture cita tions plainly due to similar endings point to the same conclusion. The marginal notes in the book are written by a hand later than that which wrote the text. The citations of scripture are in nearly all cases taken from the Armenian Vulgate as it was completed soon after a. d. 400. What differences there are may be due to inaccurate copyists. The references to the chapters and verses of Stephanus — which are added after citations, sometimes in the text, sometimes in the margin, sometimes in both at once — were already given by the scribe of 1782, at which date printed copies of the Armenian New Testament containing the chapters and verses of Stephanus had long been in circulation in Armenia. Some copyist of the Key between 1680 and 1780 inserted these references ; perhaps by way of shortening the work of transcrip tion, for the text is often merely referred to and not copied out in full. Thus the colophon of 1782 at once disarms the criticism which xxx THE KEY OF TRUTH would deny the book to be as old as the ninth century, because of the many vulgarisms of the text. These chiefly consist in a loose use of prepositions, such as would be most likely to creep in. Of the leading characteristics, however, which distinguish the modern dialects of Armenian from the old classical language there is barely any trace, as any one acquainted with them will be able to judge. Some of these characteristics, e. g. the lengthened form of verbs like karenatn for harem already confront us in more popularly written books (like the Armenian version of the Geoponica) of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. The Key of Truth must long precede that age. The use of the accusative of the relative pronoun zor at the beginning of a new sentence, to connect it with what precedes, is very common in the Key, and is at first sight modern; yet it is frequent in Zenob, who wrote about a.d. 800 a history of Taron, the region in which Thondrak or Thonrak, a centre of the Armenian Paulicians, lay. This fact of the near geographical origin of both books also explains the considerable resemblance of style between Zenob's history and the Key. There are not a great many words in the Key foreign to classical Armenian of the fifth century; but what there are we find, with three or four exceptions, in writers of the eighth to the thirteenth centuries, particularly in Gregory of Narek in the tenth. This statement is based on a study of nearly thirty such words ^ It has to be borne in mind that, whereas all the works of the orthodox Armenian Church of an earlier time were composed in the learned language. The Key of Truth is not likely to have been written in any tongue except that which was spoken among the poorer country people to whom the great Paulician leaders addressed themselves. Certainly the use of the Armenian New Testament might impart a slight classical tinge to their writings ; but there was no other influence at work to produce such a result. Like the great heretical writers who founded the vernacular litera tures of modern Europe, Huss, Wycliffe, Luther, the unknown translators of the Provengal Testament of Lyon, so the founders of the Paulician Church must have addressed themselves not to monks and learned men but to the common people. But if this be so, we cannot suppose The Key of Truth to have been written later than 850. The prayers in it remain pure and limpid examples of the ' See the excursus at the end of the appendices, in which I enter into a more technical discussion of the style of the book. STYLE AND AGE OF THE KEY xxxi classical speech; and it is natural that they should have most successfully resisted the vulgarizing influence of centuries of rude and untaught copyists. They seem to me to be older than the controversial chapters which accompany them, and to belong to the fourth or fifth century. He who considers in what form an English book, written in the tongue of the ninth century and transmitted almost ever since entirely by copyists who were ignorant and persecuted peasants, would have come down to the present age, has a right to pass judgement on The Key of Truth. The history of the sect as we read it fills us with just wonder that their book is not tenfold more corrupt and vulgarized than it is. There is constantly visible in it the hand of some eloquent and earnest writer, who knew how-to pen clear, bold, nervous, freely flowing and unembarrassed paragraphs in an age when, to judge by the works of Gregory of Narek and Gregory Magistros, the Arme nian Church writers were about to reach the lowest level of obscurity and affectation, of turgid pomposity and involution of phrase. On the whole, therefore, the evidence of the stj'le is in favour of, and not against an early date. But when we consider the contents we are obliged to refer the book to the ninth century at latest. The exordium is unmistakably from the pen of some great leader and missionary of the Paulician Church. Mark the words : ' I have not spared to give unto you, my new-born children of the universal apostolic Church of our Lord Jesus Christ, the holy milk, whereby ye may grow in the faith.' He has been inspired by the Holy Spirit to reveal ' the way, the truth, and the life ' to those from whom till now the truth had been hidden by pedantry and deceit. He will with The Key of Truth open ' the door of truth,' long since shut upon his flock by Satan. This exordium, almost Pauline in its mixture of tenderness and authority, bespeaks some great missionary and restorer of religion in Armenia. We have also hints of the cruel persecutions and vicissitudes which had too long delayed the appearance of a manual, to the composition of which ' love of the truth of our Lord and zeal for the Holy Ghost, and the urgent entreaties of many believers had long since impelled him.' At last, in response to the entreaties of many believers, and urged by supreme necessity, he has thrown aside all other interests of this transitory life in order to compose this humble and unpre tentious book, which they are nevertheless to read and ponder unto the glory of Jesus Christ their mediator. All this presupposes a numerous body of believers looking up to xxxii THE KEY OF TRUTH one great teacher who has spent his life in ministering to them. The ' supreme necessity ' must surely have been the approach of fierce persecution and perhaps of death. The reference in the context to the transitoriness of our life implies as much. Who can this teacher have been ? Gregory Magistros records ' that the ordinances of the Paulicians, whom a.d. 1042-1054 he drove out of the district of Thonrak and Khnus, had been drawn up for them 170^ to 200 years before by Smbat, whom Gregory of Narek', c. 960, also accuses of being the founder of the sect. This Smbat seems from their accounts to have made Thondrak or Thonrak the focus from which his missionary efforts radiated. That he also died in this region, or that anyhow his tomb was there, may perhaps be inferred from the words of Gregory Magistros *- It is at least certain that the district of Thonrak continued to be after his death the religious centre of the Paulicians, who on that account were called Thonraki or Thonraketzi by the Armenians, just as the boni homines of the south of France were called Albigenses, from their association with Albi. If we may take the words of Magistros to imply that Smbat left writings regulating the faith and rites of his church, what more natural than to see in The Key of Truth one of these writings ? It is even not rash to suppose that our Key of Truth was actually in the hands of Gregory Magistros ; since this writer ascribes to the ' accursed Smbat ' the teaching that dogs and wolves appear in the form of priests, a tenet which is thoroughly in keeping with Chapter viii of the Key. We do not, it is true, find the exact words, but they may well have stood in the lost chapters. But after all we here are moving in a realm of surmise only, and we cannot assume as a fact, but only suggest as a hypothesis, that this Smbat was the author of The Key of Truth. Apart from the notices of Gregory of Narek and Gregory Magistros, we should be inclined to refer the work to Sergius, the great Paulician apostle of the ninth century, concerning whom we have many notices in the Greek writers of that and the two following centuries. Even if Smbat's authorship be questioned, there can be no doubt that the Key accurately reflects the opinions and rites of the Paulicians of the four centuries, 800-1200. We may discount the falsehood and ferocity of the orthodox or persecuting writers in ' See below, p. 148 : ' Smbat giving them their laws.' ¦-= See pp. 142, 145. s See pp. 126, 127, 129: ' their >«»;/«;- Smbat." ? Cp. p. 146: 'where the leaven of the Sadducees was buried.' ITS TENETS. ADULT BAPTISM xxxiii their portraiture of those with whom they differed, and yet are struck by the agreement of the contents of the Key with the rites and beliefs of the Paulician Church as we can glean them from the writings of John of Otzun in the eighth, of Narekatzi in the tenth, of Aristaces and Paul of Taron and Magistros in the eleventh, of Nerses in the twelfth centuries. In the following summary of Paulician tenets, as they may be gathered from the pages of the Key, we add continual references to the works of these contemporary Armenian writers. Thus the reader can himself make a com parison, and judge how closely The Key of Truth corresponds with their statements. I. The writer and the reader of the Key did not call themselves PauHcians, still less Thonraketzi. They were the ' holy, universal; and apostolic Church,' founded by Jesus Christ and his apostles. In describing themselves the words catholic and orthodox are sometimes, but less often, added ; perhaps because they shrank from the use of titles so closely identified with their persecutors. See the Key, pp. 73, 76, 80, 86, 87, s.-aA passim ; and cp. Greg. Mag. p. 147, where we read that the Paulicians, after anathematizing the ancient sects, would say : ' We do not belong to these, for they have long ago broken connexion with the church^ &c. Also it is clear from pp. 141, 142 that the Paulicians of Thulail had, in their letter to the Syrian catholicos, represented themselves as belonging to the true Church. For this is the contention which Gregory so vehemently traverses. So also Greg. Mag. p. 148 : ' They say. We are Christians.' 2. The Church consists of all baptized persons, and preserves the apostolical tradition which Christ revealed to the apostles and they to the Church, which has handed it on by unbroken trans mission from the first. See the Key, pp. 73, 74, 76, 80, 86, 87, 91, scaA. passim ; and cp. Greg. Narek, p. 126: 'They are not alien to the a/oj/o/zVa/ tradition'; and p. 127: 'Such then are your apostolic men.' Also the words on p. 126 hint at the Paulician claim: ' There is much that is divine and everything that is apostolical that is yet denied by them. Of divine ordinances, the laying on of hands, as the apostles received it from Christ.' 3. The sacram.ents are three which are requisite to salvation, to wit. Repentance, Baptism, and the Body and Blood of Christ. Marriage, ordination, confirmation, extreme unction, are not neces sary to salvation. See the Key, chap. iii. pp. 76, 77, and chap. xvi. pp. 86, 87; and in the Catechism, p. 119; and cp. John of Otzun, p. 154. C xxxiv THE KEY OF TRUTH 4. All true baptism in accordance with the precepts of Christ, especially Mark xvi. 16, must be preceded by repentance and faith. See the Key, chaps, i-iii. pp. 72-77 ; and Catechism, p. 117. 5. Consequently infant baptism is invalid ; and, in admitting it, the Latins, Greeks, and Armenians have lost their Christianity, lost the sacraments, forfeited their orders and have become a mere Satanic mimicry of the true faith. If any of them, even their patriarchs, would rejoin the true Church, they must be baptized. See in the Key, passim, btit especially pp. 73, 74, 86 ; chap, x^viii. p. 92 ; and the Catechism, p. 118. And cp. Greg. Nar. pp. 126, 127 : ' We know that the Font is denied by them'; and Arist. p. 140: 'They reject the Church's baptism'; and Greg. Mag. p. 146 : • Our holy bishops,' &c., and p. 147 he describes how in Thonrak alone he baptized over a thousand. ' We ask. Why do you not allow yourselves to be baptized . . . .' ' We are in no hurry to be baptized.' ... So p. I48. On p. 144 he records that Smbat reckoned as in vain ' all priestly functions,' i. c. in the orthodox churches. So also Aristaces, p. 140 : ' Church and church ordinances they utterly reject.' Greg. Mag. p. 144 : ' Their graceless baptism.' 5. The catechumen or candidate for baptism must be of mature age, as was Jesus of Nazareth, in order that he may be able to understand, recognize, and repent of his sin, which is twofold, viz. : original, and operative or effective. See the Key, chap. ii. p. 74 ; chap. iii. p. 76 ; and particularly on p. 88, the words : ' So must we also perform baptism when they are of full age like our Lord'; and in the Catechism, p. 118. Andcp. the passage of Greg. Mag. p. 146, just referred to, from which we may infer that the 'young men' of Thonrak were still unbaptized. Of similar import are the words addressed by Greg. Mag. p. 142, to the Thulaili : ' Hold yourselves far aloof from these innocent children, . . . and let them come and receive baptism.' 6. Baptism is only to be performed by an elect or ordained member of the Church, and in answer to the personal demand of the person who seeks to be admitted into the Church. See the Key, pp. 77, 91, 92, 96. 7. On the eighth day from birth the elect one shall solemnly confer a name on the new-born child, using a prescribed form of prayer. But he shall not allow any mythical or superstitious names. See the Key, chap, xvi ; and cp. the passage in John of Otzun, p. 153, begin ning : Similiter et primum parientis feminae . . . , m which the writer seems to glance at the ceremony of name-giving. ITS ADOPTIONIST CHRISTOLOGY xxxv 8. In doctrine the Paulicians were Adopdonist, and held that Jesus the Messiah was born a man, though a new man, of the Virgin Mary; and that, having fulfilled all righteousness and having come to John for baptism, he received in reward for his struggles the Lordship of all things in heaven and earth, the grace of the divine spirit, whereby he was anointed and became the Messiah, and was elected or chosen to be the eternal only-born Son, mediator of God and man, and intercessor. See the Key, chap. ii. pp. 74, 75 ; chap. v. p. 80; the prayer to the Holy Spirit on p. 100; p. 108, the whole prayer beginning, 'King of Kings'; p. 114, and passim. 9. They may also be called Unitarians, in so far as they believed that Jesus Christ was not creator but created, man, made and not maker. He was never God at all, but only the new-created Adam. See the Key, p. 79, and especially the Confession of Faith in chap. xx. p. 94 ; pp. 108, 119, and passim. Greg. Mag. attests this, p. 148 ; ' At heart they do not own him (i. e. Jesus Christ) God, whether circumcised or not.' The context implies that the Paulicians of Khnus had objected as against those who deified Jesus that a circumcised man could not be God. And it was this tenet, that Jesus was God, which the Thulaili rejected when they denied that they con fessed any circumcised God. Perhaps the text of Gregory means that it was Jesu^ Christ, and not the position of the Paulicians of Khnus, that was rejected. I have not seen his text here. 10. Jesus was born without original sin. See the Catechism, p. 119. II. The Holy Ghost enters the catechumen immediately after baptism (to exclude evil spirits), when a third handful of water is, in his honour, poured out over the catechumen's head. He is also breathed into the elect one by the bishop at the close of the ordination service. ^te. 'Aye. Key, pp. 100,109,111, 112. [The beginning words of the prayer before the Holy Spirit, ' Forasmuch as thou wast made by the Father,' are heretical. The MS. has Lnbuii,, which means 'made' or 'created.' A slightly different reading, Irilrtui, would make the sense to be, ' Thou didst proceed {or issue) from the Father.' But bqbuifjs, the right reading. It is meant to contrast the Spirit with God the Father, who alone is u/blrij^ or 'increate.'] 12. The word Trinity is nowhere used, and was almost certainly ¦ rejected as being unscriptural. In baptism, however, three separate handfuls of water were poured over the head in the name of the Father, in the name of the Son, and in the name of the Holy Spirit. Two or three words are erased in the baptismal formula, . c 2 xxxvi THE KEY OF TRUTH which would have explained more clearly the significance they attached to this proceeding, but it was clearly heretical or they would not have been erased. A ' figure ' follows in the text, p. 98, shadowing forth the meaning. The king, we learn, releases certain rulers (? apxavras) from the prison of sin; the Son calls them to himself and comforts and gives them hope ; and then the Holy Spirit at once crowns them and dwells in them for ever and ever. This figure is also meant to exhibit the significance of genuine bapdsm. 13. The Virgin Mary lost her virginity at the birth of Jesus, and is not ocindpBfvos, ever virgin. She was a virgin, however, till the new Adam was born. She cannot intercede for us, for Christ, our only intercessor, expressly denied blessedness to her because of her unbelief See the Key, pp. 113, 114; and cp. Greg. Mag. p. 146: ' They indulge in many other blasphemies against the holy ¦virgin.' 14. There is no intercession of saints, for the dead rather need the prayers of the living than the living of the dead. See the Catechism, p. 120. 15. The idea of Purgatory is false and vain. There is but one last judgement for all, for which the quick and the dead (including saints) wait. See the Catechism, pp. 121, 122 ; and cp. Paul of Taron, pp. 175, 176. 16. Images, pictures, holy crosses, springs, incense, candles are all to be condemned as idolatrous and unnecessary, and alien to the teaching of Christ. Seethe.A>)/,pp. 86, 115; and cp. Greg. Mag. p. 145 : ' We are no worshippers of matter,' &c. Also p. 149 : ' They represent our worship of God as a worship of idols ... we who honour the sign of the cross and the holy pictures.' And cp. Greg. Nar. p. 127 : 'They deny the adored sign ' (i.e. the cross). Compare especially Arist. p. 137. 17. The Paulicians are not dualists in any other sense than the New Testament is itself dualistic. Satan is simply the adversary of man and God, and owing to the fall of Adam held all, even patriarchs and prophets, in his bonds before the advent of Christ. See the Key, pp. 79, 114 (where it is specially declared that God created heaven and earth by a single word, and by impUcation is denied that Christ had any creative functions). 18. Sins must be publicly confessed before God and the Church, which consists of the faithful. MARIOLATRY. IMAGES. EUCHARIST xxxvii See the Key, p. 96 : ' What fruit of absolution hast thou ? TeU it us before the congregation' ; and cp. Arist. p. 134 : James the Thonraki 'refused to hear auricular confessions.' 19. The elect ones alone have the power of binding and loosing given by Christ to the Apostles and by them transmitted to their universal and apostolic Church. See the Key, pp. 105, 108 ; and cp. Arist. p. 133, on James the Paulician : ' he began by establishing election among priests.' And cp. also the references under No. 37 below. Greg. Mag. says, p. 149 : ' Many of them spare not to lay hands on the Church, on all priestly functions.' 20. Their canon included the whole of the New Testament except perhaps the Apocalypse, which is not mentioned or cited. The newly-elected one has given to him the Gospel and Apostolicon. The Old Testament is not rejected; and although rarely cited, is nevertheless, when it is, called the God-inspired book, Astouadsashountch, which in Armenian answers to our phrase ' Holy Scripture ' or ' Bible.' See the Key, passim ; and cp. Greg. Mag. p. 148 : ' They are for ever . . . quoting the Gospel and the apostolon.' None of the Armenian sources accuse the Paulicians of rejecting the Old Testament in a manner in which they did not reject the New Testament. 21. In the Eucharist the bread and wine are changed into the body and blood of Jesus Christ through the blessing invoked. Yet when he said to his followers : ' My body is the true food and my blood the true drink,' and again, ' I am the bread of life which came down from heaven,' he spoke in figures. However, in the last supper, when he blessed the elements, i.e. prayed the Lord that the bread might be truly changed into his body, it was verily so changed by the Holy Spirit, and Jesus savu that it was so and thanked the Almighty Father for the change of it into his body and blood. See the Catechism, p. 123. 21. The false priests (of the orthodox Churches) either deceive the simple-minded with mere bread, or — what is worse — they change the elements into their own sinful bodies when they say ' This is my body,' instead of changing them into Christ's. See the Catechism, pp. 123, 124; and cp. Greg. Nar. p. 126: 'This commu nion bread Smbat taught to be ordinary bread.' From this we cannot infer what exactly was Smbat's error, but the words testify to the Paulician sacrament of the body and blood, however they celebrated it. Cp. also Greg. Mag. p. 1 48 : ' Jesus in the evening meal spoke not of the offering of the Mass, but of every table.' xxxviii THE KEY OF TRUTH 2 2. One unleavened loaf and wine are to be offered in the eucharistic sacrifice. Seethe Key, p. 123. 23. In bapdsm the catechumens pass naked into the middle of the water on their knees ; but beside this immersion it was neces sary to pour three handfuls of water over the head. See the Key, p. 97. 24. Exorcism of the catechumen is performed by the elect one before baptism. See the Key, pp. 92, 97. 25. The sponsors in the infant baptism of the heretics (i.e. the orthodox) churches are at best mere false witnesses. See the Key, p. 88. 26. There is but a single grade of ecclesiastical authority, and this is that of the elect one. He bears the authority to bind and loose given by the Father to Jesus in the descent of the Holy Spirit in Jordan, handed on by Jesus to the apostles and by them to their successors. See p. 105 of the Key. The historian Kirakos relates (p. 114) that 'a bishop, Khosrov by name, during the catholicate of Anania Mokatzi (c. 950), taught that it is not right to submit to the archbishop, that is to the catholicos ; for that he is in no wise superior (to other priests) except in his bare name and title.' The Paulician tenet of a single grade of spiritual authority underlay such teaching. Cp. Paul of Taron, p. 1 76. 27. But although all authority is one and the same, the elect depositary of it may have various titles ; and according to the particular function he is fulfilling he is called in the Key, priest, elder, bishop, doctor or vardapet, president or hegumenos, apostle, and chief See the Key, p. 105. Arist. p. 138, testifies to the order of Vardapet among the Paulicians ; Greg. Mag. pp. 143, 15 5, to their priesthood and hegumenate. Cp. especially p. 149 : ' They have appropriated to themselves the language and false signs of priesthood.' 27. The word used to denote authority is ishkhan-uthiun. Hence it is probable that the ishkhanq, or rulers who choose out and present to the bishop a candidate for election, and in conjunc tion with the bishop lay hands on him in ordination, were them selves elect ones. See the Key, chap. xxii. 27. The presbyters and arch-presbyter mentioned in the ordinal or Service of Election seem to be identical with these ishkhanq, or ELECTION. CANON OF N. T. MONKS xxxix rulers. They seem to have the same duty of testing, choosing, and presenting before the bishop the candidate for election. On p. 1 08 the parties present at that service are summed up thus: 'The bishop, the newly- elected one, the rulers, archrulers, and congregation.' A litde before we read that the presbyters and arch-presbyters bring up the candidate to the bishop and pray him to ordain. It would seem then that the rulers and presbyters are the same people. See the Key, chap. xxii. Greg. Mag. p. 149, mentions their presbyters. 28. There is no trace of Docetism in the Key, nor any denial of the real character of the Passion. Christ's sufferings indeed are declared to have been insupportable. See the Key, p. 108. The Armenian writers do not accuse the Paulicians of Docetism. 29. The office of Reader is mentioned. In the Ordination Service he is the candidate for election. See the Key, p. 106. 30. There is no rejection of the Epistles of Peter, nor is any disrespect shown to that apostle. It is merely affirmed, p. 93, that the Church does not rest on him alone, but on all the apostles, including Paul. In the Election Service, p. 107, the bishop formally confers upon the candidate the ritual name of Peter, in token of the authority to loose and bind now bestowed on him. There was a similar ritual among the Cathars of France. See the Key, chap. [xxii]. 31. Sacrifices of animals (to expiate the sins of the dead) are condemned as contrary to Christ's teaching. See the Key, p. 1 1 5 ; cp. Greg. Nar. p. 1 27 : 'I know too of their railing and cavilling at the first fruits,' &c. Also Arist. p. 134, and note. 32. New-born children have neither original nor operative sin, and do not therefore need to be baptized. See the Catechism, p. 118. 33. A Strong prejudice against monks animates the Key. The devil's favourite disguise is that of a monk. See the Key, chaps, viii, ix; and the Catechism, p. 122; and cp. Arist- pp. 136, 137. This writer's account confirms the enmity of the orthodox monks to the Paulicians. 34. The scriptures and a knowledge of divine truth are not to remain the exclusive possession of the orthodox priests. See the Key, pp. 71-73. xl THE key: OF TRUTH 35. Rejection of the Logos doctrine as developed in the other Churches. There is indeed no. explicit rejection of it in the Key, but it is ignored, and the doctrine that Jesus Christ is a Krlap-a, a man and not God, leaves no room for it in the Paulician theology. See the Key, p. 114; and cp. Greg. Mag. p. 147 : ' They make no confession at all except of what is repugnant to all Christian ordinances and beliefs.' 36. For the same reason they must have rejected the term BtorroKos. See the Key, p. 1 14. 37. The elect one was an anointed one, a Christ, and the ordinal is a ritual for the election and anointing of a presbyter in the same way as Jesus was elected and anointed, namely by the Holy Spirit. See the Key, p. 95, the words beginning : ' Now therefore it is necessary,' &c. Also p. 40, the passage beginning : ' And then the elect one,' &c. ; and p. 102, beginning: 'Behold them,' c&c. Compare Greg. Nar. p. 127 : 'of their self- conferred contemptible priesthood, which is a likening of themselves to Satan.' We may note that in the Key itself the elect one is not declared to be a Christ in the same trenchant terms which Gregory of Narek uses in levelling his accu sations. Greg. Mag. also testifies to their ordinations, as in the phrases on p. 144 : ' their outlandish choice (or election) by consent ' . . . ' their strange and horrible and loathsome assumption of sufferings ; of their priest-making with out high priest ' . . . ' their worthless ordinations with nothing at all.' In addition to the Armenian writers, whose testimony we have adduced, there are the Greek writers who enumerate the Paulician tenets. They all used in turn an older document, namely, the description of the Paulicians inserted in the Codex Scorialensis, I. *. I. of the Chronicle of Georgius Monachus'^ by some later editor of that chronicle ^. This document is the nucleus of the accounts of them given by Photius (c. 820-c. 891), Contra Manicheos, liber i. §§ i-io, and by Petrus Siculus, a contemporary of Photius. It was then used by Petrus Hegumenos, by Zigabenus (c. 1081-1118), by Pseudo-Photius, liber i. lo-iv. Each of these writers, no matter what his pretensions to originality, embodies this document in his account of the Paulicians, and adds to it details from other sources. Among these additions the citations of the Epistles of Sergius interest us most for our present ' To this source I allude as Scor. ' This document has been edited with commentary by J. Friedrich in the Sitzungsberichte der Philos.-Philol. Classe der k. b. Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Munchen, 1896, Heft i, under the title : ' Der urspriingliche bei Georgios Monachos nur theilweise erhaltene Bericht iiber die Paulikianer.' I cannot exaggerate my indebtedness to the editor of it. ITS AGREEMENT WITH GREEK SOURCES xH purpose, which is to adduce from them testimonia to these thirty- seven tenets or principles of practice of the Paulician Church. I shall also add some testimonies from Genesios' chronicle, and from Gregory of Asbesta in Sicily in his life of the Patriarch Methodius. For both these writers describe a sect of Selikiani in Constantinople, under the Empress Theodora, which was clearly Paulician. John of Damascus also contributes a few particulars to our knowledge of the Paulician Church. I. Scor. xi : xal Ka6oKiKT\v eKK\ri(riav to iavTav iTVvebpia. 4. Scor. xiv : 6poia>s p,kv koI tovs 7Tpe(r^vTfpovs koX Xowrour icpfls tovs Trap' TjpXv anofidWovrm. Because they were not really baptized. So also Scor. vi : koKovcti 8e iavroiis p.ev XpiiTTtavovs, fjiids 8e 'Papaiovs. So Phot. 24 B. The reason is hinted at by Photius, 29 A: oi pfjv dWa. Kal TO (rcoTtjptov bianTvovres ftdirTKrp.a, iiiroirXdrTovTai TrapaS^xeaSm avTo, Ta TOV eiafyeXiov prjpaTa ttj tov ^anTia-paTos (^avfj viro^dWovTfS. Kai ydp (^aaiV 'O Kvpios f(j>rj' 'Eya> dpi to v8a>p to fmw. Anna Comn. Alexias, xiv. 8, 9 (ii. 299, ed. Bonn), relates that many of the Paulicians of Philippopolis were baptized (tov 6dov peTea-xov ^an-Tls ttjv tov vJoO fXa^e KKr](nv; Koi Ta Xoiira, cmep dvaiTepa yeypanTai, ijyovv to Trpoo'KXrjd^pai avTOV napa tov 6eov, TO TTjV ivToXrjv bi^aaBai Kal TaXKa. Kai 6po\oyrjiTei, i>s ayyfXor ^v Kal SiTjKovrja-e TJj ivroKfi tov 6eov Kai Kara x^P^" ^'' '''"'' '''°" kXtjo-iv koI TT]v TOV XpiaTOV f'iXijcjye Tl Se, & Mai't;^ale. ineidf] troi i^ dyyeKav 6 vlos yfyivrjTou, Kal tSiv dvdpairtov avTcov pcTaytviiTTepos fwl tov 'Okto^Iov K-ala-apos eikTja)s 6)ff popa "Apfiov. So the Paulician Selix or Lizix, secretary of the empress Theodora, called Jesus Christ a creature : koI Bedv r)pSiv 'ir/aovv XpicTTov ovopd^av KTia-pa, according to Genesios ' So Pet. Sic. (sermo ii. adv. Manich. 71, 1338 D) : el 8e pri tov vidv ' Migne, Patr. Gr. 140, 284, in Nicetas Chron., who cites a life of Methodius, patriarch of C. P., by Gregory, archbishop of Sicily. xlii THE KEY OF TRUTH avTrjs (Mapias) aXij^^ 6ebv opoXoye'tTe, ttws rrpi Trfs crapKaxreas avTov prjTepa nprjo^oiTe ; 12. Scor. vi : Xtyouo't 8e rrpoy rous ayvooCiras avToiis TrpoSvpas' TTLiTTevopfV els iraTepa Kai vlbv Kal ayiov ¦nvevpa, tov eTrovpdvtov waTepa. So Phot. (24 B). 1 3. Scor. xxi : tos de els TrjV del Itapdevov koli KvpicDS Kal dXrjdSis BeoToKov Mapiav fiXaa-cjirjplas vpav . . . ovhe rj yXaa-a-a fjpSiv eKCJyrjpat tvuaTai . . . eTTiTiBevoi dno TOV ev tco evayyeXl(a prjTOV tov (patTKOVTOS' aTnjyyfXt; ra 'Ii/troC" ^ P'l'^VP o-ov Kai 01 dSeXtpol [trouj eo-TrjKaa-iv K.T.X. . . . XeyovTes, el 8ia Tr)piov tokov eTepovs vlovs eK TOV 'laxTrjip naiSonoirja-ai. So Gregory of Sicily " says of Lizix : Tfjv Ttdvayvov . . prjTepa BeoTOKOV ovk eXeye. 1 4. Scor. X : tovs iTpo^r)Tas Kai tovs Xomoiis d'yi'our aTro^aXXoiTat, e^ avT&v prjSeva Tiva ev pepei Tcov a^a>^opeva>v eivai XeyovTes. So PhotiuS (68 A) records that the Paulician woman who converted Sergius warned him that the ' sons of the kingdom to be cast out into outer darkness ' (Matt. viii. 12) are no other than the saints : ovs oi re Kal 01 Kara a-e dyiovs KaXov(Ti Kal vopi^ovoi . . . ols Kal Tvporrdyeiv hteyvaiKaTe (TelSas, TOP pdvov ^S)VTa Kal dddvaTop KOToXiTTOVTes deov. According tO Joan. Damasc. adv. Constant. Cabalinum ', Copronymus, who was almost openly a Paulician, denied that the Virgin can help us after death (perd QdvoTov avTrjV ^or]6elv pr) hvvapevrfv'^, OX that the apOStleS and martyrs could intercede for us {npefr^elav pr) KeKTrjpevovs, povovs eavTovs a>(f)eXrjoavTas 8id Ta ndBr), airep vnea-Trja-aVj Kal tos iavTmv yj/vxds eK Trjs KoXaireas Siaa-aa-avTas' eirel tovs TrpotTKoKovpevovs avTOVs ^ npooTpexoPTas, prjSep a)(j)eXovpTas). 16. Scor. ix : pXaa-(pripovoi be Kal els top ripiov aTavpov, XeyovTes, ort (TTavpos 6 XpioTos eaTiV oi xP'l be irpoa-Kwe'iadai to ^vXov mt KOTrjpapevov Spyavov. So Phot. (25 C) who adds, as the reason given by Paulicians why Christ is the Cross, the following: koI ydp airos, s Kai Ta Trap rjplv ovTa Trapabovs . . . vopoBeTrja'as avTols Kal TuvTO' prj beiv eTepap ^l^Xov TrjV olavovv dvayivmoKeiv, el pfj to evayyeXiov Kal tov dTroaToXov. Photius (28 C) alleges that they received all the New Testament except the Epistles of Peter : ot avTd re to KvpioKd Xoyta Kal tu aTroa-ToXiKa Kal rds aXXas ypar)a\ rcS pi) ovtios ni(rrevoVTi, pepeXerrjpepais Xiav ttjv eavrav ' Priscilliani op. edit. Georg. Schepss, Vindob, 1S89, p. 22. 13. xlvi THE KEY OF TRUTH KOKiav peBobe-uovres' ov ydp npos bid aaXrjvos bieXriXvBevai). It is possible that if we had in its entirety the chapter of the Key ' On the Creation of Adam and of our Lord,' we should find that it did teach this very ancient tenet ; for it is one which in no way conflicts with the belief that Christ was KTiopa Beoi and not Beds, and which coheres closely with the teaching that Jesus Christ was the new Adam. The survival of this tenet among the Anabaptists of a later age (who seem to have been the Paulician Church trans ferred to Western Europe) also makes it very probable that Paulicians may have held it. But here we are in the realm of mere surmise, for we do not find the idea in so much as survives to us of The Key of Truth. We recur to the point below (p. clxxxvii). Another tenet ascribed to the Paulicians was this, that the Virgin Mary was an allegory of the ' heavenly Jerusalem, into which Christ has entered as our precursor and in our behalf'.' Such teaching was not heretical ; and that the Paulicians did not substitute this allegory for the actual belief that Jesus was born of the Virgin is Scor. vii : t^j/ iiva 'lepovcra\r)p ev 3 npiSpopos virip ^pSiv eia^KSe XpioTos. THEIR PRIESTHOOD AND SACRAMENTS xlvii certain. The Key attests that they held the belief, and Photius and Petrus Siculus aUege as much. That they also indulged in this colourless bit of allegory is likely enough. For we find it among the orthodox Armenians of the region of MananaU, into whose hymn Aristaces', their eulogist, introduces it. We also meet with it in Adamantius (dial. C. Marc.) and other orthodox writings, as well as among the Manicheans and Albigenses. In § viii of Scor. we read that the Paulicians blasphemed the divine mysteries of the holy communion of the body and blood, and declared that the Lord meaned not that they were to consume bread and wine when he said : ' Take ye, eat and drink,' to his apostles, but only gave them his words, piptaTa. It accords with the closing words of the Catechism in the Key to suppose that they did attach such a figurative or mystical value as is here implied to the eucharistic meal ; and that is all that Scor. § viii implies. It does not allege that they discarded the actual meal of bread and wine. The only sacraments against which they really blasphemed were those of the Greeks, Latins, and Armenians, for these were from their standpoint no sacraments at all, but only profane mummery. And here we have the explanation of such statements as that of Aristaces^, that the Pauhcians utterly rejected church and church ordinances, baptism, the mass, the cross, and fasts. They neces sarily rejected the ordinances of churches which, having wilfully corrupted the institution of baptism in its evangelical, primitive, and only genuine form, as they regarded it, had also lost their orders and sacraments and apostolical tradition. But they them selves, in repudiating the innovation of infant baptism, had kept all these things, and so formed the only true Church, and were the only real Christians left in the world. This is the significance of such utterances as this of Aristaces. Failure to comprehend it was natural enough in the absence of the fuller knowledge of Paulician tenets which the Key affords us. Such utterances, however, have led inquirers, t.g. the Archdeacon Karapet Ter Mkrttschian^, to suppose that the Paulicians really discarded baptism, sacraments, and sacerdotal system ; and that, ' follojving Marcion's example, they set up a purely spiritual church.' There is, as J. Friedrich rightly observes, no ground for saying that Marcion aimed at a spiritual church in this sense of detachment from outward cere monies and observances. ' Seep. 139. " Seep. 140. ' Die Paulikianer, Leipzig, 1893, p. 109. xlviii THE KEY OF TRUTH But the Archdeacon Karapet is certainly right when, in the same context, he observes, a Httle inconsistentiy, that the Pauhcians were not and did not claim to be reformers of the Greek church : ' Wahrlich, wundersam ware es, wenn in einigen ein paar hundert Meilen von Byzantinien entfernten Gebirgsdorfern am Euphrat der Gedanke auftauchen sollte, die griechische Kirche zu reformieren.' The idea of a church without priests and sacraments, of a mysticism wherein the individual soul communes direct with God without such supports, was assuredly alien to the dark ages in which the Paulicians flourished, and was barely possible in any age before our own. Like most other heresies that in old times ramified far and wide, that of the Paulicians arose out of religious conservatism. They were 'old believers ' : not innovators, but enemies of Cathohc innovations, of infant baptism, of the fourth century Christology,' of all the circle of ideas summed up in the words opoovo-ws, BeoTOKos and demapBevos, of images and pictures, of intercession of saints, of purgatory, of papal pretensions, of nearly everything later than Tertullian's age. They did not desire new things, but only to keep what they had got ; and that, as we shall point out later on, was peculiarly primitive. They did not sit loose to priests and sacraments. If they erred at all, it was by making too much of them. It is an irreparable loss that the sacramentary which the copyist of the Key of the year 1782 transcribed along with it has not been preserved; and we can only hope that the same tenacity of the Armenian race which has kept alive this ancient Church down into our own generation may yet be accountable for its being found. It might prove to be the most ancient in form of all the Christian liturgies. The catechism with which the Key concludes is later than the first twenty-two chapters', but the information it gives about the Paulician Eucharist doubtless represents the teaching of the Church. The acts of the inquisition of 1837-1845 also in some slight measure help to fill up the gap ; for they contain the following description of their eucharist. It was sent on May 23, 1 84 1, to the consistory, of Erivan by the orthodox priest of Arkhweli : — ' The villagers of Arkhweli, before they were corrected, baptized and communicated one another according to the direction of ' Cp. p. 1. From the statements of the Paulicians, from whom the book was seized, it is clear that the Key itself only comprises the first twenty-two chapters of the book. THEY WERE OLD BELIEVERS xlix: The Key of Truth, their heretical book, after the erroneous manner of the Thonraki. These wicked practices were twice committed by them at that time under cover of darkness ; once in the stable of the choir- singer (or church-assistant) T6n6 Kirakosean, and on the other occasion in the inner chamber of Souwar Hovhannesean, in the following fashion. They meet and get ready water in a vessel, and upon a common table of wood they lay a single unleavened common loaf of small size, baked in an oven, and in a common vessel wine without water. Over the loaf they say : " Take ye, eat. This is the body of our Lord Jesus Christ." Over the wine they say : "This is the blood of our Lord, Jesus Christ." The person to be baptized comes bare-headed before the baptist without stripping off of raiment ' ; then the baptist took and poured a handful of water over the head of the person to be baptized. At the first time of so pouring it he says, " In the name of the Father" ; at the second, " and of the Son " ; at the third, " and of the Holy Spirit. Amen." After that the person baptized first receives in his hands a portion of the bread, and eats it, and then drinks a little of the wine, and goes away.' These depositions, which are signed by various of the persons concerned, also give the names and ages of four persons who were thus baptized or communicated in an heretical way. Souwar Hovhannesean was eighty years of age ; his wife Mary was sixty ; Asian Hovhannesean was eighty ; and Martoj Hovhannesean was eighty-five, since dead. These four persons had been baptized in the manner described thirty years before (therefore they were now only communicated) by the false priest (//'/. lord) Hovhannes '¦*, a follower of the Thonraki cult, who subsequentiy became a Mohammedan. The choir-singer T6n6 Kirakosean, now fifty years of age, had been baptized in the time of the same priest (i. e. Hovhannes) by Meser Putalean, a disciple of the false priest. Then follow the names of six persons, who were only baptized and not communicated, in T6n6 Kirakosean's stable ; their ages were respectively forty, forty-five, thirty-five, thirty, fifty, fifty. On the second occasion, in the chamber of Souwar Hovhannesean, ' This was a concession to the age and climate ; for the Key, p. 97, prescribes that they shall be stripped after the primitive Christian manner. 2 This person was the copyist of The Key of Truth in 1782. See below, p. Ixrii. The book actually consists of twenty-two chapters, but the numeration only extends as far as chap. xxi. Hence the statement that it was written in twenty-one chapters. The Catechism was not regarded as part of the Key. d I THE KEY OF TRUTH five persons were baptized in the manner described by Souwar, who had been baptized by the choir-singer, George Sargsean. I need not trouble the reader with their names, but their respective ages were forty-five, forty, thirty, thirty, thirty-five years. These depositions conclude with the notice that ' all these heretical proceedings were written in twenty-one chapters in the book called The Key of Truth I which at first the offenders said they had torn up and burned, though, after repenting, they admitted they had not done so. The copy of The Key of Truth here printed is the particular one here referred to, and we are therefore entitled to fill up its lacunae from these depositions, and from the confessions given above. As to the Eucharist we learn that it was celebrated after nightfall. This may have been only to protect themselves, but it is more probable that it was in strict following of the account preserved in the Gospels of the institution of the Eucharist, according to which it was a supper or evening meal, and not a morning celebration. The only communicants were four persons baptized thirty years before, and now averaging in age over seventy-six years each ; and the youngest of them, a woman of sixty, was the wife of a man of eighty. T6n6 Kirakosean, although a man of fifty, and baptized some twenty years before, did not communicate. We are tempted to infer that the participation in the eucharistic meal was, like the hereticatio of the Albigeois, deferred to extreme old age ; but the indications are too slight to build so much upon, nor was the hereticatio the same thing as the Eucharist. We can, however, infer something about the age at which baptism was conferred. Its recipients ranged from thirty to fifty years. Making allowance for the fact that in Arkhwili and Giumri (Alexandrapol) the new sect had only been disseminated since about the year 1828, and that these may have been for the most part new converts ; still it would appear that baptism was deferred, as in the orthodox Church of the third and fourth century, until the catechumens were of a very mature age indeed ; in no case less than thirty years. The archives of the consistory of Erivan record two other cases of open-air baptism in a stream at mid-day in the neighbourhood of Alexandrapol. In the second of these cases a priest named Sahak was baptizing two men whose ages are not given, when a young man of twenty-three, named Sargis Harouthiun (who afterwards joined the sect), startled him by suddenly appearing on the scene. The priest instantly invited him also to be baptized in these words : EPISTLES OF SERGIUS li ' Come and be justified by this baptism, that you may not die in your sins.' We next must attempt to solve a difficult and delicate problem, this namely : What significance did the Paulicians really attach to their orders, and to election, as they termed their form of ordination ? Gregory of Narek brings against them the charge of anthropolatry. Their founder Smbat, he says, claimed to be Christ ; and he relates with zest the ribald story of the khalif who, in putting him to death, offered to believe that he was Christ if he would rise again, not after three, but after thirty days. Our earliest Greek document, Scor., brings indeed no similar charge against the Paulicians, but we meet with it in Photius and Petrus Siculus. Photius, for example (Contra Manichaeos, i. § 21), alleges that Sergius, the great Paulician leader of the first half of the ninth century, taught that he himself, and such of his followers as were fully initiated in the mysteries, and were no longer merely auditores (aKpoaral), were themselves the Holy Spirit. This may, of course, be no more than the commentary of malice on the rite of election as given in the Key. But both Photius and Petrus Siculus preserve the following passage from an epistle of Sergius: 'Let no one deceive you in any way; but having these promises from God, be of good cheer. For we, being persuaded in our hearts, have written unto you, that I am the porter and the good shepherd and the leader of the body of Christ, and the light of the house of God, and I am with you always, even unto the end of the world. For even if I am away from you in the body, yet I am with you in spirit. For the rest fare ye well ; perfect yourselves, and the God of peace shall be with you.' To the same congregation in Colonia in Armenia, to which the above words were addressed, he writes also as follows, according to Petrus Siculus (Col. 41, 1296 A): ' Knowing beforehand the tried quality (ro boKipiov) of your faith, we remind you how that, as the churches that were aforetime received shepherds and teachers (and he signifies Constantine and the others), so also ye have received a shining lamp and a beaming star and a guide to salvation, according to the Scripture : " that if thine eye be single, thy whole body shall be full of light '." ' These passages from the episties of Sergius are strikingly similar to the exordium of The Key of Truth. A common ethos connects them ; such as would, except for the absence of corroborative evidence, entitle us to suppose that the same hand wrote the one 1 Matt. vi. 22. d 2 Iii THE KEY OF TRUTH and the other. The author of the Key, like the writer of these episties, has caught the tone of St. Paul. There is the same assurance of being the vehicle of the Holy Spirit, of being a missionary inspired and sent by God to teach the way, the truth, and the life. It is to be regretted that our fragments of Sergius' episties are so few and short ; they contain, however, one magnificent utterance, worthy of a Paul or of a Wesley : ' I have run from east to west, and from north to south, preaching the gospel of Christ until my knees were weary'.' And also the following, to Leo a Montanist, which likewise has about it the ring of St. Paul : ' But do thou beware of thyself. Cease to rend asunder the true faith. For what charge canst thou bring against us? Have I despoiled any one, or been overweening? Thou canst not allege it. But if thou dost, Thy witness is not true. Yet be it not mine to hate thee, but only to exhort thee, as thou hast received apostles and prophets, who are four in number, so receive (our) shepherds and teachers, lest thou become the prey of wild beasts.' Truly if this great teacher had faults, they were those of a St. Paul. There is a certain self-exaltation in these citations of Sergius, of which we have not the setting and context; yet not such as to warrant the charge of anthropolatry brought by Greg. Nar. and by the Greek writers. In the third of the recantations however, made in 1837, there is a curious passage. Gregory (one of the elect of the Thonraki) said : ' Lo, I am the cross : on my two hands light tapers, and give me adoration. For I am able to give you salva tion, as much as the cross and the saints^.' This singular utterance must mean that in some ceremony the elect one or priest spread out his hands, like Jesus on the cross; and received the adoration of the faithful, who ht their tapers on either hand. Here we begin to see why the Paulicians repudiated crosses of lifeless stone, and even broke them up when they could. They had living crosses of their own, elect ones who were baptized with the baptism of Christ, crucified on his cross, dead, and buried with him, rising again with him, called with his calling, reasonable images of God into whom Christ's Spirit had been breathed, in whom he abode as they in him. It need not surprise us that they rejected the stocks and stones into which the Armenians of those ages (as of this) believed that the spirit and virtue of Christ could be magically introduced by the priest, just as a Brahman may be seen by any Indian roadside ' Pet. Sic. § 36, 1293 B. Also in Photius. = See above, p. xxvii. THE ELECT AS BODY OF CHRIST liii putting the god into littie clay images brought to him by the faithful, and made hollow, on purpose. Surely it was a noble idea to restrict possession by the Holy Spirit to living images, and not extend it to stocks and stones. Such is the circle of ideas into which I believe we here enter, and perhaps we have a further trace of it at the end of the catechism which follows the Key. There we read that the false priests, when they took the elements and said, ' This is my body and blood,' turned them not into the body and blood of Christ, but into their own sinful body and blood. How are we to interpret this enigmatical statement, twice repeated? Not otherwise, I think, than by supposing that the elect priest was himself, through community of suffering^, and as possessed by the same Holy Spirit, in a mystical manner one with Christ ; so that when he took the elements and said : ' These are my body and blood,' they were by the Spirit of the heavenly Father changed into Christ's body, because his body was also Christ's. On the other hand the false priest, not being of the body of Christ, by the use of the formula ' This is my body,' only converted the elements into his own sinful body, and not into Christ's. The underlying supposition must certainly be this, that every elect one was Christ ; and it is quite in harmony with this that in the Key the apostles and evangelists are spoken of as parts or members of the Church. From Petrus Siculus ^ we learn that the Paulician Church was the body of Christ. The words in which Sergius warns his flock of the dreadful nature of apostasy are these : 6 TTopvevaiv els . to 'ibiov aapa dpaprdvei. 'H/ieif eopev a-apa XpioTov' ei Tis dcfiioTaTai Tav napaboaeav rov aapoTos tov Xpia-Tov, TovTeaTi Tav eprnv, dfiaprdvei' on npocrTpexei to'is eTepobtdaoKaXovai, Kal dneiBei tois vyiaivova-i Xoyois. Here rjpeis means ' uie, the elect.' A difficulty remains. In the Catechism on p. 123, in the chapter on the ' Holy-making of the body and blood of our Lord,' we read that the Lord, desiring to distribute to disciples and believers his body and blood, began whh ^gures, whereby he opened their minds, saying : ' My body is the true meat, and my blood the true drink ' ; and, ' I am the bread of life come down from heaven ; whoever eateth this bread shall hve for ever.' '¦ Perhaps the Marcionites had a similar idea of priesthood, and expressed it in their phrase: trufTaAoiirojpoi Hal avppiaovpevot (Tertul. t. Marc. iv. 9, 36), i.e. sharers with Jesus Christ {not with Marcion) of tribulations and of the world's hatred. ^ Hist. Man. § 39, 1300 A. liv THE KEY OF TRUTH Are we to infer that he only began with figures, but went on to really convert in the last supper the substance of the bread and wine into his true body and blood ? And that the words of institu tion are to be taken literally, whereas the sayings with which he opened their minds were only figurative ? If there be no real change of the elements, then what is meant by the saying that the false priests change the elements into their own bodies and not into Christ's ? The writer probably felt no difficulties, such as his statements raise in our minds. The ability to distinguish between an allegory and the facts allegorized, between a symbol and that which is symbolized, does not belong to every stage of culture. Philo some times lacked it ; the early Christians barely had it at all. Nor can we expect it to be very developed in the ninth and tenth centuries. It is possible, therefore, that the Paulicians entertained several ideas at once, not all compatible with each other : firstly, the idea that the Lord in saying, ' take, eat and drink,' signified not real bread and wine, but his words, prjpoTa avTov as Scor. ' has it, Xdyia KvpioKd as Photius : secondly, the idea that the bread and wine really became the Lord's body and blood : thirdly, the idea that, the elect ones being Christ's body^, the elements in becoming their body, became his; and 'in becoming his, became theirs. And lastiy it must be borne in mind that we are not suitably placed for judging of the question, because the Key has been wilfully mutilated just in the pages which would have revealed to us how the writer of it conceived of Christ's flesh. He may have believed with Origen that Christ had an alBepiov trapa, and that he brought the same with him from heaven. Such a belief would have helped in his mind to obscure the issues so clear and hard to us; to veil the contradictions, to us so palpable. Or it may have been into the risen body of Jesus, which was only visible to the faithful, that the elements underwent a change. However this be, it is certain that the Paulicians believed their elect ones to be, so to speak, reincarnations of Christ, and set such an interpretation on texts like John vi. 56 : ' Whoever eats my body and drinks my blood, shall dwell in me and I in him.' Nor is it certain that this was not also a Pauline train of thought. It is difficult to attach any other meaning to such phrases as ' Not I, but Christ that dwelleth in me.' And in Gal. vi. 17, Paul writes: ' Henceforth let no man give me trouble ; he persecuteth Christ ' Scor. viii. * 'H/jefs eapev aSipa XpiOTov. ECKBERT ON THE CATHAR SACRAMENT Iv For I bear the stigmata of Jesus in my body.' The words italicized were read in Marcion's and probably in 'Tertullian's text, and are necessary to the sense ; which is this, that Paul was a symbol or image of Christ, so that whoever harmed him harmed Christ'. Later on we shall return to this subject. It is enough now to remark that we here border on a field of primitive ideas and behefs for which the modern psychologist has devised the title of sympathetic magic. Later on I shall enumerate several points of contact between the European Cathars and the Paulicians. Here I must anticipate one of them. The Paulicians adored their elect ones as living repre sentatives of Christ, shrines of his spirit which, in the sacred season of election, had chosen them as its vessels. Accordingly they adored them or prostrated themselves before them ? and as their flesh was Christ's and they Christ's body, it was the same whether you declared the change of the eucharistic elements to be into their body and blood or into Christ's. The transubstantiation — -if we may use a word which they did not — was not so much of the in themselves lifeless elements, as of the elect one who blessed and offered them ; and their change of nature was but a corollary of his. The heretics whom Eckbert found sa widespread in the neigh bourhood of Treves and Cologne as early as a.d. ii6o held similar opinions. Of them Eckbert reports thus ^ : — ' They altogether despise, and consider as of no value, the masses which are celebrated in the churches ; for if it happens that they go with the rest of their neighbours to hear masses, or even to receive the Eucharist, they do this in mere dissimulation, lest their infidelity should be discovered. For they say that the order of the priesthood is altogether lost in the Church of Rome, and in all the churches of the Catholic faith, and the true priests are not to be found except in their sect. They believe that the body and blood of Christ can be by no means made by our consecration, or received by us in our communion ; but they say that they alone make the body of Christ at their tables. But in those words there ' It is a proof of the wide and early diffusion of the idea that in the Clemen. tine Homilies (ed. Dressel, 1853, p. 11), an anti-Pauline work, we have it expressed almost in the same words : ^aei ydp (6 eiriaicoTros) & Sei SeSijvai, Kal Kvaei & Set XvSrjvai, ais Tiv T^s iicK\riaias eiSais Koxdva. avTov oZv dxovaaTe, iis yvdvTes on & rdv oKriSeias irpoKoSe^dpevov \vttwv, els XptdThv apaprdvei KoX Toi' varipa Tuiv '6\wv irapopyi^ec ov eiveKev ov fijffcrai. " See S. R. Maitland, Albigenses and Waldenses, 1832, p. 355. Ivi THE KEY OF TRUTH is this deceit — for they do not mean that true body of Christ which we believe to have been born of the -virgin and to have suffered on the cross, but they call their o^wn flesh the body of the Lord; and forasmuch as they nourish their bodies by the food on their tables, they say that they make the body of the Lord.' The same Eckbert also in another place apostrophizes these same heretics as follows ' : — ' From one man who came out of your hiding-places, I heard this piece of your wisdom — your body is the Lord's ; and therefore you make the body of the Lord, when you bless your bread, and support your body with it.' We cannot doubt that these twelfth-century German heretics held the same theory of the Eucharist as the Paulicians. Among the Albigenses who seem to have been a kindred sect, the adora tion of the elect or perfect one by the believers was an established custom. A single example from the Liber Sententiarum''' (the record of the Inquisition of Toulouse between the years 1307-1323) will suffice : — '"And as he (the credens) was taught, he adored Peter Auterius and James his son (the two perfect ones), saying, " Good Chris tians, God's blessing and yours," bending his knees three times, with his hands on a certain bench, bowing before them and saying each time " Benedicite." And he saw them adored in the same way by others.' In the same culpa we read that the two heretics, i.e. Peter Auterius and James, ' mutually adored each other.' The acts of inquisition plainly indicate that the inquisitors regarded this adora tion as an act of anthropolatry, to be punished by sword and fire. Nevertheless the same church which held the Inquisition of Toulouse has in our own generation, and in the face of an instructed Europe and America, formally decreed to the Bishop of Rome the miraculous and super-human attribute of infallibiUty. Surely the Paulician conception of the elect representatives of Christ on earth was a better way of apprehending the dpolaois Bea, which is man's vocation. Doubtiess it was too exclusive a concep tion; and, if the church which held it had emerged triumphant, instead of being extinguished by ruthless massacres, it might have led to occasional displays of sacerdotal pride. Yet in the end a severalty of popes must be less hostile to the moral and intellec- ' Maitland, Albigenses and Waldenses, p. 361. ' Petrus 68, Culpa and Sentence. Maitland, p. 315. EARLY SPREAD OF PAULICIANISM Ivii tual progress of our race, than the grinding and levelling spiritual despotism of a single one. It is difficult to bring the Greek and Armenian sources bearing on the history of the Paulician Church into line with each other. They nowhere overlap one another, and their hsts of the names of Paulician leaders are different. It would appear that the Greeks were mainly interested in the Paulicians of Tephrik, whom the Armenian records do not notice. Assuming that my reader is famiUar with the Greek sources, I will now proceed to summarize the scanty information supplied by the Armenian writers about the outward history of the Church. John the Philosopher, who became Catholicos of Armenia A.D. 719, uses the name Paulician, but not Thonraki. Although he speaks of them as ' the dregs of the Messalianism of Paulicianism,' we need not suppose that they had anything in common with the Messalians or Euchitae of a previous age. All that we know of the latter, who are rightly described by Neander' as the first mendicant friars, contradicts not only the self-portraiture of the Armenian Paulicians in the Key, but in an equal degree conflicts with all we know of them from Greek sources. The Armenian word mtslneuthiun, which I render Messalianism, was a mere term of abuse in the eighth century, and as such is again hurled, two centuries later, at the Pauhcians by Gregory of Narek and Gregory Magistros. Of more value are four statements of John the Philosopher which follow: (i) That the Paulicians had been rebuked and repressed by Nerses Catholicos, and had after his death fled into Armenia into hiding-places, (ii) That then certain Iconomachi expelled from Albania in the Eastern Caucasus had joined them. (iii) That as oppressed dissenters from the orthodox Church they had sought the protection of the Arab or Mohammedan powers. (iv) That they imagined themselves to have discovered something great and new in what was after all old and obsolete, and had left their hiding-places and ventured out into the populous centres of the land in order to preach it. Lastly (v) that their own centre was a region called Djrkay. In this region or from it (for the text is not clear) they flowed over the land like a flood of suffocating water. Each of the above statements calls for some consideration. In regard to (i) there is a doubt as to which Nerses Catholicos is meant. A higher antiquity must at once be ascribed to the ' Vol. iii. p. 343, of English translation. Iviii THE KEY OF TRUTH Paulician Church of Armenia than is usually supposed, if the Nerses intended was the Catholicos of that name, who is by the Armenian chroniclers said to have been patriarch for thirty-four years, and who died c. 374 a.d. He more than any one else was responsible for the introduction into Armenia of the peculiar Greek Christianity of the fourth century. As such he was the first great exponent there of the ideas and tendencies abhorred by the Paulicians ; and would certainly have persecuted them, if they already existed in his day. There were, however, two later Catholici of the same name, one c. 524-533 a.d., the other c. 640-661, both of them anterior to John the Philosopher. The next statement (ii) cannot be doubted, for later on in the tenth century we meet with the same connexion between Albania and the Paulicians of Taron. Albania, at the eastern end of the Caucasus, the modern Daghestan, seems from the very earliest times to have contained a population averse to the worship of images and imbued with the primitive Adoptionist faith. In the Armenian chroniclers, who were all orthodox, we only hear of the orthodox Church of the Albans which was a branch of the Gregorian Armenian, and went to Edjmiatzin for the consecration of their Catholicos. Gregory Magistros records that many of their Catholici in succession had anathematized the Paulicians of Albania. Aristaces, in the same age, bears witness to the frequent and close relations between the heretics of Albania and those of Taron. John of Otzun only alludes to the image-breakers of Albania, — this as early as 720. That they not only abhorred images, but held characteristically Paulician tenets at that date is certain from the testimony of Moses of Kalankatuk or his continuator in a passage written early in the eleventh century. Here we read that, in the time of John Mayrogomatzi, a contemporary of Ezr Catholicos (630-640), there was a party in Albania which rejected images, did not practise baptism, did not bless the salt (i.e. for animal sacrifices), did not conclude marriage with the blessing of the Church, raising the objection that the priesthood had been lost upon the earth. Here we recognize the Paulicians without difficulty. In the same passage great antiquity is ascribed to them. This sect, it says, arose in the time of the apostles and first appeared among the Romans, for which reason a great Synod was held in Caesarea, and people were instructed to paint pictures in the house of God. Here we have an echo of the claim raised by the Paulicians themselves to represent the true apostoHc IN VASPURAKAN AND ALBANIA lix Church. Whether we are to interpret the word ' Romans ' of old or of new Rome, is not certain ; probably of the old. From (iii) it is clear that the Paulicians had already been driven by persecution to seek protection of the Arabs, who since the year 650 had successfully challenged the Roman or Greek political influence in Armenia. The same protection has probably enabled the Paulician Church to maintain its existence into the present century. At the same time it should be remarked that for a long time the Paulicians were equally opposed to Romans and Arabs. It was the government of Constantinople which, by its cruel perse cutions of them, finally drove them into the camp of the Arabs, and so destroyed the only Christian outwork strong enough to ward off the Mohammedans. The next statement (iv) is evidence that John recognized the primitive character of Paulician opinions. It is to be regretted that John of Otzun does not more nearly locate the home and focus of Pauhcian activity in his day. Djrkay may be identified either with a canton of Perse-Armenia called by Indshidshian' Djrkhan or Djrgan, which lay on the Bitlis river, an arm of the Tigris, south-west of lake Van ; 1 or with Djrbashkh, a tract lying along the western slopes of Mount Masis or Ararat, in the neighbourhood of the modern Bayezid, close to Thonrak. Both districts at a later time were homes of the Paulicians ; and, writing as late as 1800, Indshidshian (p. 113) notes that in the modern pashalik of Bayezid there was a tribe of Kurds called Manicheans, by which his informant no doubt meant Thonraki or Paulicians. And the names of both signify a region where water is plentiful; and neither of them is remote from the limits of Albania. For the rest John the Philosopher, in the treatise in which he assails them eo nomine, tells us little of the Paulicians. He is content to retail nonsense about them, and was evidently subject to the same unwillingness or incapacity to communicate to his readers their real opinions, which we find in later Armenian writers. Confining ourselves to Armenian sources we come next to the statements of Gregory of Narek and Gregory Magistros. Accord ing to these writers the founder of the Thonraki was one Smbat. Thonrak (or Thondrak or Thonrik, as it is variously spelt) is a lofty mountainous region running from about 39°-39'40 by south and ' Geogr. of Armenia (Mod. Arm.). Venice, 1806. Ix THE KEY OF TRUTH north, and 40-50-4 1-40 by west and east'. In Kiepert's map these mountains are called Niphates. Many streams, the easternmost sources of the Murad-Chai or South Euphrates, flow out of this massive on the north, the west, and the south-west sides of it. It is separated by the Bayezid branch of the Araxes from Mount Masis or Ararat, which towers with its lofty hump and peaked gendarme to the east, some fifty miles away. The Alashgerd plain watered by the upper Murad-Chai lies to the west, and stretches south-west to Melasgerd. The Turkish name of this mountain mass is Ala Dagh. Well away from it, beyond the rich plain of Melasgerd, rises the cone of Mount Sipan, 11,000 feet high, dominating the northern shore of Lake Van. Like Sipan, only more so, the Ala Dagh is volcanic ; and the highest streams of the Murad-Chai, as they run down from its north side, are choked with sulphur and warm with the heat of hundreds of small geysers. These most eastern feeders of the Euphrates, as they run down to meet at Diadin, pierce their way through masses of volcanic basalt. The highest summit is a still smoking crater of 11,000 feet, called Thoonderlik, recently described by Texier and our own consul Taylor^. We recognize in the modern name the old Armenian ' Thondrik ' or ' Thonrik,' derived from Thonr, an oven. And in the myriad sulphur-laden springs of this region we probably have an explanation of the language used by John the Philosopher, ' Suffocantium diluuii aquarum portio confluit.' The volcanic fire which in this region everywhere evidences itself, also explains the otherwise enigmatical language of Gregory Magistros (on pages 75 and 80). When he reached the sources of the Euphrates he found himself among mountains from whose hollows burst hot water springs and fumaroles. Some modern Armenians have absurdly misconstrued his language to mean that the Pauhcians, whom he is describing, were fire-worshippers. The village of Diadin or Diyadin, described on p. 223 of Murray's Handbook to Asia Minor, and Tozer's Turkish Armenia, p. 383, is called in the Armenian Tateon, and probably occupies the site of the more ancient Zarehavan, the frontier town of the old Cantons of Tsalkotn and Kokowit of Bagrevandene. Built 6,000 above the sea, it is a poor and ruinous place to-day ; but the 1 Thonrak is by Aristaces (p. 135) located in Apahuni, a canton of Turubaran. -It was on the extreme east of Apahuni probably. Alishian puts Thonrak in the canton of Tsalkotn. The limits of the old cantons cannot really be traced nowadays. '^ Proceedings of R. Geogr. Soc. xiii. TOPOGRAPHY OF THONRAK Ixi remains of a massive fortress overhanging the basalt gorge, through which the feeders of the Euphrates now united into a single torrent run, prove that it was once an important place. It was probably the Zarouana of Ptolemy; and Faustus, the fourth century Armenian writer, records that here dwelt 5,000 Armenian families and 8,000 Jewish, numbers which we may safely halve. There still remained a circus or stadion, when in that century Shaphoy, the Persian tyrant, burned and sacked the city and massacred its inhabitants.- In the next century the Armenian soldier Vardan defeated the Persians at this spot; and in 655, according to the historian Asojik, it still was a strong position. Here was bom, late in the eighth century, one in whom we may perhaps recognize the founder, as Greg. Nar. and Greg. Mag. agree in calling him, of the Thonraki branch of the Paulician Church, Smbat the Bagratuni. The prejudice of later Armenian historians has made it impossi ble to be sure of the identity of this great religious leader; but there are reasons for thinking that he was no other than Smbat ^}, Bagratuni, the founder of the petty Armenian dynasty of that name, which now under Persian, now under Byzantine suzerainty ruled over Taron or Taraunitis (in Kiepert's map), from a.d. 856 to 1062. Taron was properly but a single canton in the large pro vince of Turuberan, which, roughly speaking, included the whole valley of the Murad-Chai or south-east Euphrates to the east of the modern Kharput. To-day Mush is the chief city and seat of government of this region. But the name Taron was extended by mediaeval Armenian historians and geographers to include the whole region. The reasons for identifying the founder of the Thonraki with Smbat Bagratuni, the Confessor, as his countrymen owing to his martyr's death afterwards called him, are the following : — I. The chronicler Mekhitar, of Airivanq, who, though he only wrote about 1300, compiled his work carefully from earlier sources, has the following entry under the year a. D./21 : ' Sembat Ablabsay (i.e. Father of Abas). He was the leader (or 'the first') of the heresy of the Thonraki.' 2. Gregory of Narek implies that Smbat was murdered by a Mohammedan warrior. This warrior, he says, was himself nearly akin and allied to the madness of Smbat and his disciples, and had learned at first hand of Smbat's pretensions to be Christ. 3. On the other hand Gregory Magistros, like Gregory of Narek Ixii THE KEY OF TRUTH had in his hands the book of Ananias Narekatzi against the Thonraki, a source which, if we had it, would outweigh in impor tance all the others. Whether it was also in the hands of Mekhitar we do not know ; though it may well have been, as it was in those of Nerses Catholicos in 1165. Ananias, says Magistros, had let one know ' who and what Smbat was.' Now Gregory affirms not that Smbat was Smbat Bagratuni, but only that he flourished in his time and in that of a Lord (i. e. Catholicos) John, who if he preceded Gregory Magistros by as little as 200 years must be identified with John of Owaiq', who became Catholicos in 833. Gregory's term of 170 years is hardly long enough. Twice over he says that 170^* years had elapsed and no less than thirteen patriarchs of Great Armenia had successively anathematized the sect between Smbat's day and his own. Now from John the Fifth to Sarkis the First inclusive, who died about 1019, immediately after issuing an anathema against the sect, there were, it is true, counted thirteen Catholici. And we must suppose that Gregory does not reckon among the thirteen Peter Getadards, who acceded in 1019 and died in 1058 ; because it was actually during his Catholicate that he (Gregory Magistros) was conducting against the Thonraki the persecutions which he relates. But for these thirteen CathoHci 170 years is not enough, and we must rather adopt the term of 200 years which he gives in another letter (see p. 151) to the Vardapet Sargis or Sarkis. 4. Other sources, however, incline us to identify the Paulician ' Yet Greg. Mag. (p. 144) seems to identify the ' Lord John,' in whose day Smbat appeared, with John of Otzun, who wrote against the Paulicians. But John of Otzun became catholicos in 718, 330 years before Gregory Magistros was writing. He also implies that John of Otzun had assailed Smbat's heresy, which was hardly possible if Smbat lived a hundred years later. Gregory's account is impossible as it stands ; and he apparently confuses John of Otzun, Catholicos in 719, with John of Owaiq, Catholicos in 833; and perhaps after all, as we shall suggest on p. Ixvii, it was an earlier John Catholicos, soon after 600, whose contemporary Smbat the Paulician founder really was. Different Smbats of the house of Bagrat are also confused, it would seem ; probably because they were all Paulicians together. '' So on pp. 142 and 145, but on p. 151 he assigns 200 years, which better agrees with the date of Smbat Bagratuni as attested by Arab sources. The discrepancy in the text of Greg. Mag. may be connected with a similar dis crepancy among the Armenian historians of the ninth century, some of whom put Smbat thirty years later than others. Perhaps the text of Mag. has been altered to suit. Note that on p. 142 Mag. assigns fifteen patriarchs, and not thirteen, to the period which had elapsed since Smbat's appearance as heresiarch. See also p. Ixviii. WHO WAS SMBAT THE HERESIARCH? Ixiii leader with Smbat Bagratuni. Thus in Constantine Porphyro genitus de Admin. Imp., cap. 44 (ed. Bekk. 1840, vol. iii. p. 191), we read this : la-Teov oti rrpd TOV ^Ao'atTiov tov apxopTOs rap dpxdpTiop, tov noTpos TOV 'S.vp^aTiov tov apxopTos Tmv dpxoPTav, ov dneKe(pdXia-ev 6 dpr)pds Uepa-lbos 6 'Affocrdrar. Constantine wrote not later than 958. Unless two Smbats were murdered by the Arab invader, surely Smbat Bagratuni was the one intended by Gregory of Narek. 5. Thomas Artsruni, who died about 940, implies that Smbat Bagratuni was addicted to heresy. I quote him in Brosset's trans lation : John V. of Owaiq (says this authority) became Catholicos in 833, ' qui gouvernait la Sainte ^glise, de la croyance orthodoxe apostolique, du Seigneur J. C, d'une maniere tout-a-fait admirable, et imposait aux princes- Arm^niens I'obligation de marcher en dignes adherents de la foi Chr^tienne, afin que leurs oeuvres ti- moignassent de la r^alit^ de leur litre de Chretiens. On accueillait ses avis, ou les ^coutait volontiers ; mais on ne renongait pas aux actes impurs, aux d^gofitantes passions de Sodome ; on imitait les vices de nos anciens rois, de la famille Arsacide. . . . Le Catholicos les exhortait k s'abstenir d'impuret^s et des ceuvres pernicieuses qu'ils commettaient .... nul ne levait les yeux vers les lois du Seigneur; les oreiUes inattentives ne s'ouvraient que pour la vipbre maudite et pour I'aspic aux morsures incurable.' Here the charge of impurity assuredly means no more than it means from the lips of Gregory of Narek and Gregory Magistros and Aristaces^, namely Paulicianism. As such it is opposed to the 'orthodox apostolic belief of the Catholicos; the real antithesis to orthodoxy was not vice, but heresy, which was worse than vice. For the same reason the Armenian king, Smbat Bagratuni, is com pared to the old Arsacide kings. These latter were not peculiarly addicted to nameless vice ; but some of them were very conserva tive in matters of religion. Notably the king Arshak, who in the fourth century set up a rival Catholicos to the grecizing Catholicos Nerses; notably Arshak's successor Pap, who, after the death of Nerses, set himself to undo his so-called reforms of the Armenian Church, to send about their business the monks and nuns intro duced by him and in other ways dispense with the orthodox Greek models imported from Caesarea. If there were any doubt on this point, it is removed by other contemporary Armenian historians, such as Asolik, John Catholicos and Stephanus of Siuniq, who relate that Smbat Bagratuni had ' See pp. 125, 136, 144, 145. Ixiv THE KEY OF TRUTH a standing feud with John of Owaiq, and that, with the help of his nobles, he deprived him of his catholicate, and in 841 set up a rival in his place. They explain Smbat's subsequent defeat and capture by the Mohammedan Emir Abusa'ad as a punishment of God for his recalcitrancy towards the orthodox Catholicos, and for his heretical backsUdings. But before John the Fifth became catholicos Smbat had already been in conflict with his predecessor, David the Second, who acceded in 806 and died c. 833. Smbat had conspired with other chiefs of Armenia, named Sewaday and Sahak of Siuniq, to throw off the overlordship of the Khalifs of Bagdad. In these patriotic .struggles the Catholicos David had taken part with H61 or Haul, the Khahf's lieutenant. We can only explain David's somewhat unpatriotic poKcy by supposing that Smbat was already in religious antagonism with the orthodox patriarch ; and the Mohammedans were quick to turn to account the religious feuds of a country which they coveted. In the year 847 a new Khahf ascended the throne of Bagdad, Aboul-al Djafar, who took the tide Mot^wekkel-al' Allah. He commissioned Abousa'ad, an Arab chief who lived in the Armenian marches, to attack and reduce the Armenian princes — Ashot, who ruled in Vaspurakan, the province south and east of Van, and Bagarat, who ruled over Taron. Advancing through Atropatene, Abousa'ad (pr, according to Thomas Artsruni, his son Joseph, the father having died on the way) routed Ashot ; and, after making terms with him, went on to the fortress of Khlath', which lay under Mount Sipan at the north-west corner of Lake Van. There he halted and invited Smbat, who owed his titie of king of kings and Sparapet, or governor of Armenia, to the Khalifs appointment, to come and see him. Smbat Bagarat, nothing suspecting, responded to the orders of the Khalifs representative and set out for Khelat, taking with him ' the holy Testaments, the divine books,' and attended by retainers and clergy. The Emir at once treacherously seized him and his relatives, and sent them in chains to Samara in Mesopotamia. Then he marched himself to Mush, where he fixed his winter quarters, after devastating the whole province and enslav ing its inhabitants. The mountaineers of Sasoun, where Smbat had his castle of Sim, were alone unsubdued. They, at the approach of Spring (March, 852), rallied to avenge the treacherous capture of their loved chieftain, Smbat. They stormed Mush, and slew ' See Tozer's Ttirltish Armenia, chap. xii. HE WAS PROBABLY SMBAT BAGRATUNI Ixv the marzpan Joseph, son of Abousa'ad, there where he had taken refuge, on the roof of the great church of Mush built by Smbat. Thomas Artsruni asserts that he had seen the very man who slew the Arab oppressor. The same writer gives an interesting description of the Khouth, as the men of Sasoun were called. They lived in deep valleys and remote forests, or on the rough hill-tops. They had no towns, and went about in snow-shoes during winter. They all knew the Psalms by heart in the old Armenian translation. Indshidshian, the Armenian geographer, describing them about the year 1800, says that they still spoke in a dialect almost identical with the classical Armenian tongue ; and this explains Thomas Artsruni's statement that they spoke in the ninth century a tongue hardly intelligible to their neighbours. There can be no doubt that these brave mountaineers were Armenian Puritans or Paulicians. The prejudice of Armenian chroniclers, who were all drawn from the ranks of the orthodox Church, has obscured the subse quent fate of Smbat. Thomas Artsruni relates that he recanted his Christian faith and was circumcised as a Mussulman ; and that the Artsruni princes, in submitting to the same fate, only followed his example. He allows, however, that Smbat really kept the true faith at heart ; holding that outward apostasy through fear was no evil, if at heart the faith is retained. Herein, says Thomas, he followed the evil counsel of Elcl^sianos', the opponent of Novatian. The translator of the Armenian version of Nana's Syriac Comvien- tary on the Fourth Gospel, a contemporary of Thomas, preserves in his colophon the same tale of Smbat's apostasy. He does not say indeed in 'so many words that he turned Mussulman, but only that ' he forsook the divine faith and fell never to rise again, — and this although he claimed to have for his own the whole and entire knowledge of the faith which is in Christ.' But according to the chronicler, Vardan (d.c. 1270), Smbat Spara pet, having been removed about 855 by the Emir Bouha to Bagdad, died a martyr's death, refusing to abjure his faith. Bouha offered repeatedly to restore to him his kingdom of Armenia, but Smbat's answer was always the same : ' I cannot leave Christ. I cannot quit the Christian faith, which by the grace of the font I have received.' He was tortured and slain. Some of his fellow- prisoners who were Christians asked his body of the Khalif; and, ' i. e. Elkesaeus. See the original Greek of the ' counsel ' in Euseb. H. E. vi. 38, whence Thomas probably derived his information. e Ixvi THE KEY OF TRUTH according to John Catholicos (who heard it from an eye-witness), they took it to Babylon and laid it in the shrine erected on the site of the lion's den into which Daniel the prophet had been thrown. Smbat was known by Armenians after his death as the Confessor. If this Smbat was not the founder of the Thonraki, then why did certain Armenian Church historians, among them Thomas Artsruni, conspire to blacken his memory with this charge of apostasy? Why the accusations of impurity merely because he was opposed to the orthodox prelates David and John ? Why did these ecclesiastics make common cause against him with the infidel ? Yet he built the great Church of Mush, and took with him the Scriptures wherever he went. It is not enough to suppose that he was an adherent of the Council of Chalcedon, then and later a bone of contention among Armenian churchmen. The assaults upon Smbat are too virulent to be so explained ; nor does any writer give the least colour to the assertion that he was a Chalcedonist. Thus Mekhitar's account is the one which best accords with most of the other sources. Nevertheless, we must accept it with all reserve in view of the positive statement in the letter of Gregory Magistros (see p. 144), that ' the accursed one appeared in the days of the Lord John and of the Smbat Bagratuni.' In any case it is certain that the heresiarch Smbat was a member of the royal house of Bagarat. His name Smbat, and Mekhitar's chronicle fully establish that : nor is it easy to escape the admis sion, painful to some Armenians, that the then head of the Bagratuni dynasty was also a heretic. Smbat the heresiarch may have been the same person whom Smbat Bagratuni elevated to the cathohcate when he deposed the orthodox catholicos John of Owaiq. The Armenian sources, cited pell-mell and without any sense of their discrepancies or attempt to reconcile them, by Tchamtchean ', in his great history of Armenia, imply that about a.d. 835 another Bagarat, a near relative of Smbat Sparapet, father of Abas, was made Patrik of Armenia. He, too, had his castle at Sim among the mountaineers of Sasoun. If this one was not a double of the former, he may have been the heresiarch. My readers will, I am sure, appreciate the difficulty there is in obtaining a clear and unprejudiced account of events from Armenian chroniclers, and will not accuse me of vacillation if I now broach another and new hypothesis as to who Smbat was. ' In Bodleian Catal., under ' Chamich.' ARMENIAN SOURCES CONFLICTING Ixvii For the association in the pages of Gregory Magistros of Smbat the Paulician, leader and legislator, *ith a Persian physician Mdiusik, suggests quite another view of who he was. The historian Sebeos preserves a letter sent to the Emperor Constans by the Armenian clergy assembled in Dwin under the catholicos Nerses in a.d. 648, when the emperor was trying to force the decrees of the Council of Chalcedon on the Armenian Church. In this letter it is related that the Persian king, Aprougz Chosrow, after his capture of Jerusalem in 614, convoked at his court an assembly of the eastern, especially of the Armenian and Syrian clergy, and appointed the Smbat Bagratuni, caUed Chosrow's Shoum (or Shnoum) to preside over it in conjunction with the ' chief physician of his court.' There was also present Zachariah, the captive patriarch of Jerusalem. ' There were many Nestorians present,' says the letter, ' and many other miscellaneous heretics. Moreover, the patriarch came forward and said : " Let not that man (? Jesus) be called God." The king, on being informed of this, had the patriarch beaten and turned out, and all the other heretics present were similarly treated.' The letter then records that King Chosrow, with the help of the orthodox Armenians, decided in favour of the Nicene and earlier councils, and against that of Chalcedon. Is it possible that here we have a garbled record of the results arrived at ? May not Smbat Bagratuni, the minister of Chosrow, and joint president of this assembly with the Persian king's chief physician, be the Paulician founder? The conjunction of a Smbat Bagratuni with a Persian physician in connexion with Christian creeds is an odd one. Gregory Magistros records it, and here we meet with it exactly. Gregory also declares that a Lord John was cathohcos at the time. John of Bagran was actually catholicos c. 595-620, when Chosrow's conference took place. Thus this Smbat fulfils all the requirements of the case save one, and that is this : Gregory Magistros implies that Smbat lived no more than 200 years before the date at which he was writing, i.e. about 850. But our present hypothesis would place him over 200 years further back, about 600. Perhaps Gregory confused the two Johns. Gregory also gives us a list of the Paulician presidents or heads of the Church, who succeeded Smbat, the founder or organizer of the sect. Their names were Theodoras, Ananias, Sarkis, Cyril), Joseph, Jesu, and in the days of Magistros himself, Lazar. The period covered by these seven leaders is reckoned by Magistros, sometimes at 170, sometimes at 200. In the former case he may be Ixviii THE KEY OF TRUTH reckoning up to the year 1 019, when Sarkis I issued his anathema; in the latter to the year 1050, when he was himself persecuting them. Now seven heresiarchs, succeeding each other, would fill up 170 or even 200 years, but hardly 400. It is tempting to identify the third of these heresiarchs, Sarkis, with the Paulician leader Sergius, so well known from Photius, Peter of Sicily, and the other Greek writers; Sarkis being the Armenian form of Sergius. But since Petrus Siculus places the missionary activity of Sergius in the thirty-four years beginning from Irene's reign and extending to Theophilus, that is from c. 800-834, the identification is barely possible'. It is probable, however, that the Sergius of the Greek writers is the heresiarch mentioned, but not dated, by Matthew of Edessa (ch. 79), in the theological manifesto prepared by King Gagik of Ani for the Roman Emperor Dukas (i 071-1078 a.d.). After anathematizing Valentinus, Marcion, Montanus, Manes, Nabateus, Sabellius, Anus, and Photinus, Gagik proceeds : ' We also anathematize Nestorius, and I anathematize "Tychus, and by his Armenian name Sarkis, along with his dog and his ass, and may he in the last day partake of the lot of dogs and asses.' I believe that for Tychus we should here read Tychicus'', and that the great Paulician leader, who re-named himself Tychicus, is here meant. Even if Tychus is a mis-spelling of Eutyches, the identification of Sarkis with the Paulician leader is almost certain. But it would seem as if the Armenians only knew of their com patriot Sarkis through Greek sources. It was among Greeks that his missionary activity had lain; and all the fragments of him preserved in Petrus Siculus and Photius are Greek. The orthodox Greeks, for example Zigabenus, incessantly cast this famous heretic in the teeth even of orthodox Armenians, much to their annoyance. ' Several Armenian scholars have supposed that the Sergius of the Greek sources and the Smbat of the Armenian were the same person, because they agree so wonderfully both in the date and in the character of their activity. But the Greek sources fix the scene of the missionary labours of Sergius much further west than Thonrak, which is just behind Ararat. This is a greater objection to their identification than the difference of names; for the same person was often known to Greeks by one name and to Armenians by another. " The converse error occurs in an early twelfth century copy of Zigabenus' redaction of Scor. preserved in a recently acquired British Museum codex. Here we read, in the list of Paulician heresiarchs : tov Sepytov, rdv Kal Eut«xikov, where Scor. and the other texts have Tvxmiv. Here EvTvxtHov must be a mis placed reminiscence of Eutyches, and so in Matthew of Edessa may the reading Tychon for Tychicon. TOPOGRAPHY OF HARQ AND MANANALI Ixix They on their part had no clear memory of who Sarkis was ; and Nerses Clajensis (c. ii 00-1170) in his sixth Epistle, § 8, identifies him with St. Sergius of Cappodocia, martyred by barbarians in the age of Constantine the Great. ' Sergius with his dog and ass,' brings vividly before us the great missionary who for thirty-four years wandered east and west, and north and south, evangelizing the people. The events narrated by Aristaces are an isolated episode in the history of the Paulician Church, and must have occurred about the year 1000 a.d. Their scene was the country extending southwards from Erzeroum as far as the modern Mush. All the regions named are in the Turuberan province. The mountain Pakhr or hill of Emery must have been the range bordering the Euphrates to the south-west of Erzeroum or Karin. Harq is the XdpKa of Constantine Porphyrogenitus (De Adm. Imp. cap. 44). It was a region south of Erzeroum, where numerous torrents take their rise among the north and east ridges of the Pinkeul or Bingeul range to flow away through deep ravines, ultimately to converge in the plain of Karachoban. After traversing that plain, they turn to the south, and run into the Murad Chai at Karaghil, almost doubling its volume. Khanus (Khynus in Stanford's royal atlas) is described by Consul Brandt in the proceedings of the Royal Geographical Society. It lies in a well-grassed valley, full of game, and the old castle built on a rock overhanging the river proves it to have been a stronghold in the past. It has always kept its name. It is situated on the dividing line between the old cantons of Pasen and Bagrevand, and about fifty miles in a direct line from Erzeroum, and fifty from Mush. It also gives its name to the confluent of the Murad Chai which flows under its walls. Photius has misled every one by his location of Mananali close to Samosata. It was really a region round about the modern Karachoban; which must be the point at which, as Aristaces relates, it came down to the Eastern Euphrates, or rather to the Bingeul arm of that river, now called the Khanus or Khinis Chai, one mile from Karachoban, according to Murray's handbook of Asia Minor. This river is crossed by the Kara Keupri bridge, and near the Kuminji saltworks the same river can be forded. It was the presence of salt that gave this tract the name of Mananali, for ali means salt. The walled towns of Elia and leather, where the Byzantine officer held his court', must have been close to this ' See p. 138. Ixx THE KEY OF TRUTH ford on the north and south sides of the Khinis Chai. Such is the neighbourhood in which was born Constantine, the founder, accord ing to the Greek sources, of the Paulician sect ; and from this very same region came the Armenians who, early in this century, brought The Key of Truth to the village of Arkhw61i in Russian Armenia. The village of Tdjaurm or Tschaurm where, according to these peasants, the book was actually copied by John in 1782, is easily identified with the modern Chevirme or Chaurma. This is, according to Murray's handbook, 'a hospitable Kurd village,' 6,645 feet above the sea, and one mile south of the ford over the Araxes, which, like the Khanus arm of the Eastern Euphrates, takes its rise in the Bingeul range due south of Erzeroum. Until the beginning of this century it was inhabited by the Armenian Pauli cians. Aristaces spells it Djermay, and calls it a ' city-village.' Here also, according to him ', met together the minions of the patriarch Samuel to anathematize the six Paulician doctors, and brand them on the forehead. The historian Sebeos mentions the same place in the seventh century, and relates that it was famous for its hot springs, to which the Roman governors of Theodosioupolis (Karin or Erzeroum) used to resort in search of health. The city called by Aristaces Muharkin on p. 136, where the Paulician James ended his days, must be the same with Mufarkin, another name for Nfrkert or Martyropolis on the upper Tigris, near Amid. The letter of Gregory of Narek gives few details with regard to the geographical diffusion of the Paulician Church. The monastery of Kdshav, of which the inmates were affected, was situated in the province of Mok, north-west of the modern Bitlis, and not far east from the Sasun district. This province seems to have included the high ground in which rise the springs of the Bitlis branch of the Tigris and those of the Kara Su or Mush arm of the Murad Chai. Gregory Magistros supplies a few more hints about the ramifica tion of the Paulicians. Thulail, where they were so numerous that the sect was known as Thulaili, was a town-district in the district of Mananali, in the province of Turuberan or Taron. Yet another centre of them was Kasch8 on the Araxes, near Joulfa. We learn that the congregation of Thulail had entered into relations with the Syrian Patriarch, when the Armenian catholicos brusquely rejected their appeal to him to recognize them as orthodox Armenians. The congregation of Thonrak had done the same; and it is clear that the PauHcians looked to Syria for ' See p. 138. BYZANTINE OPPRESSION OF PAULICIANS Ixxi sympathy, and found it there. It would appear that the persecu tion of the Paulicians was more vigorous in proportion as Byzantine influence in Taron and Vaspurakan was more felt. In the latter part of the tenth and the beginning of the eleventh century, the power of the Khalifs of Bagdad was almost annihilated in these provinces. Gregory Magistros drew his title of Duke of Vas purakan and Taron from Constantinople, and held his commission to harry and destroy the Paulicians from Constantine IX Mono- machus, who reigned from 104 2- 1054. This emperor's policy was but a continuation of the Byzantine policy of the ninth century; and Gregory takes much credit to himself for only harrying his Paulician compatriots, whereas the Byzantine generals of a former age had put out their eyes and turned them loose, in the few cases in which they had not murdered them outright. The favourite punishment devised by the orthodox catholici of Armenia was to brand their foreheads with the image of a fox. It is clear, from the campaign of Gregory Magistros, that the Armenian patriarchs, in spite of their quarrel with the Greeks over the Council of Chalcedon, were ever ready to co-operate with them, when there was a chance to outrage and murder their own Armenian heretics. Nor were things much otherwise in 1837. Then it was the Russian, and not the Byzantine authorities, whose aid was invoked ; but there is not much difference. From Nerses Clajensis we learn of another ramification of the Paulician Church in the province of Hamajch in Syrian Meso potamia, and it is a devout prince Ariuz of the town of Thelkuran (north of Diarbekr) who solicits his advice about them. This Nerses wrote in a.d. 1166, and after this date there follows a blank of six centuries, during which the published Armenian sources yield no notices of the Paulician Church ; though it is probable that a careful scrutiny of unpublished chronicles written during this period would bring to light some particulars of its survival and vicissitudes all through the Middle Ages. That it had not been extinguished by the exertions of Gregory Magistros is certain; for in the narrative of an orthodox Armenian, Paul W. Meherean, written about the beginning of this century, we have proofs of the vitality which it still retained in the same tract of country between Erzeroum and Mush, in which it had always flourished. Paul Meherean's MS. is preserved in the library of San Lazaro, in Venice. On p. 120 of it he tells us that he met, when travelling to Karin or Erzeroum, with Armenians who had Ixxii THE KEY OF TRUTH denied their faith, and were such heretics as are the Thonraki or Keskes. In the latter name ¦We recognize the Kaschetzi of Gregory Magistros. He then relates that in the Wanq or monastery of Bofdshimasur there was an abbot named Hovhannes, who, falsely assuming the style of bishop, had ordained fourteen priests, and had caused considerable stir in the neighbourhood of Karin. Attacked by the orthodox Armenians, he had fled to the neighbourhood of Manazkert, and there continued his propaganda. Next he tells us that under Zachariah, the Armenian Patriarch of Constantinople, between the years 1774 and 1781, an Armenian named Hovhannes, no doubt the abbot already mentioned — came to Constantinople, and spread his heresy there. In consequence, he was imprisoned for eight months by the Armenian Patriarch. Escaping from his bonds, he returned to the neighbourhood of Khanus, and began a systematic propaganda there and in the surrounding villages. Subsequently Hovhannes visited Venice, where Mekhitar had already planted his convent of San Lazaro, and thence retiirned to Erzeroum and Mush. To escape the persecutions of the orthodox Armenians he more than once proclaimed himself a Mohammedan ; nevertheless he was imprisoned in Edjmiatzin, but escaping thence he returned to the village of Maroukh in the Khanus region, and began 'to diffuse his poison afresh.' The writer Paul pretends that in 1801 this missionary finally became a Turk or Mohammedan, ' a son of perdition,' as he puts it. We have seen that the same story was told eight centuries before of Smbat Bagratuni. Truly the Armenians are a tenacious race, and neither their heresies nor the methods of combating them undergo much change. It is probable that in the present day many of the converts of the American Protestant missions in Erzeroum, Mush, Bitiis, Kharput, and other places, are Paulicians by heredity. As Protestant converts they have gained that protection from their countrymen's violence, which for centuries they must have sighed for. The Hovhannes of whom we read in Paul W. Meherean was indubitably the Hovhannes who, in 1782, made the copy of The Key of Truth from which my text is printed. And he may very well have been the author of the appended catechism; though I am inclined to assign to this addition a more remote date, say the thirteenth or fourteenth century. As he began by being abbot of a monastery, he must have had some education such as the scribe of 1782, in his colophon, shows that he possessed. Whether he was a Paulician by birth or by conversion we do not know. CENTRES OF GREEK PAULICIANISM Ixxiii That he ordained twelve priests or elect ones proves that in the last decades of the last century the Paulician Church still had many adherents in Upper Armenia. This exhausts the history of the Paulicians, so far as we can glean it from purely Armenian sources. Into their history as given by the Greek writers I have not entered and shall not enter in detail ; for my readers will find excellent summaries in books easily procurable, for example in Gibbon's brilliant chapter, in Neander (vol. v), in Gieseler's History of the Paulicians, and in Smith's Dictionary of Christian Biography. It is of interest, however, to notice the geographical distribution assigned to the Paulicians by the Greek writers. Constantine their founder was born in Mananali, a purely Armenian canton as we have seen, and close to Karin or Erzeroum, but remote from Samosata, where the Greek writers wrongly locate it. From Mananali he went to Cibossa, a town near Colonia, which lay east of Sebastia, on the Halys, the modern Sivas. One Colonia is identified with the modern Shabin Kara-hissar, 4,860 feet above the sea, fifty miles due south of Kerasund on the Black Sea. Perhaps, however, we should identify the Colonia of Paulician history with the ancient stronghold founded by Pompey on the west bank of the Euphrates and to the north of Mehtene. The Armenians in the tenth century called it Aloons. Constantine Copronymus, in the eleventh year of his reign, after reconquering the Armenian province of Melitene, transported numbers of the Paulicians, whom he found there and in Theo dosioupolis or Karin, to Thrace to defend the fine of the Danube. Under the Emperor Nikephorus, early in the ninth century, the Paulicians were numerous in Phrygia and Lycaonia. Under Leo the Armenian we read of them in Neo-Caesarea in Cappadocia, where an inquisition of them was opened in that reign. Kunoskhora in Armenia, the place where, in consequence of the cruelties of this inquisition, the Paulicians rose in rebellion, I cannot locate. Magistros calls Thonrak ' a place of dogs,' which answers to oi KOToiKovvres kvvqs Trpi xd>pav of Petrus Siculus, p. 66 ; but this cannot be the same place, for from 813-820, when Leo reigned, the Khalifs of Bagdad were paramount in Thonrak, and outside the Roman dominion the Pauhcians were ever safe from Byzantine cruelty. Argaus, which, about the same time the Saracens assigned to the Paulicians, and where Sergius lived, was probably the modern Argo- van, twenty-five miles north of Melitene. One of the chief Paulician Ixxiv THE KEY OF TRUTH congregations was at Mopsuestia, only five hours east of Adana. Lastly, Tephrike, where the Church made its famous stand, is a well-known site some seventy miles south-east of Sivas on the river Chalta, which, rising on the south side of Mount Argaeus, flows due east to join the northern Euphrates fifteen to twenty miles north of Egin. The scanty historical notices which the Greek writers contain do not overlap the equally slender Armenian sources. The latter concern the Paulician movement to the east of the Euphrates ; the former relate its struggles with Greek orthodoxy to the west of that great boundary. On this side of the Euphrates it was that the Greek populations were attracted by it. Here was a large bilingual Armenian population, speaking Greek, yet not forgetting their own tongue. They must have been the chief purveyors to the Greek world of a puritanism which essentially belonged to a race of vigorous mountaineers, and was alien to the debased Greek spirit of the eighth century. On this side of Asia Minor also, especially in Phrygia, they were in contact and, as I shall presently point out, probably in actual religious communion with the still surviving and ancient Montanist Church. But although our two sets of sources have little in common beyond their sketch of Paulician tenets and character, there can be no doubt that the Puritan communities both east and west of the Euphrates were bound together in a common policy. If the early Bagratuni dynasty from 820-850 was hostile to the Arab Khalifs, it was because the latter hampered and curtailed the aspirations of Armenia after freedom, religious and political. For the same reason to the west of the Euphrates the Paulicians were enemies of the Byzantines who persecuted, and friends of the Arabs who protected, them. But the disasters which befeU them in the west found their echo in Armenia Magna. And the persecution of the Empress Theodora, during whose regency (842-867) one hundred thousand of them were martyred, unquestionably weakened their influence further east. Smbat Bagratuni the Sparapet seems to have been the last of the petty Armenian dynasts who favoured them. Local heads of clans here and there, like the Wrw^r, and men of royal family like Mushel, continued here and there to take their part and share their sufferings. But they nowhere held the government in their hands; and from about the year 900 onwards they were outcasts, and their hand against every man's. And such have ever since continued to be their fortunes. CAUSES OF THE MOHAMMEDAN CONQUEST Ixxv But it is against itself that a state or a church rejects the counsel of God ; and Eastern Christianity, Greek and Armenian alike, is to this day bleeding from the wounds which, in its cruel persecutions of these early Puritans, it inflicted on itself To us who are the heirs of the ages the truth of things is slowly unrobed ; and there is an irony too painfully clear in the circumstance that in the chronicle of Aristaces the pages immediately following the two malignant chapters about the Pauhcians, translated in my appendix, have for their topic the capture of the royal city of Ani and the massacre of its inhabitants by Alp Arslan. As we read these dreadful pages which tell us of the cruelties of the human wolf of the eleventh century, we seem to hear the shrieks and groans of the miserable victims of the human wolf of to-day, still ravening in the plains and valleys of Armenia. Fortune does not always smile on bigots and persecutors; and Gregory Magistros had scarcely ended his harryings of his Paulician countrymen, had hardly concluded his bombastic recital of his exploits as a persecutor, before the star of his country set in a mist of Tartar bloodshed and oppression out of which it was never again to emerge. Nor was retribution really less certain, if it was less swift, in the country west of the Euphrates. Paulicianism was the natural faith of the hardy moun taineers of the Taurus ; and in destroying them the Wind fanaticism of Byzantium destroyed its only bulwark against Saracen invasion. ' In the Greek borderlands, west of the Taurus and Euphrates, were encamped the Paulicians, opposing to the worldly orthodoxy of the empire a genuinely apostolical Christianity founded on the Bible. Persecuted under the emperors of the seventh century, they enjoyed (in the eighth) a thorough-going toleration, thanks to the wise policy of the Iconoclasts who followed. The brave bands of these Christian Maccabeans furnished a frontier-cordon against Islam as vigorous as it was indispensable. To strengthen this line of defence the extraordinary spiritual leadership of Sergius (about 800) had done not a little. Yet the persecutions under the Caesars Michael I and Leo V drove a portion of them into the Arab domain. But when Theodora began her extraordinarily bloody persecution, this brave population was seized with universal despair. The commissioners sent to inquire into their faith rivalled in blood- thirstiness the officers of the Spanish inquisition. They were murdered, and the robber-incursions into the empire began. The sect found in Karbeas, who had been a Roman officer, one who could lead them in the field as in the council-chamber ; and from Ixxvi THE KEY OF TRUTH the frontier-fortress of Tephrike, like the later Waldensians against the Piedmontese, they waged a most successful guerilla-war against the Empire '.' Tephrike fell (873). But the backbone of Oriental Christianity was broken. What the Protestant Churches have achieved in Europe, that the Paulicians might have accomplished in the east. But from the ninth century onwards, wherever the Muslim met a Paulician, they met a friend ; and the ultimate success of the most soldierly of the Mohammedan invading races was assured. It is the Osmanli Turks who have proved themselves to be that race. There remains an important Greek source of information with respect to the Paulicians, which has not been noticed because the sect is not referred to in it eo nomine. It was fii'st published in the learned Historia Haeresiae Monothelitarum of Franc. Combefisius, ed. Paris, 1648, col. 317 fol., and is entitled, Xoyos o-njXiTevTiKos KOTu 'Appeviav, and ascribed to ' our holy father Isaac, Catholicos of Great Armenia^.' A reference to the baptism of Constantine as having occurred 800 years before the date of composition fixes its date in the twelfth century ; and the author was clearly the contem porary and possibly the companion in the discussion with Theorian under Manuel Comnenus of Nerses the Graceful, from whom we print some excerpts in our fifth appendix. The tone of this ' oration ' is throughout that of a renegade Armenian who had gone over to the Greeks, and who, in his anxiety to blacken his country men, ascribes to the orthodox Armenian Church not only the errors of Eutyches and Dioscurus, of Timotheus Aelurus and Petrus Fullo, of Julian of Halicarnassus, and of Aphthartodoketism, but also the characteristic errors of the Paulicians. These are summarized in chap, viii, and partly agree with and partly supplement our other sources of information. (i) 'Christ was thirty years old when he was baptized. There fore they baptize no one until he is thirty years of age.' That this was and is still the custom of the Thonraki is implied in the Key, and may be inferred, as we have seen (p. 1) from the Acts of the Inquisition of Arkhw6U. The same conclusion results ' Translated from the excellent ' Abriss der Byzantinischen Kaisergeschichte ' in K. Krumbacher's Geschichte der Byzantinischen Literatur, 2nd Edition, p. 970. ^ An Abrege of the same is attributed to S. Nicon, and is printed among the notes in the Patres Apostolici of Cotelerius. The Greek text of Isaac, ch. viii, is printed in Appendix VII below. ISAAC CATHOLICOS, C. II50-1200 Ixxvii from the so-called teachmg of St. Gregory the Illuminator, to which we elsewhere refer (p. cxi). John of Otzun (for reference see below on No. 5) implies that infant baptism had become the rule rather than the exception in his church before 700 a.d., but he glances at the Paulician custom. (2) ' Christ, after baptism, was not anointed with myrrh (pvpop) nor with holy oil, therefore let them not be anointed with myrrh or holy oil.' In the baptismal service of the Key no allusion is made to the use of the holy oil, and the modern Pauhcians reject it (see above, pp. xxvi and xlix). (3) ' Christ was not baptized in a font, but in a river. Therefore let them not be baptized in a font.' This seems to have been the practice of the Thonraki, judging from the same Acts of the Inquisition of ArkhwSli, wherein is described (see above, pp. 1, li) a case of baptism in a river. The Key indicates that total immersion was the rule; but, during the best part of the year, immersion in a river was impossible in the highlands of Armenia, though feasible in the Mesopotamian districts. The DidacM, ch. vii, prescribes baptism ep vboTi fSi/Ti. (4) ' Christ, when he was about to be baptized, did not recite the Creed of the 318 Fathers of Nice. Therefore shall they not make profession of it.' It is clear from the Key that the Paulicians of Armenia rejected the entire theology of the great councils, and the Creed given on p. 94, to be imparted by the catechist to the catechumen, is a coun terblast to the Nicene Creed. In the first Paulician confession of Arkhweli (see above, p. xxv) we read that the great councils were inspired by Satan ; and Isaac Cathohcos indicates, towards the close of this eighth chapter, that the same people whose teaching is here summarized rejected the Nicene doctrine of the Incarnation. (5) ' Christ, when he was about to be baptized, was not first made to turn to, the west and renounce the Devil and blow upon him, nor again to turn to the east and make a compact with God. (For he was himself true God.) So let them not impose these things on those to be baptized.' The baptismal service in chap, xxi of the Key implies that the above is correct ;, and John of Otzun, in his Synodal oration (c. 718 A.D.) chap. V, glances at the Paulician practice in the following passage (opera John Otzun. Venet. 1834, p. 25): 'Et Ixxviii THE KEY OF TRUTH istud quoque praeterea cernimus : quod ab lis, qui baptizandi sunt, non exigunt quidam interrogationis modo de abrenuntiando diabolo iuramentum, neque sanctissimae Trinitatis professionem . . . sed tantummodo ad fontis baptismum illos temerarie admittunt.' The truth seems to be that John of Otzun was introducing these new practices into the ancient baptismal rite of the Armenians, and not that some were neglecting to observe them. In the same context he insists that, before baptism and before entering the baptistery, the priest should lay hands on the catechumen and anoint him — a practice which the orthodox Armenians have after all never adopted. (6) ' Christ, after he had been baptized, did not partake of his own body. Nor let them so partake of it.' In the Acts of the Inquisition of Arkhw61i (see above, p. xlix) the newly-baptized do not at once communicate. In the Greek and Roman and orthodox Armenian churches the host is put into the mouth of the child immediately it is baptized ; and perhaps the delay interposed by the Paulicians was by way of protest against this superstitious custom. How long the interval was we know not, probably forty days. (7) ' Christ, after he was baptized, fasted forty days, and only (that); and for 120 years such was the tradition which prevailed (in the Church). We, however, fast fifty days before (lit. near to) the Pascha.' This means that the Paulicians kept a fast for forty days after the feast of the baptism of Jesus Christ, and that all Christians kept this fast during the first 120 years after Christ. The 'we' refers of course to Isaac and his party. To fast for fifty days before Easter was common in Syria at one time, and the Lenten fast was kept for various periods from forty hours to fifty days. The persistence of the name Quadragesima to denote it indicates that the Paulician fast was its original form. When the importance of the baptism was lost sight of in the Church, the eariier fast became a fast before Easter. The orthodox Armenians still identify Christmas with the Baptism. (8) ' Christ did not hand down to us the teaching to celebrate the mystery of the offering of the bread in church, but in an ordinary house and sitting at a common table. So then let them not sacrifice the offering of bread in churches.' The modern Paulicians (see above, p. xlix) celebrate their Eucharist in a cellar or stable, or wherever else they can. (9) ' It was after supper, when his disciples were sated (xopra- HIS SUMMARY OF PAULICIAN TENETS Ixxix o-Bripai), that Christ gave them to eat of his own body. Therefore let them first eat meats and be sated, and then let them partake of the mysteries.' This proves that the Paulicians kept up the primitive custom of an agape' preceding the Eucharist for centuries after the great Church abandoned it. So St. Paul (i Cor. xi. 21) deprecates the practice of coming hungry to the Eucharist, no less than that of coming drunk. All were, by sharing, to have had enough to eat and drink, and no more. (10) ' Christ, although he was crucified for us, yet did not enjoin us to adore the cross, as the Gospel testifies. Let them therefore not adore the cross.' This is a point to which not only the Key but all the sources abundantly testify. (11) 'The cross was of wood. Let them therefore not adore a cross of gold or silver or iron or bronze or stone.' To this point also ihe' Key testifies. (12) 'Christ wore neither humeral nor amice nor maniple nor stole nor chasuble. Therefore let them not wear these garments.' So the Greek source, Scor. xiv, asserts that the ' priests ' of the Paulicians whom they called synecdenii and notarii dressed and looked and lived exactly like every one else. The only bit of ritual hinted at in the Key is the reservation for the bishop of a particular seat (p. 107). The orthodox Armenian Church has ever been almost barbaric in its wealth of ecclesiastical vestments. Yet any priest may assist in the service of the mass in his plain dress. (13) 'Christ did not institute the prayers of the hturgy and of the holy epiphanies, and all the other prayers for every action and every hour. Let them therefore not repeat them or be hallowed by these holy prayers.' So Nerses (see Appendix, p. 155), says: 'Liber Rituale et canones, qui in eo continentur, crucis et ecclesiae benedictio, et alia, non sunt admittenda.' This book of rituals for all occa sions was called among the Armenians Mashtotz, from the name of the ninth-century compiler. The Paulicians, according to Nerses, rejected it as not being the work of the ancient fathers. (14) 'Christ did not ordain (ixeipoTovrjoev) patriarchs and metro politans and bishops and presbyters and deacons and monks, nor their several prayers (i. e. services of ordination). Let them there fore not be ordained nor blessed with these prayers.' Ixxx THE KEY OF TRUTH So the Key deprecates the idea of any hierarchy in the Church (p. 105). And it is this that underhes the tirade of Gregory Magis tros (p. 144). So, in the Albigensian Church, the lowest deacon could replace the highest bishop in every and any ecclesiastical function. (15) 'Christ did not enjoin the building of churches and the furnishing of holy tables, and their anointing with myrrh and hallowing with ten thousand prayers. He did no such thing. Let them not do it either.' So Nerses (see above on No. 1 2) states that they, the Paulicians, would not formally consecrate churches (ecclesiae benedictio). The Greek sources (Scor. xi) testify that they had proseuchae only. It must not be forgotten, however, that, from the reign of Coqstantine onwards, the 'cruellest edicts forbad the use of their churches to all heretical sects, and ordered their destruction. However, in this particular also the Paulicians preserved the primitive teaching of the Christian Church as expressed by Origen in the words (C. Cd'/j«W2, viii. 20): (pevynpev ^apovs Kal dydXpoTa Kal yems ibpvea-Bai. On this point there are many golden passages to be read in Origen, viz., C. Celsum, i. 5, viii. 17, 18, 19, 20. The Pauhcians, as Nerses Shnorhah testified (p. 155), limited the church to the worshippers met together in Christ's name, and so did the Albigeois. The modern Paulicians (see above, p. xlix) celebrate the Eucharist in a stable on a common table of wood. (16) ' Christ did not fast on the fourth day of the week and on the ParaskevS. Let them not fast either.' So Aristaces testifies (p. 140) that the Paulicians rejected 'the ordinance of fasts.' (17) 'Christ did not enjoin us to pray towards the east. Let them not either pray towards the east.' The custom of turning to the east in prayer was so ancient in Christianity, being already attested by second-century fathers, that it is surprising, though not impossible, that the Paulicians had not adopted it'. It is hardly a charge that Isaac would invent. If it be true, it is another proof of the extremely primitive character of their Church. In ch. xiv, col. 384, Isaac condemns the Armenians for re-baptizing the Greeks (^Papaiovs) ; but the orthodox Armenians ' Or had they dropped it out of opposition to the Sun worship of the Manicheans ? JOHN OF OTZUN S TESTIMONY, C. 700 Ixxxi probably did this no less than the Pauhcians, so we need not sup pose that he herein refers to them. In the summary, however, of Armenian errors which follows (col. 385) are some which must have been pecuhar to the Paulicians, e. g. that they did not keep the Feast of the Annunciation; that they refused to adore the Images of Christ, and of the mother of God, and of the saints, and called them idols; that 'they denied the nativity of Christ,' which must mean that they regarded the Baptism as the real Nativity of Christ. The orthodox Armenians themselves retained so much of the original Adoptionist character of their Church as always to keep Christmas and the Baptism on one and the same day, Jan. 6'. The above summary is so terse, so instinct with the religious radicalism which must characterize every Christian system built on the Gospels alone, that we may fairly suppose that Isaac copied it" directly from some Paulician source, in which the principles of the sect were compendiously set out and defended. Being himself an Armenian, Isaac may well have had access to such a source. John of Otzun (c. 680-725) wrote a separate 'discourse against the Pauhcians ' eo nomine ; of it I print the relevant portions in my Fifth Appendix. But in his synodal oration there are many covert references to them, beside the one noticed in No. 5 of Isaac's list. And they are moreover introduced in such a way as to indi cate that in his day the Armenian Church was still in transition from its older Adoptionist form to the later orthodox or Caesarean type; so that the traces of old belief and practice were still common among the clergy. Thus he begins his review of the newer system which he was seeking to impose with these words (ed. Venice, 1834, p. 15): 'I perceive numberless irregularities in many matters of deep moment, not only among the laity, but among the clergy as well, nay among the bishops (lit. primates or leaders) of our Church. With one language and by the help of one preacher (i. e. Gregory the Illuminator) we have started forth on the way of truth. Yet now we pursue many paths and tracks. Not only in our lives but in our forms of glorifying God (or ' in our doxologies ') '¦ See further on this point below, p. ciii foil. ^ The methodical manner in which the points are grouped in itself indicates that Isaac has embodied a Paulician document in his text. Their supreme tenet — the baptism of Jesus— comes first, and their teaching about baptism occupies the first seven sections. Then follow two concerning the Eucharist. The rest of the clauses convey their conceptions of priesthood, public worship, and of the Christian life in general. f Ixxxii THE KEY OF TRUTH we depart from what is correct in many and various ways .... And so it is that when we congregate before the God of peace to ask for peace, we are disturbed and confused ; and, just as if we were aliens to one another in race and tongue, we fall into discord and faction, as though we were savages one to the other.' The admission of Aristaces (see Appendix, p. 132) that the Thonraki, like the orthodox Armenians, were descendants of Gregory the Illuminator, well agrees with the above. There follows in John a passage, which, as it concerns not a few of the points enumerated by Isaac Catholicos, I transcribe from the faithful Latin version of the Mekhitarists (ed. Venice, p. 17):— 'Interea et istud nobis videre obtigit, quod quibusdam in locis Altaria et Baptisteria non extruuntur iuxta beatorum Patrum nostrorum praeceptum traditionemque, ambo lapidea et immobilia condendo ; sed ligneum ac mobile altare quidam erigunt, et con- suetum perficiunt lavacri ritum pro necessitate, ac pro tempore, et loco, per quodlibet vas prae manibus in promptu occurrens (cp. above, p. xlix), suorum excusationem errorum pueriliter quidem, et imperite adferentes, si quidquam priscis temporibus festinanter ab aliquo nostratum fuerit opus; a Christo, exempli gratia, qui ad communem mensam in caenaculo corporis et sanguinis sui Sacra- mentum confecit ; et a Philippo, qui, ut ut accidit, Eunuchum in quavis aqua baptizavit. Similiter, aiunt, de aliis quoque Apostolis demonstrat historia, quod diversimode ab invicem, et quomodo- cumque tempus poscebat utrumque conficiebant Sacramentum. Sanctus quoque Illuminator noster ligneum, inquiunt, secum cir- cumferebat altare (or table) ; atque in fluviis rivuhsque ubicunque advenisset, baptismum peragebat.' A more direct commentary on the charges of Isaac Cathohcos, Nos. 3, 8, and 15, could not be than these remarks of John of Otzun afford; and it would almost seem as if Isaac had preserved to us a Paulician document, not of the twelfth, but of the seventh or eighth century. It is anyhow clear that in the seventh century the Adoptionists of Armenia made exactly the same appeal to the example of Christ and to the usages of the Illuminator which they made in the tenth to the twelfth centuries, and which meets us everywhere in The Key of Truth. John himself admits the anti quity of the usages he condemns in the words, ' si quidquam priscis temporibus festinanter ab aliquo nostratum fuerit opus,' where the word aliquo must refer to Gregory the Illumina:tor. AGAPfi AND EUCHARIST NOT SEPARATED Ixxxiii In further criticism of their constant appeal to Christ's example John continues thus : — ' Quibus dicendum est : O vos, si universa a Christo acta nobis ad exemplum adducenda essent, ergo oporteret, et triginta annorum unumquemque baptizari (cp. Isaac's document, No. i), et octiduum circumcidi (cp. the name-giving of the Pauhcians, p. 87 of the Key), et tertia die resurgere, et quadragesima die in caelum conscendere (cp. Narekatsi's ribaldry about Smbat, p. 128) : hoc namque modo haec Christo peragere placuit. Item quoque post coenam hora vespertina mysterio communicari ; quoniam Dominus, ubi vetus illud perficiens obsignavit, ibi per suum quoque novi testamenti fundamenta iecit. Nunc autem multas horas interponimus cor- poream inter spiritualemque mensam, et octidui baptizamur.' It is remarkable that some of these points were just those on which the persons denounced by Isaac Catholicos laid stress ; namely the baptism in the thirtieth year, and the participation in the Eucharist immediately after an agap6. It would appear that the more thorough-going of the old Adoptionist believers had already been excluded in the days of John of Otzun from the church over which he presided; and now formed a distinct sect, being called Paulicians after Paul- of Samosata. And John alludes to customs of the latter as a reductio ad ahsurdum of the arguments of the less rigorous Adoptionists who still lingered in the Church ; half and half adherents of the older religion, who had perhaps abandoned the Adoptionist Christology, and had adopted infant baptism and separated the Eucharist from the agapl, yet in other respects clung to what was ancient. It is certain from the teaching of Gregory the Illuminator (see p. cxi), that the original practice of the Armenians was to baptize at thirty years of age ; and, from the teaching of the twelve apostles, we know that the union of Eucharist with agap6 long continued in the Church. The language of the DidacM, ch. 10, is almost identical with that of Isaac Catholicos : peTd be to epnXrjo-B^vai outms eixapiarrjoaTe. St. Basil, Kp. xciii. (iii. 187 a) testifies that, in the fourth century, it was still usual in Alexandria and Egypt to cele brate the Communion in one's own house : eKoa-Tos koI tSup ev Xaa TeXovvTQiV ft)S enl to nXeloTOV exei Koivcoviav ev tq> oIkco aiTOV Kal OTe PovXeTai peraXap^dvei bi eavTov. And Socrates, H. E. V. 2 2, testifies that the Egyptians in the neighbourhood of Alexandria and in the Thebaid kept up the agape before the Eucharist and had not severed them : Iv a-a^^dno pev -noiovvTai a-wd^eis, ovx i>s e'Bos be f 2 Ixxxiv THE KEY OF TRUTH XpioTiapois tS>v pviTTTjpimv peTaXapfidvovo'i, peTa ydp to eva>xiBtjvat Kal irav- Toiav ebeapoTap ep(f>opijBfjpai, nepl eonepav npoa-cpepovTes tS>v pva-Tripiav peTa- Xap^dvovtnv. I owe these references to Mr. Brightman's Liturgies, vol. i. p. 509. In the Armenian canons of St. Sahak (p. 96, ed. Venice, 1853) there is a trace of the same usage among the Armenians of the fourth and fifth centuries. Canon 17. 'The priests shall in unanimity (or all together) per form the service (or ministration), and the offering (or mass) of the agapSs. Without reading the Gospel let the priests not venture to present [the offering]. But if any one be found in a state of surfeit (i. e. having overeaten or overdrunk) before the offering (or mass) is made, in the offering let him not dare to take the bread, and let him be removed by his fellows.' Canon 18. 'Likewise the laity {lit. cultivators) who have been invited to the agap6, shall share in the service and offering (or mass). Prior to the offering let them not venture to eat and drink in their own houses. And if any one has beforehand eaten and drunk in his own house, let him not dare to come to the offering of bread, that there be no condemnation of himself and insult to the spiritual feast ; since such perversity is vain . . . .* These two canons indicate the custom of an Agap6 and Eucharist following such as we have before us in the New Testament. They are not directed against the eating of a supper in church before the Eucharist ; but firstly against the priests overeating at the supper, and secondly against the laity eating that supper in their own houses and then coming into church to partake of the Eucharist separately. The reading of the Gospel is to intervene between the supper and the Eucharist, but nothing else is pre scribed. The Paulician Eucharist was similar. In the time of John of Otzun the agapS still went on, but separated by an interval of time from the Eucharist. That the orthodox Armenian Church in his day began the fast of forty days immediately from the Epiphany on Jan. 6th, cannot be inferred from John of Otzun, who, in his fifth and sixth canons (ed. Venice, 1834, p. 59), distinguishes indeed the ' holy forty days of Zatik' (Easter), which preceded Pentecost, from the 'holy quadragesimal fast' which followed the Epiphany, but does not explicitly say that the latter was an Epiphany fast. When in the Armenian canons of Sahak (p. 11 1) we have specific mention of the ' Festival of the Holy Epiphany and its forty days,' the feast of vnairavTfj called Quadragesimae de Epiphania in the CANONS OF SAHAK, C. 425 Ixxxv Peregrinatio of St. Sylvia is referred to. It is possible that this feast originally marked the close of the Lord's fast of forty days and the beginning of his ministry, but we have no evidence on the point. The Armenians also kept, and still keep, a fast of five days or more called Arhadjavor, preliminary to the fast of our Lord. This originally commemorated the preaching of repentance by Jonah according to the Armenians themselves; but its real significance is very doubtful. Perhaps it at first commemorated the preaching of repentance by John the Baptist. The forty days' fast was so strictly kept by some in the days of John of Otzun that they passed the Sabbaths and Lord's Days during its con tinuance in sadness and penitence, without celebrating the Eucharist. John condemns this custom ; and Gregory of Narek seems to glance at it when (see p. 126) he taxes the Thonraki with reckoning the Lord's day the same as any other. ' In tristitia et poenitentia transigunt, non secus ac reliquos quinque dies praeteritos ... In hac die Christus mortem coercuit, secum ex morte humanam educens naturam,' says John of Otzun. The strictures of Isaac Catholicos are largely borne out by the review of the ecclesiastical condition of Armenia with which Nerses of Lambron, his contemporary, concludes his commentary on the Armenian mass. Hierarchy, celebration of mass, ritual, observance of church feasts — all this was, he says, confined to the monasteries. The common people would not build churches, and if there were any they had been built by the Francs, or were derelict Armenian churches taken possession of by them. Even in the Armenian court the Armenian nobles could not go to the sacrament in church for fear of the populace, who rejected bishops in favour of elders, neglected the Lord's day and would permit no feasts in honour of saints, no church vestments, no ritual. Dulaurier has translated this striking chapter in his crusading documents. It entirely confirms the document given in Isaac Catholicos, and the two sources taken together prove that the Paulician heresy was as rife in the twelfth as it had been in the fifth when Lazar of Pharp was accused of it'. And, like Lazar, Isaac Catholicos seems to have known it not under the name Paulicianism, but simply as a heresy immemorial among his countrymen. So far our chief aim has been to prove that the correspondence of TM Key of Truth on the one hand with the old Armenian, and on the other with the Greek sources of information about the ' See below, p. cviii. Ixxxvi THE KEY OF TRUTH Pauhcians, is so close that we cannot hesitate to recognize in it an authoritative manual of that Church. The Thonraki were the Armenian branch of that Church, since both Gregory of Narek' and Gregory Magistros identify them. The problem which still confronts us is a more fundamental one, namely, what was the relation of this Paulician Church to the Great Church? Was it a paraphyadic outgrowth of the post- Nicene Church of Asia Minor and, as regards the Thonraki, of the orthodox Armenian Church ? Or was it the survival of an early form of the Apostolic Church, so that its origin lay far back behind the Nicene Council ? Was it Protestantism or opposition to what were regarded as the abuses of the Great Church, a return to lost evangelical standards consequent upon the diffusion of the Gospel texts; and in Armenia did this specially result from the diffusion of an excellent vernacular translation of the New Testa ment ? Or was it rather the case that these early standards had never been lost ? In the latter case Paulicianism was just the fruit of an inevitable antagonism felt by an older and simpler form of church towards the dogmatic and ritualistic developments which at once began when, under Constantine, the Great Church got the upper hand. The answer to this question has been in some measure forestalled in our discussion of the document preserved by Isaac the Catholicos. We shall now try to argue it on still wider and deeper grounds. This question cannot be satisfactorily answered until we have examined and cleared up the relation of the Paulician system of behef and observance exhibited to us in the Key to ancient Christianity in general, and until we have determined to what stage of the Church's development and history it belongs. This is the more necessary because of the very conflicting accounts of the antiquity of the sect. For example, John of Otzun, the Catholicos, writing in 720, not only hints that their heresy was a rehabilitation of what was very old, but seems to connect them with heresies which were already ramifying in Armenia under Nerses in the middle of the fourth century. And we shall presently adduce ' Dr. Karapet Ter-Mkrttschian, p. 86, notices that Gregory of Narek, in his famous book of prayers, entitles one of his chapters ' Discourse about the Church against the Manicheans, that is the Paulicians.' Ii^, it Gregory enumerates the functions and elements of the Church as a visible edifice, and explains their significance. He is of course combating the Thonraki teaching — that the real Chnrch was not of wood or stone, but the invisible communion of the faithful (see Appendix V, p. 155). PAULICIAN TENETS PRIMITIVE Ixxxvii similar evidence from the writings of Lazar of Pharp in the fifth century. The Greek writer again, Zigabenus, declares that Sergius Tychicus flourished only 500 years after St. Paul, i.e. about 550; if so, Constantine Sylvanus, the founder of the Paulicians, must be put back at the least to 450. On the other hand, Pseudo-Photius dates the appearance of Sergius 700 years after St. Paul; while Peter of Sicily, who used the same sources, dates it 800 after. An examination of the Key itself goes far to confirm the state ments of John of Otzun and of Zigabenus ; for note that in it belief and observance go hand in hand, and are so closely interde pendent as to preclude the idea that the Church, whose book it was, was in any way an eclectic one. Everything grows organically out of their conception of Jesus, as a man, not divine, but created, and yet not hke other men, since he was the new Adam, without sin. Purely human, though free from sin, Jesus came to John to be baptized in the Jordan, when he had reached his thirtieth year. Then his sinless nature, which had triumphed over all temptations and kept all the Father's commandments, received its reward. The Spirit of the Father descends on him, fills him with the Godhead, and invests him with authority; and a voice from heaven proclaims him to be the chosen Son in whom God is well pleased, and who, according to the older form of the text of Luke, is on that day begotten by the Father. Then it was that Jesus received all the high prerogatives which raised him above ordinary humanity, though always without making him God and Creator. For till then he had been, except in respect of his sinlessness, in no wise higher than Moses or Enoch. Filled with the spirit of adoption, the elect Christ is forthwith led up on to the mountain to enjoy, for forty days, the mystery of intercourse with the Father ; and this feast of divine converse to which, after baptism, Christ was at once admitted, is the archetype of the sacramental meal for the reception of which baptism qualifies us '. ^ The antiquity of the idea worked out in ch. v of the Key is apparent, if we compare the similar account in Philo {Vita Mosis, iii. § 2) of the forty days' stay of Moses on the mountain, which for him, as for Jesus, was preliminary to the ministry. 'ESti 5^ rrpoTepov, uiorrep Trjv jfivxrjv, Kal Td aSipa KaBapevaat, prjSevis nd&ovs irpooaipdpevov, dXA.' dyvevffai dtro tt&vtwv oaa ttjs Svrjrrjs eoTi tpvffeajs, fftnoiv Kal TTOTuiv Kal r^s rrpos yvvaiKas 6pt\ias. dWd TOVTrjs p^v eK iroWaiv Xp^vejv KaTetppSvrjoe, Kal ffx^S^i/ d^p' o5 Td irpaiTov ^p^aro 'npo(pr}Tevetv Kal 9eo