It’s really astonishing to watch Armenians forge their myths out of thin air—”Armenians created the most powerful of all the ancient states”, “Armenians are direct heirs of ancient [ˈeɪnʃ(ə)nt] civilisations”, “Armenia is the first Christian country”… Not the least of Armenian myths is a claim that the Armenian Church is apostolic.
So, let us try to find out what an apostolic church is in the first place. According to the Christian tradition, it is a title attributed to early churches founded by apostles, the disciples of Jesus Christ, and the disciples of these chief apostles, who contacted with them personally, often being their closest associates.
Here is a list of apostolic churches established in the first century AD:
- The Orthodox Church of Constantinople;
- The Orthodox Church of Alexandria;
- The Orthodox Church of Antioch;
- The Orthodox Church of Jerusalem;
- The Albanian Apostolic Church; and
- The Georgian Orthodox Church.
The Armenian Church cannot be included in this list, for it was founded in the first third of the fourth century by Gregory the Illuminator, also known as Gregory the Parthian, who, needless to say, was not among the 12 disciples of Christ. And indeed, the Church acknowledges only 12 disciples of Jesus as ‘true apostles’ and another 70 disciples of these apostles, who died at the beginning of the second century AD.
In fact, the Armenian Church had never been called ‘apostolic’ up until recently. It was known as the Armenian Gregorian Church, or simply the Gregorian Church. This is exactly how it was called by Armenian historians. For example, one of the Soviet historians of Armenian descent Vahan Bayburtyan, uses the term ‘Armenian Gregorian Church’ instead of ‘Armenian Apostolic Church’. Another researcher of Armenian history, Kazar Ayvazyan, also indicated that this monophysite church was called the Armenian-Gregorian Church. The same title was used by a post-Soviet Armenian historian Vyacheslav Vartanyan.
Finally, there is an article on the Armenian Gregorian Church included in the 1961 edition of the Soviet Historical Encyclopaedia. We will just note here that the project included in its board of editors prominent Soviet academicians Vasily Struve and Mikhail Tikhomirov, as well as academician Abgar Ioannisian, who has focused on the Armenian issue in his works. So, this is what we can read on page 750 of the Soviet Historical Encyclopedia: “Gregory the Parthian contributed largely to the propagation of new religion in Armenia; hence his name in the title of the Armenian Gregorian Church.”
So how did the Armenian Church, founded in the fourth century AD, suddenly become apostolic?
In fact, the Armenian clergy holds two versions of events to justify the apostolic authenticity of the church.
According to the first version, Christianity in Armenia was preached by apostles Thaddaeus and Bartholomew regarded as the founders of the Church in Armenia.
However, scholars hold a different opinion. For example, the reputable pre-revolutionary Russian historian Alexander Anninsky emphasised that the older Armenian historians had not mentioned apostles Thaddaeus and Bartholomew’s preaching under the Arsacid dynasty in Armenia. It was the later Armenian historians who opted for a Mekhitarist algorithm to justify Apostle Thaddeus’s alleged “being in Greater Armenia too”. Therefore, the Armenian Gregorian Church cannot be an apostolic one simply because apostles did not propagate Christianity among Armenians.
When Mekhitarists failed to portray apostles Thaddaeus and Bartholomew as the founders of the Armenian Church, they came up with another version of the ‘apostolic legend’. In essence, the idea was to create a spiritual [ˈspɪrɪtʃʊəl] link between Apostle Thaddeus and Gregory the Parthian. It was a necessary move to justify the apostle’s affiliation with the church, for the lifetime of Gregory the Parthian disproved his being an apostle or having any contact with apostles and their disciples whatsoever. To prove the unprovable, Mekhitarists implanted a legend about Gregory’s birth in Moses of Khoren’s History published in 1893. They claimed that his parents, fleeing from the Sasanid Empire, stopped by the grave of St. Thaddaeus to take a break. It is there that Gregory the Parthian was allegedly conceived and blessed by St. Thaddaeus. Apparently, it was this legend professing a spiritual kinship between Gregory the Parthian and Apostle Thaddaeus that Mekhitarists tried to use in order to place the Armenian Gregorian Church upon a firmer footing as far as its apostolic origins were concerned.
But scholars disagreed again. A prominent researcher of Armenian history, Nikolai Adontz, was sceptical of this legend, stating that it “merely lacked any real background”. The legend indeed has a fair amount of idiosyncrasy, with such a strange way of blessing more intrinsic to pagan cults or magic rituals than Christianity.
Given the reputation of Adontz in academia, Mekhitarists refrained from getting into semantics with him, taking the primary version of the ‘apostolic legend’, which focused on apostles Thaddeus and Bartholomew, as a basis for their argument. It has thus been repeated many times in various available resources and still enjoys being a cornerstone of the falsified history of the monophysite Armenian Church.
It is quite clear that the Armenian Church cannot be apostolic, even though it has been named as such. Alas, this is yet another fake to mislead the world community. It is a lie and quite an effective one, since everyone wrongly believes that “an official title of a church cannot be fake, after all!”…
