too, claims to be apostolic. In the national legend St. Bartholomew and St. Thaddæus come and preach the gospel in Armenia soon after Whitsunday. Armenians have further appropriated the story of King Abgar the Black and the portrait of our Lord (pp. 29-31). Armenia to the south touches the old kingdom of Osroene. They have made Abgar an Armenian king. In this form the legend is doubly untrue. For not only is the whole story apocryphal (p. 31), but in any case, Abgar would have nothing to do with Armenia.[1] Moreover, the Armenians have to suppose a general apostasy later, to account for the persecution of St. Gregory. We may then leave the account of a directly apostolic foundation as merely one more case of the invariable desire of each Eastern Church to be apostolic. Nor is it compatible with the legend of a directly Divine foundation later (p. 409, n. 3). Yet we have evidence of Christians, even of a bishop, in Armenia before the Illuminator. When Dionysius of Alexandria (248-265) wrote to the Armenians "about penitence," they had a bishop named Meruzanes.[2] It seems that the faith penetrated into Armenia from Edessa during the 2nd or 3rd century.[3] This earliest Church was destroyed by the Persians when they overran Armenia in the 3rd century (p. 386). Consistently with the policy of the Sassanids they tried to force Mazdæism on all their subjects (p. 25). The mission of St. Gregory is part of the general revolt of Armenia against the Persian tyrant. When King Trdat II came back in 261 and drove out the Persians (p. 386), at the same time a young Armenian of noble family,[4] who had
- ↑ The legend is told in the Armenian version of Lerubna of Edessa (in Langlois: op. cit. i. 326-331), and by Moses of Khoren (ib. ii. 93-100). Addai here appears as St. Thaddæus, and their lists of Katholikoi count him the first. See A. Carrière: La légende d'Abgar dans l'hist. d'Arm. de Moïse de Khoren (Paris, 1895). Tournebize discusses the story at length (op. cit. 402-413).
- ↑ Eusebius: Hist. Eccl. vi. 46. Gelzer ("Die Anfänge der armen. Kirche") places Meruzanes in the isolated south-eastern corner of Armenia, in Vaspurakan (p. 172).
- ↑ Tournebize: op. cit. 413-418.
- ↑ He is said to have been of Parthian blood, son of the very Anak who murdered the last king, Khosrov, in 238 (?). Gutschmid doubts this. He notices that in Agathangelos' account Trdat says to Gregory: "You are a stranger and unknown among us" (Langlois, i. 126), and concludes that he was a foreigner (Kl. Schr. iii. 409). Gelzer thinks he was of an Armenian pagan sacerdotal family (op. cit. 146-148).
