The Armenian Church

According to tradition, the apostles Bartholomew and Jude Thaddeus (the double name was to distinguish him from Judas Iscariot and from stories of Jude the brother of Jesus) preached the Gospel in Judea, Samaria, Edom, Syria, Mesopotamia, and Libya. They were the first to bring Christianity to Armenia. Jude Thaddeus is said to have cured Abgar V of Edessa of leprosy by exposing him to the Image of Edessa.

There is also an "Apostle to the Armenians," Saint Gregory the Illuminator (pictured in a Constantinople mosaic), who converted the Armenian king in 301CE thereby stopping his persecutions of Christians. The king, Tiridates III, made Christianity the official state religion. This was not that radical a change, since Christianity had been growing steadily since the 1st century. Tiridates declared Gregory the Illuminator to be the first Catholicos, a term used to denote the head of a church in some of the Eastern Christian traditions.

In 325, at the First Council of Nicaea designed to create consensus among the Christian world (where Arianism was literally slapped down by Santa Claus), the Armenian Catholicos (Gregory's son Aristaces) attended. At that time, the Armenian Church was subordinate to the Bishop of Caesarea, where Tiridates had sent Gregory to be consecrated and where Gregory adopted the Byzantine rites. Over the following years, however, Armenia started adopting Antiocian/West Syriac rites, which blended with the Byzantine rites to create the Armenian Rite.

Translation of the Bible into Armenian in the early 400s helped Christianity spread faster. Over time, however, differences arose between what was being practiced/believed in Armenia and the West. The biggest difference was over monophysitism; that is, the divine nature of Jesus. Eastern Orthodox churches professed monophysitism, the idea that Christ had a single nature, that of the divine. The Council of Chalcedon in 451 approved that Christ had two inseparable natures: human and divine. The Armenian Church severed ties with Rome in 610 over this difference.

It was Pope Innocent II who tried to reconcile Rome and Armenia. To do that, he knew he could not simply order the Armenian Church to fall in line; he had to work with his contemporary, the Catholicos Grigor III Pahlavuni. We'll talk about that process tomorrow.