The Key of Truth, a Manual of the Paulician Church Of
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? ^C^T^V^ >Alot , L ^ THE KEY OF TRUTH CONYBEARE HENRY FROWDE, M.A. PUBLISHER TO THE UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD LONDON, EDINBURGH, AND NEW YORK THE KEY OF TRUTH A MANUAL OF THE PA ULICIAN CHURCH OF ARMENIA £(Se dRnnentan 'Ztjct EDITED AND TRANSLATED WITH ILLUSTRATIVE DOCUMENTS AND INTRODUCTION BY FRED. C. CONYBEARE, M.A. FORMERLY FELLOW OF UNIVERSITY COLLEGE OXFORD AT THE CLARENDON PRESS 1898 ©;efor& PRINTED AT THE CLARENDON PRESS BY HORACE HART, M.A. PRINTER TO THE UNIVERSITY ortLF VRL 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 Thbnrak, 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 Tifiis, 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 Ter 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 like any other problem of Christian palaeontology. It resembles the questions which arise in con- nexion with the Didache or The Shepherd of Hernias ; 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 vii 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 1 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, 1 The phrase is that of the Spanish Adoptionists. But the thought was fully expressed five centuries earlier by Methodius, Conviv. viii. 8 : y\ eiacXTjaia rnrapya Kal cbSivet, pi\pmip o Xpiarbs iv fjp.iv pop<pw9rj yewrjdeis, ottojs (/cclotos tuiv ayiaiv tw p.eTex eiV Xpiarov Xpiarus yevvr)9rj. 'The Church is big with 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. ; which means that those who have been baptized by participation of the Spirit into Christ, have become Christs.' Harnack well sums up the teaching of Methodius as follows {Dogmengesch. bd. i. 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 Ioh. tr. 21, n. 8 : - Gratias agamus non solum nos Christianos factos esse, sed Christum.' Such then was also the Paulician conviction. viii 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 diffusion 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.