ARMENIAN CHURCH. The earliest notice of an organ ized church in Armenia is in Eusebius, H. E. vi. 46, to the effect that Dionysius of Alexandria (c. 25o) sent a letter to Meruzanes, bishop of the brethren in Armenia. There were many Christians in Melitene at the time of the Decian persecution in A.D. 25o, and two bishops from Great Armenia were present at the council of Nicća in 325. King Tiridates (c. A.D. 238-314) had already been baptized some time after 261 by Gregory the Illuminator. The latter was ordained priest and appointed catholicus or exarch of the church of Great Armenia by Leontius, bishop of Caesarea in Cappadocia. This one fact is certain amidst the fables which soon obscured the history of this great missionary. Thus the church of Great Armenia began as a province of the Cappadocian see. But there was a tradition of a line of bishops earlier than Gregory in Siuniq, a region east of Ararat along the Araxes (Aras), which in early times claimed to be independent of the catholicus. Almost the earliest document revealing anything of the inner organization and condition of the Armenian church in the Nicene Age is the epistle of Macarius, bishop of Jerusalem, to the Ar menian bishop, Verthanes, written between 325 and 335 and pre served in the Armenian language. Its genuineness has been un reasonably suspected. It insists on the erection of fonts; on dis tinction of grades among the ordained clergy; on not postponing baptism too long; on bishops and priests alone, and not deacons, being allowed to baptize and lay hands on or confirm the bap tized ; on avoiding communion with Arians; on the use of un leavened bread in the Sacrament, etc. The Armenians must, like the Georgians a little later, have set store by the opinion of the bishop of Jerusalem, or they would not have sent to consult him. It was equally from Jerusalem that they subsequently adopted their lectionary and arrangement of the Christian year; and a 9th century copy of this lectionary in the Paris library preserves to us precious details of the liturgical usages of Jerusalem in the 4th century. We can trace the presence of Armenian convents on the Mount of Olives as early as the 5th century.
Tradition represents the conversion of Great Armenia under Gregory and Tiridates as a sort of triumphant march, in which the temples of the demons and their records were destroyed whole sale, and their undefended sites instantly converted into Christian churches. The questions arise : how was the transition from old to new effected ? and what was the type of teaching dominant in the new church? Armenian tradition, confirmed by nearly con temporary Greek sources, answers the first question. The old order went on, but under new names. The priestly families, we learn, hearing that the God preached by Gregory needed not sacrifice, sent to the king a deputation and asked how they were to live, if they became Christians; for until then the priests and their families had lived off the portions of the animal victims and other offerings reserved to them by pagan custom. Gregory re plied that, if they would join the new religion, not only should the sacrifices continue, but they should have larger perquisites than ever. The priestly families then went over en masse. How far the older sacrificial rules resembled the levitical law we do not know, but in the canons of Sahak (c. 43o), the priests already receive the levitical portions of the victims. The earliest Arme nian rituals contain ample services for the conduct of an agape (q.v.) or love feast held in the church off sacrificial meat. In the canons of the catholicus Sahak the priest is represented as eating the sins of the people in these repasts.
The mother church of Armenia was established by Gregory at Ashtishat in the province of Taron, on the site of the great temple of Wahagn, whose festival on the 7th of the month Sahmi was reconsecrated to John the Baptist and Athenogenes, an Armenian martyr and Greek hymn writer. The first of Navasard, the Ar menian new year's day, was the feast of a god Vanatur or Wana dur (who answered to Z Evs Evros) in the holy pilgrim city of Bagawan. His day was reconsecrated to the Baptist, whose relics were brought to Bagawan. The feast of Anahite, the Armenian Venus and spouse of the chief god Aramazd, was in the same way rededicated to the Virgin Mary, who for long was not very clearly distinguished by the Armenians from the virgin mother church. The old cult of sacred stones and trees by an easy transi tion became cross-worship, but a cross was not sacred until the Christ had been, by priestly prayer and invocation, transferred into it.
Another survival in the Armenian church was the hereditary priesthood. None but a scion of a priestly family could become a deacon, elder, or bishop. Accordingly (except for an interregnum of 25 years) the primacy remained in the family of Gregory until the end of the 4th century, when it was transferred to another family. But by this time the autonomy of the Armenian church was thoroughly established. The right of saying grace at the royal meals, which was the essence of the catholicate, was trans fer'ed oy the king, in despite of the Greeks, to the priestly family of Albianus, and thenceforth no Armenian catholicus went to Caesarea for ordination. The ties with Greek official Christendom were snapped for ever, and in subsequent ages the doctrinal pref erences of the Armenians were usually determined more by antag onism to the Greeks than by reflection. If they accepted the Council of Ephesus in 43o and joined in the condemnation of Nestorius, it was rather because the Sassanid kings of Persia, who thirsted for the reconquest of Armenia, favoured Nestorianism, a form of doctrine current in Persia and rejected in Byzantium. But later on, about 48o, and throughout the following centuries, the Armenians rejected the decrees of Chalcedon and held that the assertion of two natures in Christ was a relapse into the heresy of Nestor. From the close of the 5th century' the Armenians have remained monophysite, like the Copts and Abyssinians, and have only broken the record with occasional short interludes of orthodoxy.
Monastic institutions were hardly introduced in Armenia before the 5th century, though Christian rest-houses had been erected along the high-roads long before. Out of these grew the mon asteries. The monks were, strictly speaking, penitents wearing the cowl, and not allowed to take a part in church government. This belonged to the elders. At first there was no separate episcopal ordination, and the one rite of elder or priest sufficed. There were also deacons, half-deacons, and readers. Besides these there was a class of wardapets or teachers, answering to the didascalos of the earliest church, whose province it was to guard the doctrine and for whom no rite of ordination is found in the older rituals.
A few other peculiarities of Armenian church usage or belief deserve notice. In baptism the rubric ordains that the baptized be plunged three times in the font in commemoration of the en tombment during three days of the Lord. In the West trine im mersion was generally held to be symbolic of the triune name of "Father, Son, and Holy Ghost." This name the Armenians have used, at least since the year zoo; before which date their fathers often speak of baptism into the death of Christ as the one essen tial. As late as about 1300 a traveller hostile to the Armenians re ported to the pope that he had witnessed baptisms without any trinitarian invocation in as many as 30o parish churches.
There were abortive attempts to unite the Armenian Church with the Byzantine in the 9th century under the patriarch Photius, and again late in the 12th under the emperor Manuel Comnenus, when a joint council met at Romkla, near Tarsus, but ended in nothing (A.D. 1179). Neither could the Armenians keep on good terms even with the Syriac Monophysites. From the age of the crusades on, the Armenians of Cilicia, whose patriarch sat at Sis, improved their acquaintance with Rome; and more than one of their patriarchs adopted the Roman faith, at least in words. Dominican missions went to Armenia, and in 5328, under their auspices, was formed a regular order called the United Brethren, the forerunners of the Uniats of the present day, who have con vents at Venice and Vienna, a college in Rome, and a numerous following in Turkey. They retain their Armenian liturgies and rites, pruned to suit the Vatican standards of orthodoxy, and they recognize the pope as head of the church.
The recent history of the Armenian Church is inseparable from the history of the Armenian people during and after the World War. Previous to the World War, and after the settlement (if such it can be called) following the Balkan War of 1913, the Armenian population of over 3,000,000, between the Euphrates and the Kura, constituted a strong and healthy nationality. But from the year 1915 onwards the greater part of the population of Turkish Armenia was expelled from its territory. Large num bers were massacred or perished in their wanderings on the moun tains. In 1921, the Armenian Republic of Erivan, in Russian Transcaucasia, adopted the Soviet regime and became part of the Federated Union of Socialist Soviet Republics. Hundreds of thousands of Armenian refugees have fled to Syria, Mesopotamia, Transcaucasia, as well as to Greece and Russia. The disintegration of national religious customs and traditions, involved in these events, needs no comment.
See the articles ARMENIA; ARMENIAN LANGUAGE and ARMENIAN LITERATURE, with the references there given; also (pre-war) articles AR MENIA, ARMENIANS, in Hastings' Encyclopaedia of Religion and Ethics, vol. i., and Conybeare, Rituale Armenorum (Oxford, 1905).