Historical, religious, cultural background of Armenia
According to many scholars, Armenia existed in isolation from the rest of Christendom in the 5th century. According to most current historical research documents, the reign of the Arsacid Dynastry in the Armenian kingdom ended in 428 AD, and the Persians worked to bring the Zoroastrian faith back to Armenia, so that the Armenian church did not catch up with the development of Christian thought at the same time. Thus, the Armenian Church did not agree with the important Christian definition of Christ produced by the Ecumenical Council held in Gakdun in 451 A.D. ——— the divine-human nature of Christ and insisted on the oneness of Christ (which condemned the Oneness of Christ as heretical).
Although Armenians did not often agree with this clear division of their own theology, most historical writings still point out that the Armenian Church parted ways with Rome and Constantinople and formally condemned the doctrine of Gakton at the Ecumenical Council in the 6th century. Historically, however, the situation is much more complicated, and different factions within Armenian Christianity are having different influences.
St. Gregory's missionary service in the northern part of the Assasis dynasty of Greater Armenia at the beginning of the 4th century is unquestionably influential. Today, Armenian scholars also believe that the narrative of the Apostolic tradition of St. Detius is a variation of the legend of another apostle, Thaddeus of Edessa, and thus infers that the influence of the apostolic tradition is in fact far less than that of St. Gregory. However, the Christianity marched north from Syria and Mesopotamia into the independent provinces of Armenia's southern plateau before the time of St. Gregory. Literature from the mid-3rd century AD in this region mentions a fairly stable and large Christian community and their bishops, and the introduction of Christianity must have preceded this period.
The earliest available record of Christianity in Armenian sources appears in the late 5th century in the Historical of the Armenians, written by Faustus of Byzantium of Byzantium, a Greek account of the spread and evolution of Christianity in the Kingdom of Armenia between 317 and 387 AD. This account celebrates both the exalted religious status of St. Detius and the feats of St. Gregory, and in describing the latter, the author highlights the important influence exerted by the Syrian bishop Daniel in the 4th century in the cathedral in the southwestern part of the Talon region of the Armenian kingdom: "The first great churches ... Mother of the Armenian churches ... The first and most glorious place, because it was the first sacred church to be built, where the first altar was erected as the lord. ”
It can be seen that Armenian Christianity has two origins from the beginning: one is the apostolic tradition from Syria in the southern part of the Armenian kingdom; The second is the Christian tradition brought by St. Gregory in the north of the kingdom from the Hellenistic Cappadocia.
The current narrative of Armenia's early Christian history revolves around the missionary history of St. Gregory, and the Greek historical records of the same period (Greek sources of this period were the first to collectively refer to the three very different regions of the time as "Armenia", namely the Roman province of Lesser Armenia west of the Euphrates River, the autonomous provinces in the southern part of the Kingdom of Armenia, and Greater Armenia in the northern part of the kingdom) and epic historical writings written in Armenian have long been ignored and despised by scholars.
Armenian manuscript production began in the early 5th century AD and largely stemmed from the invention of the Armenian alphabet by Mesrop Mashtots in the early 5th century, which is an extremely pivotal event in Armenian cultural history. Mesrob's powerful motivation for creating the alphabet was to narrate and codify the Christian faith in the language of his own people. The earliest books written in Armenian include translations of scriptures, early church classics, and Greek and Syrian theological writings of the time. Soon, however, native historians began writing Armenian history in Armenian, distinguishing Armenians from neighboring Persian and Byzantine empires, and Armenian writing and manuscripts flourished in this increasingly independent and manifest cultural consciousness.
The history of Armenia is extremely tortuous, Armenians have experienced numerous wars, occupations, independence, civil strife and some brief periods of regional prosperity, and in the long history of manuscripts written in the Armenian script have been a direct manifestation of the reproduction of unique "Armenian culture" and the evolution of its civilization. Some 30,000 volumes of Armenian manuscripts have survived, many of them in private collections, and are systematically collected in the manuscript library in Yerevan, the capital of Armenia (about 11,000 volumes), the Armenian Diocesan Manuscript Library in Jerusalem (about 4,000 volumes), and the Armenian Monastery of St. Lazarus in Venice. About 500 volumes of manuscripts are also housed in museums and libraries across North America.
