The First Christian Kingdoms

The gold coins of Ezana, king of Aksum in the highlands of what is now Ethiopia and Eritrea, in the mid-fourth century, show the king's crowned bust, and above it a small symbol. On his early coins, the symbol is a crescent and disc, the emblem of the old gods of South Arabia and Aksum. On his later coins, the crescent and disc are gone. In their place is a cross, one of the earliest appearances of the Christian cross on any coin in the world. Ezana's inscriptions change in the same way: the early ones thank the war god Mahrem, the later ones "the Lord of Heaven" and, in a Greek version, the Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Here, in metal and stone, is the moment a kingdom changed its religion. Around the same decades, at the other end of the Christian world, in the mountains of the Caucasus, the kings of Armenia and Georgia did the same. These three kingdoms, none of them within the Roman Empire, adopted Christianity as the religion of the state before Rome itself did, and each created a Christian culture of its own that has survived for sixteen centuries.

Armenia: the king, the pit and the alphabet

The Armenian church traces its beginnings to the apostles Thaddeus and Bartholomew, and there were Christians in Armenia in the third century. The decisive event, in Armenian tradition, came through Gregory, later called the Illuminator (Grigor Lusavorich), a Christian of Parthian noble descent who entered the service of the Arsacid king Tiridates III (Trdat). When Gregory refused to sacrifice to the goddess Anahit, the king had him tortured and thrown into a deep pit at Khor Virap, near Mount Ararat, where he survived, the story says, for some thirteen years, fed secretly by a Christian widow. Tiridates, having martyred a group of Christian virgins led by Hripsime and Gayane, fell into madness, in legend turning into a boar. Only Gregory could heal him. The king was baptized and made Christianity the religion of his kingdom; Gregory was consecrated bishop at Caesarea in Cappadocia and destroyed the temples of the old gods. The traditional date is 301; scholars place the conversion somewhere between about 284 and 314, and the account of the king's madness and healing is hagiography, written down in the fifth century by a writer calling himself Agathangelos. A church at Etchmiadzin, "where the Only-Begotten descended", was built on the site of Gregory's vision of Christ; the present cathedral, much rebuilt, stands on foundations of the fourth century and is the seat of the Armenian Catholicos.

A century later, the monk Mesrop Mashtots, with the support of the Catholicos Sahak and King Vramshapuh, created the Armenian alphabet around 405, in order to translate the Bible into Armenian. The first sentence translated, tradition says, was from Proverbs: "To know wisdom and instruction, to perceive the words of understanding." A golden age of translation and original writing followed, and the alphabet, 36 letters in its original form, became the bearer of Armenian identity.

In 451 the Persian king Yazdegerd II, who ruled much of Armenia, ordered the Armenians to return to Zoroastrianism. The Armenian nobles under Vardan Mamikonian rose in revolt, and at the Battle of Avarayr, on 26 May 451, they were defeated and Vardan was killed. But the resistance continued, and in 484 the Persians recognized the Armenians' right to their faith. Vardan and his companions are saints of the Armenian church, and Avarayr is remembered as a victory of faith in military defeat.

In the same year of 451 the Council of Chalcedon defined Christ as one person "in two natures". The Armenians, whose bishops were not present, later rejected it, and the Armenian church is one of the Oriental Orthodox churches, with the Coptic, Ethiopian, Eritrean, Syriac and Malankara churches, which confess one united nature of Christ, divine and human (miaphysitism). They reject the older label "Monophysite", which implied that they denied Christ's humanity.

Georgia: Nino and the grapevine cross

In eastern Georgia, the kingdom the Greeks and Romans called Iberia, with its capital at Mtskheta, the conversion is credited to a woman. Nino, a captive or a pilgrim from Cappadocia (the sources differ), came to Mtskheta, healed the queen Nana and a child through prayer, and won over King Mirian III. The Georgian chronicles tell that Mirian, lost in sudden darkness while hunting, prayed to "Nino's God" and the light returned. He was baptized and made Christianity the religion of the kingdom, around 326 in the traditional reckoning or 334–337 in Cyril Toumanoff's dating. The earliest account comes from the Latin church historian Rufinus at the end of the fourth century, who heard it from a Georgian prince, and does not name Nino; the name comes from later Georgian tradition.

Nino's emblem is a cross of grapevine tied with her own hair, which, the legend says, the Virgin Mary gave her. The cross with drooping arms is still the symbol of the Georgian Orthodox Church. At Svetitskhoveli cathedral in Mtskheta, tradition holds, lies the robe of Christ, brought from Jerusalem by a Georgian Jew who had been present at the crucifixion and buried with his sister Sidonia, from whose grave grew a great cedar; the "life-giving pillar" made from it gives the church its name. The Georgians also created their own alphabet, the Asomtavruli, attested in inscriptions of the fifth century; Georgian tradition credits it to a king of the third century BCE, and Armenian tradition to Mesrop Mashtots. Its origin is debated.

Aksum: a king, a captive and a bishop

The story of Aksum's conversion also begins with captives. The church historian Rufinus tells how two young Christians from Tyre, Frumentius and Aedesius, were shipwrecked on the Red Sea coast and taken to the king of Aksum, where they rose to positions of trust and, after the king's death, helped raise his young son. Frumentius went to Alexandria and asked the patriarch Athanasius to send a bishop to Aksum. Athanasius consecrated Frumentius himself, around 340–350, and he returned as the first bishop, remembered in Ethiopia as Abba Salama, "Father of Peace", and Kesate Berhan, "Revealer of Light". The young king was Ezana, whose coins and inscriptions record his conversion. A letter of the emperor Constantius II, preserved by Athanasius, asks the kings of Aksum to send Frumentius back to be examined by an Arian bishop; they did not.

Christianity spread beyond the court from the late fifth century with the Nine Saints, monks from the Roman and Syrian world who founded monasteries, among them Abba Garima and Abba Aregawi at Debre Damo, a monastery on a flat-topped mountain still reached only by a rope. They translated scripture into Ge'ez, the Semitic language of Aksum, and brought the miaphysite theology that made the Ethiopian church Oriental Orthodox, bound for sixteen centuries to the Coptic patriarch of Alexandria, who appointed its bishop until 1959. The Garima Gospels, three gospel books (two of them illustrated) kept at the monastery of Abba Garima, were long thought to date from about 1100; radiocarbon tests placed them between the late fourth and the seventh centuries (about 390–570 for Garima 2 and 530–660 for Garima 1), making the older perhaps the earliest complete illustrated Christian manuscript to survive.

Ethiopian Christianity: the Ark and the Old Testament

Ethiopian Christianity developed features found nowhere else:

• The tabot. Every Ethiopian church holds a tabot, a consecrated slab of wood or stone representing the tablets of the Law and the Ark of the Covenant. A church is not a church until a bishop has consecrated its tabot; only priests may see it, wrapped in cloth. At the feast of Timkat (Epiphany), the tabots are carried in procession to water.
• The Ark itself. The Ethiopian national epic, the Kebra Nagast (Vault, V66), tells how Menelik, son of Solomon and the Queen of Sheba, brought the Ark of the Covenant to Ethiopia. The church holds that the Ark is kept in a chapel of the church of Our Lady Mary of Zion at Aksum, seen only by its guardian monk. The claim cannot be tested; scholars date the Kebra Nagast in its present form to the fourteenth century, and the Ark's fate in the Bible is unknown (Vault, V07).
• The largest canon. The Ethiopian Bible has 81 books, including 1 Enoch and Jubilees, which survive complete only in Ge'ez (Vault, V49).
• Old Testament practices. Ethiopian Christians practise circumcision, keep dietary laws close to those of Leviticus, observe the Saturday Sabbath alongside Sunday, and fast for some 180 days a year or more. How these practices arose, through early Jewish influence in Aksum or later biblical devotion, is debated.
• Lalibela. In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries the Zagwe king Lalibela, tradition says, had eleven churches carved downwards out of the living rock at Roha, since named after him, as a New Jerusalem, with its own Jordan river. They are still in use and are a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

The believer's lens

For Armenian, Georgian and Ethiopian Christians, these conversions are not simply historical events but acts of God: Gregory preserved in the pit, Nino guided by the Virgin, Frumentius brought by shipwreck to a king who would believe. They see their churches as apostolic, founded by the apostles or their companions, and as among the oldest Christian nations, faithful through centuries of persecution by Persians, Arabs, Mongols, Ottomans and, in the twentieth century, Soviet atheism and the Armenian Genocide. Their alphabets, liturgies, saints and holy places are inseparable from national identity. For Ethiopian Orthodox Christians, the presence of the Ark at Aksum is a sacred reality, and the tabot in every church a sign of God's covenant with Ethiopia as a new Israel.

The skeptical lens

The historian can confirm the broad story from independent evidence: Ezana's coins and inscriptions, the Armenian alphabet and literature of the fifth century, the Georgian inscriptions and churches, the early accounts of Rufinus and Athanasius, and the Garima Gospels. The dramatic details of the conversion stories, the king turned boar, the darkness on the hunt, the thirteen years in the pit, are hagiography, written down generations later, and follow patterns common to conversion legends.

The claim to be "the first Christian nation" is contested between Armenia and others: the small kingdom of Osroene at Edessa is said by later tradition to have had a Christian king around 200, a claim most historians doubt; the traditional date of 301 for Armenia may be a decade or more too early. What can be said is that Armenia, Georgia and Aksum were among the first states to adopt Christianity officially, within a few decades of each other, and before the Roman Empire made it the state religion under Theodosius in 380.

The Ark of the Covenant at Aksum cannot be examined and its claim cannot be tested. The relic of Christ's robe at Mtskheta is a tradition, not a documented object.

Symbology and sacred encoding

• The cross replaces the crescent. Ezana's coins encode a conversion in the smallest of images: a change of the symbol above the king's head, from the crescent and disc of the old gods to the cross.
• Alphabets as scripture. The Armenian and Georgian alphabets were created, or reshaped, to carry the Bible and the liturgy. Letters became sacred, and in Armenia the invention of the alphabet is itself a church feast, the Feast of the Holy Translators.
• Khachkars. From the ninth century Armenians carved cross-stones, stone steles with a cross that sprouts leaves and rests on a rosette or disc, surrounded by interlace: the cross as the Tree of Life. Tens of thousands survive; the art is on UNESCO's list of Intangible Cultural Heritage (2010).
• The grapevine cross. Nino's cross of vine branches tied with hair, with its drooping arms, joins the cross to the vine of the Gospel of John ("I am the vine") and to Georgia's ancient wine culture.
• The tabot. A small wooden or stone slab, inscribed and hidden, which makes a building into a church: the sacred centre is not visible, but everything depends on it.
• The Ethiopian cross. Hand and processional crosses of elaborate lattice and interlace, in brass, silver and wood, each region with its own style, symbolize the endless life of Christ.
• Lalibela's geography. The churches were laid out, tradition says, as a map of Jerusalem, with a stream named the Jordan and a Tomb of Adam: sacred geography reproduced in the Ethiopian highlands.
• Armenian numerals. Like Greek and Hebrew, Armenian used its letters as numbers, and Armenian scribes practised letter-number calculations in dating and calendars.

Connections

These kingdoms were converted from the wider world of Early Christianity (ch16) and Patristic Christianity (ch22), and their churches stand alongside the Byzantine church of Eastern Orthodoxy & Byzantium (ch60), from which the Council of Chalcedon divided the Armenians and Ethiopians. Armenia's struggle with Zoroastrian Persia belongs to the history of Zoroaster (ch06). Aksum's neighbours were the Christian kingdoms of Nubia (ch68) and the Jewish and Christian kingdoms of South Arabia described in Pre-Islamic Arabia (ch70), which Aksum invaded in the sixth century. The Ark and the Kebra Nagast link Ethiopia to Pre-exilic Israel (ch07) and the Vault's Ark of the Covenant (V07) and Kebra Nagast (V66), and its biblical canon to the Book of Enoch (V49). Ethiopia's later emperors and the Rastafari movement's veneration of Haile Selassie belong to African Diaspora Religions (ch40).

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From The Divine Archives · https://getconexto.com/chapters/ch79.html · a comparative library of the sacred.