Note 51 — Chapter XVI · EDGMIATSIN AND THE ARMENIAN CHURCH

The Armenians boast that the Gospel was preached to their ancestors by the first apostles, and that they were the first people to adopt Christianity as the religion of the State. They separate these two events by a respectable interval, for they attribute the conversion of king and people to a miracle performed by St. Gregory towards the close of the third century. We have seen that the current version of that miracle comprises a vision by which Jesus Christ becomes in effect the Founder of their cathedral church. The inference is perhaps legitimate that they hold their own Church, as an organisation, to have been established by Christ Himself; and its independence of all hierarchies, whether of the East or of the West, to be based upon the same supreme sanction.51 We are carried back by a discussion of these claims to the very dawn of the Christian religion; and it will be wise to keep them before us as prominent landmarks to control the discursiveness of an enquiry which must also be brief.