Note 61 — Chapter XVI · EDGMIATSIN AND THE ARMENIAN CHURCH

It is scarcely open to doubt that the theoretical side of the religion was not defined by any rigid formula. “Tell me,” says Archelaus, “over whom it was that the Holy Spirit descended like a dove. Who is this one whom John baptizes? If He was already perfect, if He was already the Son, if He was already Virtue, the Holy Spirit could not have entered into Him; a kingdom cannot enter into a kingdom. Whose was the voice which came from heaven and bore testimony to Him: ‘This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased’?” It is clear that the theory of Archelaus was of an adoptionist nature, or, in other words, that he believed Jesus to have been adopted as the Son of God by the descent of the Holy Spirit at the baptism. It is also plain that he was not arguing as an irresponsible disputant, but as giving voice to a strong current of orthodox opinion in his Church, as opposed to the docetic teaching of Mani, representing Jesus as a heavenly spirit assuming the mask of man. Other currents there certainly were in other dioceses than that of Archelaus, and perhaps even among his own flock. But there seems strong reason for believing that the adoptionist Christology was firmly established towards the close of the third century in outlying portions of the Roman Empire and among the Christian communities outside its pale.61 In Antioch it had been suppressed in the person of Bishop Paul of Samosata after the overthrow of his patron, Zenobia, queen of Palmyra, by the Emperor Aurelian in the year 272. The weight of the Empire was placed in the scale of those tendencies which were to crystallise in the celebrated formula of Nice (A.D. 325): Christ a very God, begotten of God, but not a creature of God; Son of God, of one nature with the Father; Who came down from heaven, and took flesh, and became man, and suffered and ascended into heaven; Who was before He was begotten and Who has always been. The same Council of Nice enjoined that the followers of Bishop Paul, or Pauliani, should be re-baptized before admission to the Church. The recalcitrant were driven out into the mountain fastnesses, where after the lapse of several centuries and under the Armenian terminology of Paulicians (Paulikean), the inheritors of their spirit again emerge as a sharp thorn in the side of the orthodox Churches both of Constantinople and of Armenia. The history of the wholesale persecutions of this hardy people by the successors of the Cæsars during the ninth century, and of the successful reprisals which they made, is outside the scope of these remarks; they were driven into the arms of the Mohammedan Power, and their decimation by the imperial armies drove another nail into the coffin which was being prepared for the cancerous body of the Roman Empire.