Note 33 — Chapter III · Legends of the Conversion to Christianity

But this is not accepted by modern writers, any more than it was by the ancient historians. Bryce places the conversion at 302, and states that the so-called conversion of Constantine happened either twelve or thirty-seven years later, according as one reckons to the battle of the Milvian Bridge, or his baptism.33 Armenia, therefore, was the first country that adopted Christianity as a religion of state, a matter of no small pride to the Gregorians, and it has been maintained as the national religion ever since in a form so intact as to surpass the dreams of the most ultra-conservative. And this, too, in the face of attacks by Persian fire-worshippers who attempted to force their religion upon the people, Greek and Latin popes, Mohammedan khalifs, and Turkish sultans. Ormanian, former Armenian patriarch at Constantinople, who gives the date as 301, considers the existence of the churches of St. Rhipsime and St. Gaiane with their inscriptions as positive proof, and mentions also the testimony in the writings of Eusebius, who cites the war of the year 311 which the Emperor Maximianus, the Dacian, declared against Armenians on account of their, at that time, recent conversion.34 The critical studies made since the journey of Dubois (1837) are conclusive at least in this, that the conversion of Tiridates and of the nation could not have taken place later than the year 302, and there is no doubt therefore of the claim that the Gregorian church is the oldest national Christian church of the world.