What was the earliest doctrine of the churches of Armenia? If we could believe the fathers of the 5th and succeeding centuries Nicene orthodoxy prevailed in their country from the first; and in the 5th century they certainly chose for translation the works of orthodox fathers alone, such as Chrysostom, Basil, Gregory of Nyssa and Gregory Nazianzen, Cyril of Jerusalem and Cyril of Alexandria, Athanasius, Julius of Rome, Hippolytus, Irenaeus, avoiding Origen and other fathers who were becoming suspect. However, we do hear of versions of Nestorian writers like Diodore of Tarsus being in circulation, and the Disputation of Archelaus proves that the current orthodoxy of eastern Armenia was Adoptianist, if not Ebionite in tone. The Persian Armenians as late as the 6th century had not heard of the faith of Nicaea, and only then received it from the catholicus Babken. They sent a copy of their old creed to Babken, and it closely resembles the Adoptianist creed of Archelaus, the gist of which was that Jesus, until his thirtieth year, was a man mortal like other men; then, because he was righteous above all others, he was promoted to the honour and name of Son of God. He received the title by grace, but was not equal to God the Father. Because the Spirit worked with him, he was able to vanquish Satan and all desires, and because of his righteousness and good works he was made worthy of grace and became a Temple of God the Word, which came down from heaven in Jordan, dwelt in him and through him wrought miracles. From such a standpoint the baptism of Jesus was the moment of the divine incarnation. The man righteous above all others was then reborn of the Spirit, was illuminated, was spiritually anointed, became the Christ and Son of God. In effect the fathers of the Armenian church often fell back into such language, far removed as it is from orthodoxy; and they emphasized the importance of the baptismal feast of the Epiphany on the 6th of January by refusing to accept the feast of the physical birth of the 25th of December. As late as 1165 their patriarch Nerses defends the Armenian custom of keeping Christmas on the 6th of January on the express ground that as he was born after the flesh from the Virgin, so he was born by way of baptism from the Jordan. The custom from the first, he says, had been to feast on one and the same day the two births, much as they differed in sacramental import and in point of time. We see how deep the early Adoptianism had struck its roots, when a primate of the 12th century could still appeal to the baptismal regeneration of Jesus. The same Nerses held that the second Adam, Jesus Christ, received a new body and nature and the sevenfold grace of the Spirit in the Jordan. The Armenian doctors also taught that John by laying hands on Jesus and ordaining him at his baptism sacramentally transferred to him the three graces or charismata of kingship, prophecy and priesthood which had belonged to ancient Israel. After baptism, if not before, the flesh of Christ was incorruptible. It consisted of ethereal fire, and he was not subject to the ordinary phenomena of digestion, secretions and evacuations.
Monastic institutions were hardly introduced in Armenia before the 5th century, though Christian rest-houses had been erected along the high-roads long before and are mentioned in the Disputation of Archelaus. The Armenians called them wanq, and out of them grew the monasteries. The monks were, strictly speaking, penitents wearing the cowl, and not allowed to take a part in church government. This belonged to the elders. At first there was no separate episcopal ordination, and the one rite of elder or priest (Armen. Qahanay, Heb. cohen) sufficed. There were also deacons, half-deacons and readers. Besides these there was a class of wardapets or teachers, answering to the didascalos of the earliest church, whose province it was to guard the doctrine and for whom no rite of ordination is found in the older rituals.
A few other peculiarities of Armenian church usage or belief deserve notice. In baptism the rubric ordains that the baptized be plunged three times in the font in commemoration of the entombment during three days of the Lord. In the West trine immersion was generally held to be symbolic of the triune name of “Father, Son and Holy Ghost.” This name the Armenians have used, at least since the year 700; before which date their fathers often speak of baptism into the death of Christ as the one essential. As late as about 1300 a traveller hostile to the Armenians reported to the pope that he had witnessed baptisms without any trinitarian invocation in as many as three hundred parish churches.
The paschal lamb is now eaten on Sunday, but until the 11th century, and even later, it was eaten with the Eucharist at a Lord’s Supper celebrated on the evening of Maundy Thursday after the rite of pedilavium or washing of feet. On the morning of the same day the penitents were released from their fast.
The rite of extreme unction was introduced in the crusading epoch, although it was already usual to anoint the bodies of dead priests. The worship of images never seems to have taken root among Armenians; indeed they supplied the Greek world with iconoclast soldiers and emperors. The worship of crosses into which the Spirit or Christ had been inserted by the priest must have satisfied the religious needs of a people who, save in architecture, showed little artistic faculty. In their older rituals we find a rite for blessing a painted church, but no word of statues. Frescoes in their churches are rare, and mostly too high up for veneration to be paid to them.
On certain days the cross was washed, and the water in which it had been washed was a sovereign charm for curing sickness in men and animals and for bringing fertility to the land.
In the older rituals we find a rite of exhomologesis, for restoring those who had sinned after baptism. It was a medicine of sin that could only be used once and not a second time. In form it is a rehearsal of the first baptismal rite, but with omission of the water. It involved like the first rite open confession and repentance, and absolution by the church. In a later and less rigorous age this rite was abridged and adjusted to constant repetition, in such wise that a sinner could be restored to grace not once only, but as often as the clergy chose to accept his repentance and confession. Thus the whole development of the penitentiary system is traceable in the MSS.
The confession of a dying man might be taken by any layman present, and written down in order to be shown to the priest when he arrived. It then was the duty of the latter to supplicate for his forgiveness, and administer to him the Eucharist.
The clergy of all grades were originally married. The parish priests, or white clergy, are so still, except some of the Latinizing ones. But since the 12th century, or even earlier, the higher clergy, i.e. patriarchs and bishops, have taken monkish vows and worn the cowl.
There were abortive attempts to unite the Armenian church with the Byzantine in the 9th century under the patriarch Photius, and again late in the 12th under the emperor Manuel Comnenus, when a joint council met at Romkla, near Tarsus, but ended in nothing (A.D. 1179). Neither could the Armenians keep on good terms even with the Syriac monophysites. From the age of the crusades on, the Armenians of Cilicia, whose patriarch sat at Sis, improved their acquaintance with Rome; and more than one of their patriarchs adopted the Roman faith, at least in words. Dominican missions went to Armenia, and in 1328 under their auspices was formed a regular order called the United Brethren, the forerunners of the Uniats of the present day, who have convents at Venice and Vienna, a college in Rome and a numerous following in Turkey. They retain their Armenian liturgies and rites, pruned to suit the Vatican standards of orthodoxy, and they recognize the pope as head of the church.