To What Extent did Armenia Become Christian during the Fourth and Fifth Centuries? Performing Christianity among Armenian Elites
Cinemre, İlhami Tekin · 2024
Argues that the narrative of Armenia's Christian history has taken on a mythical character, a distortion made worse by the total absence of pagan Armenian historiographical sources. Everything surviving was written by Christians. The fourth and fifth centuries carry outsized weight in that narrative, but Cinemre questions how accurately Christian Armenian sources depict the actual Christianization. He asks specifically how deeply Christianity penetrated the Armenian elite class as opposed to being formally professed, examining the religious influence of Christianity in what was a multicultural, multi-religious environment.
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Cinemre, İlhami Tekin 2024. To What Extent did Armenia Become Christian during the Fourth and Fifth Centuries? Performing Christianity among Armenian Elites. Le Muséon, Vol. 137, No. 3-4, pp. 405–433 (Peeters); DOI 10.2143/MUS.137.3.3293894. https://doi.org/10.2143/MUS.137.3.3293894
What this offers a reader
Takes the 301 conversion story apart and asks what the evidence actually supports.
Critical historical method applied to the founding claim of Armenian Christian identity.
A hard question asked seriously: how Christian was fourth-century Armenia, really?
Was Armenia really Christian in the fourth century, or only officially so?
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