[6] According to one older view, Movses was born in the village of Khorni (also called Khoron or Khoronk) in the Armenian province of Taron or Turuberan.

[6] Malkhasyants instead proposed as Khorenatsi's birthplace the village of Khoreay (Խորեայ) in the Haband district of the province of Syunik, which is mentioned by the thirteenth-century historian Stepanos Orbelian.

[6] Accepting Khorenatsi's claimed fifth-century dating, Malkhasyants proposes 410 as the approximate year of his birth, arguing that he probably would have been a young man of about 22 or 23 upon journeying to Alexandria, where Movses writes that he was sent after the Council of Ephesus of 431.

[6] After the Council of Ephesus, when Mashtots and Sahak were correcting the Classical Armenian translation of the Bible according to the Koine Greek original, or translating it into Armenian a second time, they decided to send Movses and several of their other students to Alexandria, Egypt—one of the great centers of learning in the world at the time—to master Hellenic learning and the literary arts.

[6]To further complicate their problems, the atmosphere in Armenia that Movses and the other students had returned to was one that was extremely hostile and they were viewed with contempt by the native population.

While later Armenian historians blamed this on an ignorant populace, Sassanid Persian policy and ideology were also at fault, since its rulers "could not tolerate highly educated young scholars fresh from Greek centers of learning".

Gyut, Catholicos of All Armenians (461–471), one day met Movses while traveling through the area and, unaware of his true identity, invited him to supper with several of his students.

[10] One of his primary reasons for taking up Sahak Bagratuni's request is given in the first part of Patmutyun Hayots, or History of the Armenians: "For even though we are small and very limited in numbers and have been conquered many times by foreign kingdoms, yet too, many acts of bravery have been performed in our land, worthy of being written and remembered, but of which no one has bothered to write down.

Movses's history also gives a rich description of the oral traditions that were popular among the Armenians of the time, such as the romance story of Artashes and Satenik and the birth of the god Vahagn.

[15] Beginning in the nineteenth century, as a part of a general trend in those years to reexamine critically classical sources, Khorenatsi's History was cast into doubt.

[13][25][26][27][28] Vrej Nersessian, the curator of the Christian Middle East Section at the British Library, took issue with many of Thomson's characterizations, including his later dating of the writing and his contention that Khorenatsi was merely an apologist work for the princely Bagratuni dynasty: If so, how does one explain then Moses's complete preoccupation with the events preceding A.D. 440 and his silence regarding the events leading up the Arab incursions and occupation of Armenia between 640–642?

[26][31] Aram Topchyan, then a research fellow at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem of Armenian Studies, agreed and noted that it was odd that Thomson would fault Khorenatsi for failing to mention his sources because this was an accepted practice among all classical historians.

[32] In 2000, historian Nina Garsoïan wrote that the dispute over Khorenatsi's dating continued and that "no final agreement on this subject has yet been reached" at the time.

[35] Today, Movses Khorenatsi's work is recognized as an important source for the research of Urartian and early Armenian history.

[36][37] It was Movses Khorenatsi's account of the ancient city of Van with its cuneiform inscriptions which lead the Société Asiatique of Paris to finance the expedition of Friedrich Eduard Schulz, who there discovered the previously unknown Urartian language.