Paulicianism
The sect flourished between 650 and 872 around the Byzantine Empire's frontier with the Arab Caliphate in Armenia and Eastern Anatolia, despite intermittent persecutions and deportations by the imperial authorities in Constantinople.
[1] After a period of relative toleration, renewed Byzantine persecution in the mid 9th century prompted the Paulicians to establish a state centered on Tephrike in the Armenian borderlands under Arab protection.
[9] In Thrace, the sect continued practicing their faith for some time, in some places until the 17th–18th centuries, before gradually converting to other religions and are considered to be the ancestors of the modern Roman Catholic Banat Bulgarians[8] and the Muslim Pomaks.
[4] It is most likely to be Paul the Apostle, a figure whom the Paulicians are consistently stated as according special veneration from the earliest sources up to their apparent extinction in the early modern period.
[17] Another possible source is Paul the Armenian, an otherwise obscure Paulician figure said to have led the sect in its migration to Episparis following its persecution by Justinian II at the close of the 7th century.
Gegnaesius was taken to Constantinople, appeared before Emperor Leo III, was declared innocent of heresy and returned to Episparis, but, fearing danger, went with his adherents to Mananalis in Eastern Anatolia.
In 747, Emperor Constantine V is reported to have moved a significant number of Paulicians from Eastern Anatolia to Thrace to strengthen the Bulgarian frontier, beginning the presence of the sect in Europe.
In 843, the Empress Theodora, as regent to her son Michael III, instituted a major persecution against the Paulicians throughout Asia Minor[22] in which 100,000 adherents in Byzantine Armenia alone were said to have lost their lives or property.
Under the protection of Umar al-Aqta, the Emir of Melitene, the sect was permitted by the Arabs to build two fortress cities, Amara and Tephrike, and establish an independent state.
[9] Others were transferred to the Western frontier of the empire, including a military detachment of some 20,000 Paulicians serving in Byzantine Italy under the general Nikephoros Phokas the Elder.
The policy of transferring Paulicians to the West proved to be harmful for the Byzantines, with the group bringing limited economic and military benefits for the empire's Balkan frontier.
This text was first identified by Armenian ecclesiastical authorities in 1837 while tracing a group of dissidents led by Hovhannes Vartabedian;[33] British Orientalist Frederick Conybeare published a translation and edition of it in 1898.
[34][35] The manuscript transmission of the Key is traced to the late 18th century, leading historians to raise doubts over its background, with some suggesting that its composition was influenced by Protestant missionary activity in Armenia at that time.
[9] By the mid-19th century the mainstream scholarly theory was that the sect was a non-Manichaean, dualistic Gnostic doctrine with substantial elements of Early Christianity closest to Marcionism, although others disputed this.
[3][9] Frederick Conybeare, in his edition of The Key of Truth, concluded that "The word Trinity is nowhere used, and was almost certainly rejected as being unscriptural" and that Paulicians believed that Christ came down from heaven to emancipate humans from the body and from the world.
Conybeare's theory, part of a broader argument that Adoptionism represented the original form of Christianity that had subsequently been suppressed by the Catholic Church, met a skeptical reception at the time.
[42] In the 1960s, however, Nina Garsoïan, in a comprehensive study of both Greek and Armenian sources, argued in support of a link to Adoptionism, and asserted that Paulicianism independently developed features of docetism and dualism.
[43] In a paper presented to the Unitarian Christian Alliance Conference in 2022, Atlanta Bible College adjunct professor Sean Finnegan argued that the Armenian sect which produced The Key of Truth, while nontrinitarian, did not hold an Adoptionist Christology.
[8] Due to supposed iconoclasm it was asserted that the sect rejected the Christian cross, rites, sacraments, the worship, and the hierarchy of the established Church,[4][8] because of which Edward Gibbon considered them as "worthy precursors of Reformation".
[47] Early modern Catholic reports of the Paulicians remaining in the Balkans claimed that they were iconoclasts, rejecting the veneration of images and the Cross, that they used fire rather than water in baptism, and that they had a relatively simple conception of priesthood.
