In his Letter to the Armenians, Macarius, Bishop of Jerusalem, draws on local tradition to respond to queries by the nascent Armenian Church regarding baptism and the Eucharist. He addresses his letter to Vrt`anes, elder son and second successor to Gregory the Illuminator as head of the Armenian Church, and reveals much about the nature of pre-Nicene Armenian Christianity and its affinities with East Syrian baptismal and eucharistic traditions thought to stand in need of reform. Terian's study of Macarius - Letter to the Armenians establishes the date of this earliest document bearing on the history of the Armenian Church, and highlights the document's place in the baptismal and eucharistic liturgy of Jerusalem prior to Cyril's Catechetical Lectures and in the travel diary of the nun Egeria later in the fourth century.

This book examines the way Christians in Jerusalem prayed and how their prayer changed in the face of foreign invasions and the destruction of their places of worship.

This volume commemorating the late Armenian scholar Karen Yuzbashyan comprises studies of mediaeval Armenian culture, including the reception of biblical and parabiblical texts, theological literature, liturgy, hagiography, manuscript studies, Church history and secular history, and Christian art and material culture. Special attention is paid to early Christian and late Jewish texts and traditions preserved in documents written in Armenian. Several contributions focus on the interactions of Armenia with other cultures both within and outside the Byzantine Commonwealth: Greek, Georgian, Syriac, Coptic, Ethiopic, and Iranian. Select contributions may serve as initial reference works for their respective topics (the catalogue of Armenian khachkars in the diaspora and the list of Armenian Catholicoi in Tzovk’).

In Introduction to Eastern Christian Liturgies, renowned liturgical scholars Stefanos Alexopoulos and Maxwell E. Johnson fulfill the need for a new, comprehensive, and straightforward survey of the liturgical life of the Eastern Christian Churches within the seven distinct liturgical Eastern rites still in existence today: Armenian, Byzantine, Coptic, Ethiopic, East Syrian, West Syrian, and Maronite. This topical overview covers baptism, chrismation, Eucharist, reconciliation, anointing, marriage, holy orders, burial, Liturgy of the Hours, the liturgical year, liturgical ethos and spirituality, and offers a brief yet comprehensive bibliography for further study. This book will be of special interest to masters-level students in liturgy and theology, pastoral ministers seeking an introduction to the liturgies of the Christian East, and all who seek to increase their knowledge of the liturgical riches of the Christian East.

Seeking to tell worship history in the same way it is usually experienced, Walking Where Jesus Walked is a document-rich snapshot of the church in Jerusalem in the late fourth century. / Here the reader journeys with a woman visiting Jerusalem as the highlight of a Holy Land pilgrimage in the last part of the fourth century. As she marvels at the new churches built at so many sites associated with Jesus Christ, she notes how remembrance shaped by Scripture and fitting to the time and place serves as the bedrock for this church s worship. Ruth helps today s reader hear the preaching which caused shouts of delight at the tomb of Christ, know the readings which lead the congregation to weep in the shadow of Calvary, and see the new buildings which sought to manifest God s glory at the places where Jesus had walked, died, and risen from the grave. / By pairing contemporary descriptions, artistic portrayals, and worship texts with various commentaries to guide readers, this first in a series of case studies of particular worshiping communities from around the world and throughout Christian liturgical history aims to allow a worshiper today to think concretely and contextually about some of the continually important issues for Christian worship.

Seeking to bridge the distance between scholarship and praxis, to be accessible to both pastoral ministers and academic theologians, this volume is organized according to three categories: liturgical year, Christian initiation, and Eucharist. Within these categories, the contributors are especially attentive to three important aspects of liturgical history: the role that important figures in liturgical history played as liturgical pastorshow liturgical history has been used in shaping contemporary liturgical rites and prayershow liturgical history informs contemporary understandings and beliefs Ultimately, the book pays tribute to Maxwell Johnsons contributions to the life of the church by exploring ways that the study of liturgical history might help the church remain faithful to God and to the sacramental worldview that continues to define and characterize classic Christianity.

The twenty-three discourses presented in this volume have a long textual history that ascribes them to St. Gregory the Illuminator of Armenia (d. 328), a prevalent view that lasted through the nineteenth century. Armenian scholarship through the last century has tended to ascribe them to St. Mashtots‘, the inventor of the Armenian alphabet (d. 440). In his critical introduction to this first-ever English translation of the discourses, Terian presents them as an ascetic text by an anonymous abbot writing near the end of the sixth century. The very title in Armenian, Yačaxapatum Čaŕk‘, literally, “Oft-Repeated Discourses,” further validates their ascetic environment, where they were repeatedly related to novices. For want of answers to introductory questions regarding authorship and date, and because of the pervasive grammatical difficulties of the text, the document has remained largely unknown in scholarship. The discourses include many of the Eastern Fathers’ favorite theological themes. They are heavily punctuated with biblical quotations and laced with recurring biblical images and phraseology; the doctrinal and functional centrality of the Scriptures is emphasized throughout. They are replete with traditional Christian moral teachings that have acquired elements of moral philosophy transmitted through Late Antiquity. Echoes of St. Basil’s thought are heard in several of them, and some evidence of the author’s dependence on the Armenian version of the saint’s Rules, translated around the turn of the sixth century, is apparent. On the whole they show how Christians were driven by the Johannine love-command and the Pauline Spirit-guided practice of virtuous living, ever maturing in the ethos of an in-group solidarity culminating in monasticism.

"Ararat" and Armenia in the Bible and associated traditions -- Jews in Armenia in the ancient period (First century BCE - Fifth Century CE) -- The Middle Ages -- Other Armenian-Jewish connections.

“Saint Gregory of Narek, a monk of the tenth century, knew how to express the sentiments of your people more than anyone. He gave voice to the cry, which became a prayer of a sinful and sorrowful humanity, oppressed by the anguish of its powerlessness, but illuminated by the splendor of God’s love and open to the hope of his salvific intervention, which is capable of transforming all things.” —Pope Francis, April 12, 2015 This is the first translation in any language of the surviving corpus of the festal works of St. Gregory of Narek, a tenth-century Armenian mystic theologian and poet par excellence (d. 1003). Composed as liturgical works for the various Dominical and related feasts, these poetic writings are literary masterpieces in both lyrical verse and narrative. Unlike Gregory’s better-known penitential prayers, these show a jubilant author in a celebratory mood. In this volume Abraham Terian, an eminent scholar of medieval Armenian literature, provides the nonspecialist reader with an illuminating translation of St. Gregory of Narek’s festal works. Introducing each composition with an explanatory note, Terian places the works under consideration in their author’s thought-world and in their tenth-century landscape.

The present volumes is the result of an international collaboration of researchers who are excellent within their respective fields: interpretation of texts, studies of rites, archaeology, architecture, history of art, and cultural anthropology. They met for two conferences to discuss the significance of rites of ablution, initiation, and baptism and their interpretation in Late Antiquity, Early Judaism, and Early Christianity. The volume establishes a new international standard of research within these fields of scholarship.