REMEMBERING THE FIRST AND FORGOTTEN ARMENIAN GENOCIDE OF 1019.

Ironically, most people, including most Armenians, are unaware that the first genocide of Christian Armenians at the hands of Muslim Turks did not occur in the twentieth century; it began in 1019—exactly one-thousand years ago this year—when Turks first began to pour into and transform a then much larger Armenia into what it is today, the eastern portion of modern day Turkey.

Thus, in 1019, “the first appearance of the bloodthirsty beasts … the savage nation of infidels called Turks entered Armenia … and mercilessly slaughtered the Christian faithful with the sword,” writes Matthew of Edessa (d.1144), a chief source for this period. Three decades later the raids were virtually nonstop. In 1049, the founder of the Turkic Seljuk Empire himself, Sultan Tughril Bey (r. 1037–1063), reached the unwalled city of Arzden, west of Lake Van, and “put the whole town to the sword, causing severe slaughter, as many as one hundred and fifty thousand persons.”

After thoroughly plundering the city—which reportedly contained eight hundred churches—he ordered it set ablaze and turned into a desert. Arzden was “filled with bodies” and none “could count the number of those who perished in the flames.” The invaders “burned priests whom they seized in the churches and massacred those whom they found outside.

Between 1064 and 1065, Tughril’s successor, Sultan Muhammad .. laid siege to Ani, the fortified capital of Armenia, then a great and populous city.

Once inside, the Islamic Turks .. began to mercilessly slaughter the inhabitants of the entire city . . . and piling up their bodies one on top of the other. . . . Beautiful and respectable ladies of high birth were led into captivity into Persia. Innumerable and countless boys with bright faces and pretty girls were carried off together with their mothers.”

Muslims had to learn suppression and elimination of their opposition. And the Roman network of affiliated churches, once that form became the dominant state-established religion, began to eliminate the opposition of people in independent assemblies who would not leave the doctrine of the apostles and be subjugated to them. The beginning of persecution by the Roman church of other believers started at the time of Constantine, and that was 200-300 years before Mohammed and his man-created religion appeared. From the standard reference work "A History Of Christianity" are the excerpts as follows (my bolding for emphasis):

================A minority of the church at Carthage, on the shores of the Mediterranean, called a council to investigate the validity of the election and ordination of its newly-made pastor or bishop. He had by management secured the majority vote, and hurried on his ordination by the hands of a self-excluded pastor of a neighboring church, who was not recognized by the surrounding churches or their pastors. (I have condensed these facts, which will be found with a unanimity of detail in Hawei’s Mosheim and Neander). These associate pastors (of Numisia) were not invited, nor their counsel or approbation sought. The council decided that the minority was the true church. It then proceeded to ordain Majorius, elected by it as pastor or bishop. The neighboring Churches of Africa, in sustaining this church and its pastor against the dominant party and its bishop Celilanus, gave voice to a great principle, which involved the Christian world in discussion and interminable contest. The principle was this: "That every church which tolerated unworthy members in its bosom was itself polluted by the communion with them. It thus ceased to deserve the predicated of purity and holiness, and consequently ceased to be a true Christian Church, since a church could not subsist without these predicates." (Neander, p. 203).

This principle was a protest against hereditary church membership. It proclaimed that none but those who were born from above, had any right to the ordinances or admission into the church. Neander, an apologist for infant baptism, says:

"It was still very far from being the case, especially in the Greek Church, that infant baptism was generally introduced into practice. Among the Christians of the East, infant baptism, though in theory acknowledged to be necessary, yet entered so rarely and with so much difficulty into the existence of the church during the first half of this period." (History, vol. ii, p. 319). [That is, the first half of the fifth century.]

It is thus most evident from the investigations of the great pedobaptist historian, whose researches took a wider and more thorough range than those of any other man, living or dead, that infant baptism was not as yet introduced when the division took place in the churches in Carthage and Numidia, and when the majorities expressed and battled for theories which were in direct antagonism even to their own practice. Even Augustine, who rose to eminence during the conflicts in Africa, though a child of pious parents, was not baptized in infancy. The question of infant baptism soon necessarily rose into prominence. The principles of the Numidian pastors and churches, that none but regenerate believers could be received into a true Christian Church, and that those who received any others were not true churches, utterly condemned the theory of infant membership, and condemned the practice which the majority soon after introduced.

MAJORIUS, the first pastor of the Carthage Church, died soon after his ordination, and Donatus was elected to fill his place. Schisms occurred in almost every church in Africa, and extended into Asia and Europe.

Henceforth, those who declared for the Numidian pastors, and indorsed the principles they expressed, were denominated Donatists. Their ground was that Cecilanus had acted the traitor during the persecution of Diocletian, as had many members of the Carthage Church: that these traitors were nevertheless sustained by, and continued in the church, and had by management elected Cecilanus pastor: that Felix, a notorious traitor, was selected to ordain the new pastor, against the protest of the minority and without the council of neighboring pastors: that the majority, in thus countenancing unworthy and unregenerate members, and declaring that spirituality was not essential to church-membership: in fact lost the predicates of a true church. They had remained in the dominant church until they had seen in it the signs of apostasy. Braving and enduring confiscation, imprisonment, banishment, and death; refusing position, power, the smiles of great Constantine, and the terrors of imperial indignation, they stood steadfast to those principles which were cherished by thousands who ad long before broken all connection and communion with dominant party.

A council of foreign interested bishops was appointed by Constantine, the emperor, to settle the dispute; but compromise was a word unknown to these Donatists. A spiritual church was with them everything, nothing else was a church. But these principles would have unchurched those very bishops who were appointed to adjudicate. Of course the decision was against the Donatists. Accordingly they were denounced as heretics, and persecuted by the Emperor, now at the head of the so-called Catholic Church. As a consequence, all who held these principles, now so manfully sustained by the Donatist, united with them, and were known by their name; and thus were found in various countries separate and independent churches, which baptized into their communion none gut those who gave evidence of a change of heart and life, refused all union and communion with the religious organizations around them, and rebaptized all who had been immersed in any other society.

Such were their principles, that Osiander, a historian of great note, and an apologist for infant baptism and a worldly church, said: "Our modern Anabaptists were the same as the Donatist of old." And according to Long, an Episcopalian, who wrote a history of the Donatists, " they did not only rebaptize children, contrary to the Catholic Church." (History of the Donatists, Orchard, p. 60).

Then, the Donatists of Africa were Baptists. Did the denomination originate with them?

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American natives didn’t learn brutality from Europeans, that idea is propaganda.

It is not clear where you ever got this idea, but I'm afraid you are wrong.

I am from Western New York State and very familiar with its pioneering history. My great-grandfather was one, and I was raised in the midst of an area that went through the transormation fron aboriginal to civilization only a couple of hundred years ago or so. The memory was still fresh there in my youth.

The British did pay their allies the Iroquois a bounty for the scalps of freedom-seeking men, women, and children colonists, burning their homes and destroying their crops to instill extreme terror in the hearts of formerly British citizens but who were then separating from British rule because of its mistreatment.

Scalping was just an adaptation of the already existing pelts-for-cash or high-value hard-goods exchange in the fur trade, used as a sort of "body count" method of measuring the effectiveness of the terror-inducing aboriginal warriors toward subduing the pioneering settlers.

Lt. Col. John Butler (click here) was principal in collaborating with the Iroquois for such terroristic raids. His son Walter (Capt.) (click here) operated with the Mohawk Joseph Brant (click here). The scope and horror of their operations would make the Viet Nam My Lai incident look like a Sunday School picnic conducted by amateurs.

The existence of this threat to thinly-populated communities for some twenty years, as well as the exceptionally cruel treatment of militia servicemen and civilians by the British troops (cf Banastre Tarleton (click here) provided the reason for the codification of our Second Amendment to the Constitution of the United States, and its persistence till now as a general principle of the God-given right to defend one's life and property using any weaponry commonly used by a death-dealing adversary.

And yes, this is a good parallel between the persecutions of non-Loyal colonists in American history then to the fears of non-Romish Christian local independent autonomous assemblies in 300-400 AD to the agents of the Constantine State Church inflicting its deadly suppression of the religious freedom of its theological Christ-following nonconformists.

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