Replies

I’m glad you have now stated a case.

I was able to do so after you provided more than just assertion.

You’re quite right that Photius was not accurate when he called them Manicheans, which is why I didn’t repeat that claim. Surely, you are quite unfair to Schaff to figure he unquestioningly repeated whatever Photius wrote. But Photius can hardly be dismissed as purely lying; he wrote much against my own Catholic Church, but what he wrote did have a basis in truth. We certainly do use unleavened bread, and we do say the “filioque.” It’s his characterizations that are the problem, and his [Photius’] claim that the Paulicians were Manicheans has to be viewed in the same sense as when I accuse the DaVinci code of being Gnostic: He’s finding many of the same errors, but not meaning to ascribe each and every error of the Manicheans to the Paulicians.

If you will notice, I did not address Photius’ statement that they were Manicheans for the simple fact that it is obviously wrong.

Instead, what I addressed were the specific claims – repeated from Schaff, who in his turn repeated them from the Greek writers who discussed the Paulicians – that you had listed. I do not think I’m being in the least unfair to Schaff, and indeed, would not blame Schaff for repeating what, at his time, was pretty much the only source of information available to him on the subject of the Paulicians. The point is, however, that Schaff – as well as the Greek sources – were simply wrong on many of their claims about the Paulicians, including many of the ones you listed in your effort to cast the Paulicians as Marcionite gnostic dualists.

Again, we should note that the Greek evidences, especially the polemical writers, while not being spurious, are also not accurate – and therein lies the problem. The Armenian sources, which scholars readily admit are in contradiction to the Greek sources (e.g. N.A Garsoian, The Paulician Heresy, p. 26) refute many of the claims about the Paulicians by the Greeks, and which are repeated by later scholars like Schaff. Indeed, Garsoian notes that a lot of the reason why scholars continue to give undue weight to the Greek evidences is because the Armenian evidences are not as accessible to them.

Further, your argument about Photius is illogical since his merely getting some of his facts right about the Catholic religion does not necessarily imply that he got his facts, or all of them at least, right about other groups. This is especially true since Photius was well-placed to be very familiar with the differences between Constantinople and Rome (especially since he helped to aggravate those differences), while his knowledge of the Paulicians was at best second-hand.

The reason we know the Greeks (and therefore Schaff, etc.) were wrong is because we have the testimony of more trustworthy evidences. We have the Armenian evidences: a scattering of writings and statements by Armenian ecclesiastics, as well as a primary source document that purports to have been the work of the Paulicians themselves – not something somebody heard somebody else say about them that they were ready to believe since they didn’t like the Paulicians anyhow. The Greek writers are simply not that weighty of evidence, the Armenian evidence is much more so, despite being underappreciated by scholars who hold to the “party line”, so to speak.

Certainly, Conybeare’s discovery of “The Key” is significant, but Conybeare himself concedes many of the claims that Schaff and which you cite him [Conybeare] as dismissing would echo are true. (I learned that just from reading the introduction in Conybeare’s translation!) But subsequent researchers have not even concurred with the refutations of Photius that Conybeare asserts.

Then, with all due respect, you need to go back and read it again, because Conybeare’s introduction flatly contradicts the claims you made in your original post as well as in your subsequent post in which you cite Schaff as your source.

Conybeare does agree that in some places, the Greek sources do seem to be in fundamental agreement with the evidences provided in the Armenian. However – and this is key – in many claims about Paulician doctrine, including the claims you made, the Greek sources fundamentally disagree with the source documents themselves. Again, some agreement does not imply ALL agreement.

So, does Conybeare really “concede many of the claims that Schaff….are true,” as this applies to the actual claims in question? Let’s see:

1) Schaff (and yourself) state that the Paulicians were Dualists. Conybeare, on the other hand, said,

“Nevertheless, there are ascribed to the Paulicians in both sets of sources opinions of which we find little or no hint in the Key. First among these is a Manichean dualism according to which the visible universe was created by the devil.

“Now firstly the Key, p. 48, asserts just the contrary. In it Satan is indeed frequently alluded to as the adversary of God himself, and the latter is usually characterized as the heavenly God or God in heaven. But there is no indication that the Paulicians went beyond the well-marked dualism of the New Testament itself, according to which (John xii. 31 and xiv. 30) Satan is the ruler of this world, or even as Paul expressed it (2 Cor. iv. 4), the God of this world.” (p. xliv)

Hence, to the extent that there is “dualism” in the Paulician beliefs, it is a “dualism” which is readily found in the NT itself (and, hence, which is theoretically there in Catholicism and Protestantism as well). There certainly is no hint in the Key of Truth that the Paulicians believed Satan created the world – indeed, there are a number of statements exactly to the contrary, where God is specifically credited with creation of the heavens and the earth.

2) Schaff (and yourself) state that the Paulicians reject Old Testament, rejected Peter’s epistles, and basically held only to the letters of Paul and Luke, and (tentatively) John (i.e. evidence of Marcionism). Further, it was claimed that the Paulicians “rejected Peter” as being a false apostle. Conybeare, on the other hand, says,

“Their canon included the whole of the New Testament except perhaps the Apocalypse, which is not mentioned or cited….The Old Testament is not rejected; and althought rarely cited, is nevertheless, when it is, called the God-inspired book, Astoudsashountch, which in Armenian answers to our phrase ‘Holy Scripture’ or ‘Bible.” (p. xxxvii)

“There is no rejection of the Epistles of Peter, nor is any disrespect shown to that apostle. It is merely affirmed, p. 93, that the Church does not rest on him alone, but on all the apostles, including Paul. In the Election Service, p. 107, the bishop formally confers upon the candidate the ritual name of Peter, in token of the authority to loose and bind now bestowed on him.” (p. xxxix)

So, contra Schaff, we see that the Paulicians held to the entirety of the NT, with the possible exception of Revelation. However, two things should be considered which mitigate even this possibility. One, Revelation was not generally accepted into the Armenian canon until around the beginning of the 13th century, nearly four centuries after Conybeare dates the origin of the Key. It is quite possible that the Paulicians simply didn’t have access to Bibles and manuscripts that had the book in it, quite regardless of what they would have thought about the canonicity of it. Two, they accepted other of John’s writings, so if they’d had access, they likely would have accepted Revelation as well. Probably, the reason why they didn’t cite this book is merely because they actual subjects addressed in the Key don’t really need to draw upon Revelation as a source.

Again, we see also that the Paulicians didn’t reject the OT. Indeed, at one point, the Key calls Moses “the great prophet” (something a Marcionite definitely wouldn’t have done), and refers to the creation account (specifically found in the Jewish Torah) in a positive light. None of this would have even been conceivable to a Marcionite. The reason why the Key of Truth rarely cites the OT? Probably because the Key is largely a manual of order and ritual for New Testament churches – and the primary place you’ll find material pertaining to that is in the Gospels and in Acts (which are the primary books cited in the Key). You simply don’t find baptism, church organization, etc. in the OT, so why cite the OT extensively in a book about those topics?

And Peter - as we see, he’s not rejected as a “false apostle from the devil.” Indeed, at least twice, the Key calls him a “member of the holy universal and apostolic church” as it cites his epistles – the same formula, incidentally, which the Key uses in referring to John and Paul.

Schaff (and yourself) state that the Paulicians were Docetists – an early heresy which said that Jesus’ body was immaterial and an illusion, that He only “seemed” to have a body, and did not really “die.” Conybeare, on the other hand, says,

“There is no trace of Docetism in the Key, nor any denial of the real character of the Passion. Christ’s sufferings indeed are declared to have been insupportable.”

Indeed, the great lengths to which the Key of Truth goes to establish Christ as the New Adam and to which it speaks of His body would seem to positively rule out any idea that they were docetists on the part of anyone who’d actually read the Key.

It should be noted that the Armenian ecclesiastics, even the “orthodox” ones, did not ascribe these heresies to the Paulicians. This is likely because the Armenians had the Paulicians in their presence and knew better, while the Greeks did not, and didn’t know what they were talking about.

Hence, we see the three major claims about the Paulicians which I had disputed – if we will recall, I didn’t dispute the ones about their rejection of relics, saints, Marianism, rejection of hierarchy, etc. – which Conybeare positively states his disagreement with Schaff and yourself. As it would bear on the actual topics of discussion here, what exactly makes you think Conybeare “concedes” any of these assertions from Schaff?

Conybeare spent considerable time in Armenia and Russia, and learned much of the Paulicians not from historical artifacts, but from presuming the similarity of Paulicians to “Eastern Protestants” who were historically influenced by the Paulicians. Such modern Russians denied many of the heresies Photius ascribed to the Paulicians, and Conybeare readily accepted that if a certain heresy was explicitly taught in “The Key” it should be considered refuted, given the modern Russians’ denials of those heresies, a fact which alone should suggest that they saw huge errors among the Paulicians which they dropped, if indeed they can be said to be more than somewhat influenced by Paulicians. However, both the Paulicians and the modern Russians teach that their more distinct doctrines should not be openly professed. Further, the Russians had been in a society whose Christianity had been dominated by Orthodox / Catholic Christians for a THOUSAND years since Photius wrote of them. Therefore, it is quite reasonable to assume that the modern Russian “Protestants” had drifted far towards (small “o”) orthodox Christianity since the days of Photius. I might make a comparison between the Mormons and the Paulicians, wherein the Mormons, through promoting assimilation and downplaying their more controversial doctrines, now seem far more like conventional Christians than did the Mormons of the 1830s. And even saying that much is far more than can be said of the Russian Protestants, who do not even claim to be Paulicians.

I’m going to have ask you for your source(s) for your claims that Conybeare spent considerable amounts of time in Armenia and Russia, and that modern Russian sects played a role in shaping his views on the Paulicians.

I ask because the only work that Conybeare wrote about Russian religious sects (Russian Dissenters, 1921) barely references the Paulicians, mentioning them three times, and each time incidentally. Further, he states in the Preface to this work that,

“It is not a work of original research. I have only read a number of Russian authorities and freely exploited them….”

This, plus the listing of his sources that follows seems to suggest that, far from having some sort of direct contact with anyone in Russian, but merely through literary works. Further, in his introduction to the Key of Truth, Conybeare states about his discovery of the Key of Truth,

“In the autumn of the year 1891, I went to Armenia for a second time….” (p. v)

His trip in which he found the Key was his second trip – hardly indicative of his spending massive portions of his lifetime in Armenia, conferring about the Paulicians with modern “heretics.”

This aside, what you’ve written above is largely conjecture – and needless conjecture at that, for there is nothing that suggests a link between the Paulicians and modern Russian sects, such as the Raskol and others. At least nothing Conybeare seemed to feel was important enough to mention in his only book on the subject. Hence, it wouldn’t be surprising that modern Russian Protestants (or other dissenting, Protestant-like native sects) would not claim descent from the Paulicians – that argument’s never really been on the table anywise (i.e. straw man).

The Key of Truth was dated by Conybeare, and has generally been accepted, to around the middle of the 9th century, on textual critical and form critical grounds. The issue at hand is what the Paulicians believed – and we have a document dating to more than a millennium ago. What modern Russian sects believe is wholly irrelevant to this discussion.

In fact, your very argument relating the Paulicians to the Albi(gensians) confirms this: The Albi plainly did believe in the demiurge, exotic sexual mores, etc. IN fact, I would hesitate to link the Paulicians to the Albi precisely because there is not historical record of the Paulicians having gone nearly as heretical / pagan as the Albi. (The Albi divided their believers into two classes, because the more enlightened class would otherwise die out due to their sexual and asthetic ethics.) I’d suppose (with poor historical sourcing) that once the Albi and Bulgars were introduced to Gnosticism, they recognized certain similarities to the Paulician beliefs they had been taught, and supposed Gnosticism to be a still more primitive Christianity???

Sorry, but no. These same arguments about the Albigenses are suspect for the same reasons as those about the Paulicians – the claims are often advanced by their bitter enemies, while there are contemporaneous evidences which refute the charges.

As Conybeare himself pointed out in his discussion of the Albi and the Cathars, the Lyon manuscript, an authentic source document from the Cathars themselves, refutes the charges that the Albi/Cathars were dualists, Manicheans, rejected the OT, etc. Specifically concerning the charge of dualism (in which a belief in the demiurge would be included), Conybeare states that we “should probably attach little weight to it” (p. cxlv). Further, both the Lyon MS and the evidence of contemporary Catholic clergymen suggests that far from having “exotic sexual mores”, the Cathars actually held celibacy to be the “higher state” (much like, you know, the Catholics).

You also lump in as inherently false the Sergian texts, which Schaff did have, and are not comprised solely of polemics against Paulicians.

The Sergian texts, to the extent that they would affirm the charges that Schaff (and yourself) make about the Paulicians, would still be factually wrong, regardless of how much they constitute a polemic.

Sorry, but no. The Paulicians were not dualistic, Marcionitic Gnostics with funny sexual practices and a hatred for two-thirds of the Word of God. To the extent that they were heretical, it would primarily revolve around the presumption of Adoptionism that Conybeare seems to find in the Key of Truth. I would add, however, that this is largely inferred from what words “should” have been present in lacunae or erasures rather than from what they actually said – reading the Key, one doesn’t get a sense of their Adoptionism so much as that they merely affirm the creation of Jesus’ body in the Virgin Mary and His assumption of glory at His baptism. In my last post, I incorrectly stated that the Paulicians rejected transubstantiation. In fact, they did affirm it, but with the important difference that they didn’t believe it imparted grace unto salvation – the Key repeated affirms that repentance and faith are first necessary for salvation before anything else matters. As such, the Paulicians would have been heretical in their support for transubstantiation as well.

But all the same – Docetists? Nope. Marcionites? No way. Dualists? Try again.