Armenian Christianity (conversion era)

Armenia's own tradition holds that it was the first kingdom to adopt Christianity as its official religion, when Gregory the Illuminator — imprisoned for years in a pit, by the telling — converted King Trdat and the court around the turn of the fourth century. What followed over the next century and a half is the more remarkable part. An entire national church built from nothing, catechised at first in Greek and Syriac because Armenian had no script of its own, until the monk Mesrop Mashtots devised an alphabet around 405 and the church set about putting the Bible and the liturgy into the people's own language. That translation, made under the catholicos Sahak Partev, is still called by Armenians the Queen of Translations, and it did more than any royal decree to make Christianity Armenian rather than imported. The story of these years ends at the battle of Avarayr in 451, where Armenian nobles fought a Persian attempt to impose Zoroastrianism. A defeat on the field that became the founding story of Armenian religious identity.