The Age of Monks and Empires · c. 330-609 · Caucasus
Georgian Christianity
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About This Movement
The kingdom of Kartli, in what is now eastern Georgia, became Christian in the fourth century through the preaching of a woman the tradition calls Nino, and then spent three centuries holding that identity on a frontier where Persia had every reason to prise it loose. Its oldest surviving book, written in the 470s or 480s, is the account of Shushanik. An Armenian princess married to the local ruler, who abandoned Christianity for Zoroastrianism and imprisoned and beat his wife until she died rather than follow him. Georgia developed its own alphabet, its own monasteries, and an unusually rich liturgical life: Georgian manuscripts preserve the worship of fifth- to eighth-century Jerusalem more fully than any Greek source does. In 609, at the third council of Dvin, its church broke with Armenia and took the Chalcedonian side. Which is why the two neighbouring Caucasian churches have belonged to different communions ever since.
Sources
- Iakob Tsurtaveli, The Martyrdom of Queen Shushanik (trans. in D. M. Lang, Lives and Legends of the Georgian Saints, 1956) (primary) — The earliest surviving original Georgian text (c.476-83); Lang's English translation (1956, reprinted); confirms the Armenian-Georgian-Persian frontier world.
- The Conversion of Kartli cycle / Life of St Nino (trans. in Lang 1956; scholarly trans. C. B. Lerner, 2004) (primary) — Georgia's own conversion narrative; the surviving redactions are later (7th-10th c.) than the era, so use with retrospection flags.
- The Old Georgian Jerusalem Lectionary (ed./Latin trans. M. Tarchnischvili, CSCO 188-189, 204-205, 1959-60) (primary) — Strong liturgical evidence: Georgian preservation of Jerusalem's 5th-8th c. worship; Georgian/Latin only, no English translation available.
- Stephen H. Rapp Jr., The Sasanian World through Georgian Eyes (2014) (secondary) — Leading modern treatment of early Georgian historiography and its Iranian-frontier Christian identity; Ashgate/Routledge, expensive but standard.
- Cambridge History of Christianity, vol. 2, ch. 4, 'Early Asian and East African Christianities' (David Bundy) (reference) — Reference chapter covering Georgia among the Caucasus Christianities.