The Great Cloud of Witnesses · The Fathers & the Creeds
Eznik of Kolb
died c. 449Syriac
One of the first men to write in the brand-new Armenian alphabet, sent abroad to learn Syriac and Greek so his nation could have books.
Summary
- Lived died c. 449.
- Stood in The Fathers & the Creeds (AD 313–600).
- Hangs on The Fathers.
- Tradition: Syriac / Oriental.
The life
Eznik was an Armenian, born around 380, and he belongs to the single most productive generation in the history of his nation's literature. Armenia had adopted Christianity as a state religion at the beginning of the fourth century, but it had no alphabet of its own. Around 405 Mesrop Mashtots devised one. Everything then had to be translated, fast.
Eznik was one of Mesrop's pupils, and one of the men sent abroad to do the work. He went first to Edessa to learn Syriac and translate from it, then to Constantinople to learn Greek. He came home in the early 430s carrying a corrected Greek text of the Bible, obtained after the Council of Ephesus, and the Armenian Bible was revised against it. The version that resulted has been called the queen of translations for its fidelity and its beauty, and Eznik had a hand in it.
He was made bishop of Bagrevand. In 449 he was among the bishops at the Council of Artashat when the Persian king Yazdegerd II demanded that Armenia abandon Christianity and return to Zoroastrianism. The council's reply, which Eznik signed, told the king that he had authority over their bodies and their goods but not over their faith, and that from this belief no one could move them"neither angels nor men, neither fire nor sword." The refusal led directly to the battle of Avarayr in 451, where the Armenian nobility fought the Persian army and lost the field, but won the point: the demand was eventually dropped.
His book is Refutation of the Sects, also known simply as On God. It is the first original work of Armenian literature, not a translation, but a work of argument written from scratch. In four parts it takes on the pagan religion of the old Armenia, the dualism of Zoroastrianism, the Greek philosophers' doctrines of fate and eternal matter, and the teaching of Marcion.
The Zoroastrian section is what scholars prize. Eznik lived next to that religion and describes its cosmology from close range, and his account is a primary source for Sasanian Persian belief in the fifth century. His central argument throughout is the goodness of the one Creator and the reality of human freedom: evil is not a rival god, and a man is not fated.
He died about 450.
Sources: Eznik of Kolb, On God, translated by Monica J. Blanchard and Robin Darling Young; Koriwn, The Life of Mashtots; Elishe, History of Vardan and the Armenian War.
What was happening while he lived8 moments · AD 313–600
- 380Nicene Christianity becomes the empire's official religionThe Edict of Thessalonica, issued by Theodosius I, commanded all his subjects to hold the faith of Nicaea. Legal protection had become legal privilege, and pressure on everyone else.
- 381The Council of ConstantinopleAround a hundred and fifty bishops confirmed Nicaea and expanded its article on the Holy Spirit, who "proceeds from the Father" and "together with the Father and the Son is worshiped and glorified." This 381 text is the creed most churches actually recite as the Nicene Creed.
- 386Augustine converts in a Milan gardenA thirty-one-year-old professor of rhetoric, weeping under a fig tree, heard a child's voice chanting "take up and read," opened Paul's letter to the Romans, and stopped running. His mother Monica had prayed for him for years; Bishop Ambrose's preaching had already broken his objections.
- c. 397–400Augustine writes the *Confessions*He told his whole story, theft, ambition, a long affair, a slow surrender, as one long prayer addressed to God. Nothing quite like it had been written before, and it invented the spiritual autobiography.
- c. 405Jerome finishes translating the Old Testament from HebrewCommissioned by Bishop Damasus in 382, Jerome worked for decades in Bethlehem, learning Hebrew so he could go behind the Greek to the original. His Latin Bible, later called the Vulgate, was the Bible of the West for a thousand years.
- 410Rome is sacked; Augustine begins *The City of God*Alaric's Goths took the eternal city, and pagans blamed the Christians for abandoning the old gods. Augustine answered across thirteen years (413–426) with a book about two cities, one built on love of self, one on love of God, and only one of them permanent.
- 431The Council of EphesusBishop Nestorius objected to calling Mary *Theotokos*, "God-bearer," and Cyril of Alexandria pressed the point that the title is a claim about the child, not the mother: the one she bore was God. The council agreed, though the politics around it were ugly.
- 451The Council of ChalcedonSome five hundred bishops set the boundary lines that have held ever since: Jesus is one person in two natures, truly God and truly man, "without confusion, without change, without division, without separation." It fenced the mystery rather than explaining it.
Go further
Read them yourself. Public-domain works are free to read in full; the rest open where the book can be found.
Search Eznik of Kolb at the Internet Archive · every work MannaFest cites
Why this one hangs here
Helped put the Bible into Armenian and wrote his people's very first work of theology.
Hangs on The Fathers: The men who carried the faith out of the apostles' hands, and wrote down what they had received.
Standing beside himThe Fathers & the Creeds · 130 on this stretch of wall
Exiled five separate times for refusing to say the Son was anything less than God, they called it Athanasius against the world.
Made a Roman emperor stand outside the church door until he repented of a massacre.
Heard 'sell what you have' read aloud in church, walked into the Egyptian desert, and started monasticism.
A brilliant, restless sinner whose mother prayed for him thirty years; his Confessions still read like a man talking straight to God.
Built an entire town for the sick and the poor outside his city, and wrote the rule Eastern monks still live by.
Preached five sermons in a tiny borrowed chapel that settled how the whole church speaks about the Trinity.