ՄԵԼՔՈՆԵԱՆ ՍԱՐԳԻՍ / MELKONIAN SARGIS
(arm)
Թէոդոսուպոլիս/Կարինի Ժողովում (632) ընդունուած Դաւանագրի հարցը
The question of the dogmatic document adopted in the Council of Theodosiopolis/Garin (632)
Bazmavep
2022 / 3-4,
pp.
173-232
Medieval Armenian historiography mentions a council in the city of Theodosiopolis/Garin in the first half of the seventh century (632) with the participation of Emperor Heraclius I (610-641) and the Catholicos of the Armenian Church Ezr I (630-641), where ecclesiastical unity was established between the parties. Armenian sources, especially from the eighth century, report that the Catholicos Ezr during this council was deceived by the Greeks and eventually converted to Chalcedonism. But so far not a single source is known that reports on the acts of this council.
Despite the fact that acts or other documents from the council of Theodosiopolis have not been preserved, but the acts and documents of negotiations between the Imperial church and other non-Chalcedonian Oriental churches again for the conclusion of church unity, which took place in parallel, have been preserved. By comparing these documents with information from Armenian sources, it is possible to restore the content of the document of the council in Theodosiopolis.
To solve this problem, we divided our study into three parts. In the first part, by studying official documents published by the secular and ecclesiastical leaders of Costantinople and acts of inter-church agreements in the 30s of the seventh century, we show the official christological doctrine of the Eastern Roman Empire in the years when the council in Theodosiopolis was held. In the second part, we study the problem of the council of Theodosiopolis in Armenian and other sources. In the third part, by comparing the information of the Armenian sources with the Syrian sources, we separately studied the issue of the document adopted in the council of Theodosiopolis.
At the end we concluded that during the council in Theodosiopolis, the christological doctrine adopted by the Armenian side was not Chalcedonian, but corresponded to the so-called neo-Chalcedonism or neo-Cyrilianism, according to which „the active subject in Christ is the God-Logos“, and the document presented by Emperor Heraclius to the representatives of the Armenian Church corresponds to the letter that was addressed to the Patriarch of the West Syrian (Jacobite) Church Athanasios I Gammálā (593/594-630/631) for the conclusion of church unity approximately in 630/31 and was preserved in the Syriac text of the Chronography of Michael the Syrian.