Separatists on the Eastern Frontier
From the middle of the seventh century to the end of the ninth, on the frontier where the Byzantine Empire met Armenia and the Arab caliphate, communities who called themselves simply Christians refused the state church's images, crosses, relics, and priests. Their enemies called them Paulicians. Emperors and patriarchs hunted them for more than two hundred years. Some were killed, some were deported to the Balkans, and one part of the movement fled into Muslim territory and built a fortified state of its own.
Few groups test a historian's honesty like the Paulicians. Almost everything we know about them was written by men who wanted them converted or destroyed, and those men accused them of errors that, if true, struck at the doctrine of God Himself. Later admirers, including some older Baptist histories, read the same scraps of evidence and found faithful Bible Christians. The truth is harder to reach than either side admitted. This article tries to say what can be known, what cannot, and why the Paulicians still matter.
The Paulicians were separatist churches, though not accurate in every doctrine. Theologica places them among the free churches because they stood apart from the state church and were persecuted by it. Separatists were not perfect, and on the Paulicians the record is especially muddy.
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For Deeper Study
- The Paulician HeresyAmazon Nina G. GarsoïanA study of the Armenian and Byzantine sources (1967). Argues that the original Paulicians were Armenian adoptionists rather than dualists.
- Christian Dualist Heresies in the Byzantine WorldAmazon Janet Hamilton and Bernard HamiltonTranslated sources, including Peter of Sicily, with introductions. Reads the Paulicians as dualists.
- The Key of Truth: A Manual of the Paulician Church of ArmeniaAmazon F. C. ConybeareThe Armenian text with an English translation (1898). Conybeare's claim that it preserves early Paulician belief is disputed.
- The Bogomils: A Study in Balkan Neo-ManichaeismAmazon Dmitri ObolenskyThe standard older study of the Bogomils and their possible Paulician roots (1948).
- The Pilgrim ChurchAmazon E. H. BroadbentA sympathetic survey of dissenting churches from a Brethren perspective; reads the hostile sources generously.
- Foxe's Book of MartyrsAmazon John FoxeThe classic Protestant record of those who died for the faith, from the early church to the English Reformation.
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