Gregory's Hidden Years: An Assassin's Son Raised in Exile

Before he became Armenia's Illuminator, Gregory was the sole survivor of a massacre his own father caused. Tradition and the fifth century History of the Armenians attributed to Agathangelos identify Gregory's father as Anak, a Parthian nobleman of the Arsacid line, bribed by the Sassanid Persian court to assassinate the reigning Armenian king, Khosrov the First, around 258. Anak carried out the killing but was caught and executed along with his household, in keeping with the era's practice of extinguishing an assassin's whole family in retaliation; Gregory, still an infant, was smuggled out of Armenia by a Christian nurse and carried to Caesarea in Cappadocia, then part of the Roman world, where he was raised as a Christian in a household with no memory, for him, of his father's crime or his family's destruction. As an adult Gregory returned to Armenia and entered the service of Tiridates the Third, the son of the king his own father had killed, a choice later tradition frames explicitly as an attempt to atone through loyal service for a debt he had not personally incurred. The imprisonment at Khor Virap and the eventual conversion of Tiridates that made Armenia the first Christian state therefore follow a life that began not in ordinary Armenian Christian society but in the household of a foreign king's murderer, raised abroad as an act of rescue rather than of destiny.