Gregory the Illuminator

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.

The Armenian Apostolic Church Gregory founded kept his own bloodline at its head for more than a hundred years after his death. Gregory consecrated his two sons, Vrtanes and Aristakes, as bishops, and the office of Catholicos, supreme head of the Armenian Church, descended through his direct male descendants, known to history as the Gregorids, with only occasional interruption from the early fourth century until the death of Sahak the First in 437 or 439, after which the hereditary line ended and passed, through Sahak's daughter's marriage, into an unrelated family. The Armenian Church's own calendar still names four of these direct descendants among its saints, Gregory's sons Aristakes and Vrtanes and his grandsons Grigoris and Husik, an institutional memory of the family line kept alongside Gregory's own feast. Etchmiadzin, the cathedral Gregory is said to have been shown in a vision, its very name recording the descent of the Only Begotten to mark the spot, has remained the seat of the Catholicosate through all the political upheavals separating fourth century Armenia from the present, standing today as the oldest cathedral built by a state acting as a Christian state anywhere in the world. The Catholicos of All Armenians continues to sit there, the current holder of an office Gregory's own sons and grandsons once filled by inheritance, giving the Armenian Church an unusually direct, traceable line of institutional continuity back to its own founding conversion.