Saint Nino and the Conversion of Georgia

Extract from Tyrannius Rufinus,
Historia Ecclesiastica

The story of St. Nino, for all its fabulous embellishments, is built on a solid foundation of fact. History, archaeology and national tradition are unanimous in affirming that Iberia, as Eastern Georgia was then called, adopted Christianity as its state religion about A.D.330, in the time of Constantine the Great.

Introduction [0]
Extract:"Historia Ecclesiastica" [0]

At this period, the Roman Empire exercised suzerainty over the neighbouring state of Armenia, where Christianity had lately triumphed as a result of the mission of St. Gregory the Illuminator. We Should also recall that by St. Nino's time Western Georgia, comprising the provinces of Colchis, Abkhazia and Lazica, had already been evangelized by missionaries active in the Greek colonies along the Black Sea coast. The Council of Nicaea in the year 325 was attended by bishops from Trebizond, the principal sea-port of Lazica, and from Bichvinta, the strategic port and Metropolitan See situated on the borders of Colchis and Abkhazia. It thus becomes clear that political conditions strongly favoured the Conversion of Eastern Georgia to Christianity, the new official creed of the Romans.

The biography of St. Nino as we have it today is made up of a number of elements of varying authenticity. The basis of our knowledge of the saint's personality and mission is contained in a chapter of the church history by Rufinus, Composed about the year A.D. 403. This chapter is based on oral information given to Rufinus by a Georgian prince named Bakur whom he met in Palestine about the year 395. This Bakur was a member of the royal house of Iberia, and was telling of events which had occurred little more than half a century earlier, during the lifetime of his own parents or at least his grandparents. When due allowance is made for the pious raptures of Rufinus and his informant, there is no reason to challenge the essential accuracy of their joint account.

This is more than can be said for the other legends which gathered round the saint in the course of ages. About the 8th-9th centuries, the Armenian writer known as the pseudo-Moses of Khorene combined the story of St. Nino according to Rufinus (as known to him through the Armenian version of the church history of Socrates of Constantinople) with the story of the conversion of Armenia by Ripsime and Gregory the Illuminator, as related by Agathangelos. This artificial fusion of the stories of St. Nino and of Ripsime defies chronology and represents, to use uncanonical language, a red herring trailed across the path of historical analysis.

Once the process of elaboration and embroidering had begun, there was no limit to the fantasy of Ninoâ€™s later pious biographers. This saintly woman, originally described as a simple slave girl, is now transformed into a niece of the Patriarch Juvenal of Jerusalem (who lived a full century after Nino's time), or, in other variants, into a Roman princess. Incidents belonging to the reign of Diocletian are transposed into that of Constantine to permit of Nino being portrayed as one of the virgins accompanying Ripsime to Armenia; there Nino is supposed to have been miraculously preserved from the martyrdom which overtook her companions at the hands of King Tiridates. Special interest attaches to the references to the True Cross and to the Coat of our Savior, which was supposed to have been rescued by the Jews of Georgia and preserved there after the Crucifixion. It is possible that this legend has a basis in the ancient traditions of the Jewish community in Georgia, and that the Christian faith had its adepts within this colony even before Nino's mission.

In the pages which follow, the passage from Rufinus which forms the nucleus of all later accounts of St. Nino's mission is given first in its entirety. This is succeeded by episodes from the later Georgian biographies of St. Nino, which assumed their definitive shape in the 10th-11^th centuries. For the complete cycle of lives of St.Nino, reference should be made to the classic work, "The Life of Saint Nino" by Marjory and Oliver Wardrop, which appeared in I900 as volume 5 of the Clarendon Press series Studia Biblica et Ecclesiastica