Discussion of mission in east Roman or Byzantine history has typically focused on imperial ambitions, royal conversions, and a “top-down” approach to Christianization.Footnote ¹ The Christian emperor, the earthly image of the heavenly king, had been called by God to propagate the faith and civilize the barbarians. Toward this end he sent out emissaries to foreign potentates, and the conversion of the ruler was soon followed by the Christianization of his people. Such narratives largely ignore missionaries “from below,” deemed “accidental” evangelists, and focus instead on imperially sponsored or “professional missionaries.”Footnote ² Several recent studies have added nuance to the traditional picture by devoting increased attention to mission from below or presenting Christianization as a process comprising multiple stages that spanned several centuries.Footnote ³ Building on my own previous article on this theme, the present essay will reexamine narratives of unofficial mission on the eastern frontiers, in particular accounts of captive women credited with converting whole kingdoms to the Christian faith. In each case a female ascetic has either been taken prisoner or has lived for some time as a captive in a foreign land just beyond east Roman borders. The woman's steadfast adherence to her pious way of life, performance of apostolic signs, and verbal testimony to faith in Christ move the ruler and his people to accept the Christian God.

Included in a series of historical writings from the fifth to the seventh century, these conversion narratives expose theological assumptions and ideals that are often ignored in discussions of Christianization as a function of imperial politics. We find in these accounts a peculiar inversion of the imperial paradigm of mission, for the initiative comes neither from emperors nor bishops but rather from those of lower status in late Roman society—whether slaves, prisoners of war, ascetics, or women of no ecclesiastical rank.Footnote ⁴ Narratives of female captive evangelists challenged traditional Roman status markers, implicitly if not explicitly affirming the paradoxical biblical exaltation of the poor, the weak, and the humble over the rich, the powerful, and the proud.Footnote ⁵ Although ancient and modern narratives tend to focus on monarchical conversions, and through the patronage of kings the Christianization of their subjects, evidence suggests that women, slaves, and foreigners often prepared the way for these royal conversions. While by no means eradicating class distinctions, recent work on Christianity as a “people's history” has shown how both the practices and the rhetoric of late ancient Christians subverted traditional notions of elite social status and imperial authority. In a similar fashion these female captives inverted the expected order in the process of Christianization.Footnote ⁶

To be sure, the evangelistic activity of captive women missionaries and martyrs was only one stage in a longer continuum of religious change. Coming neither from above, as imperially sponsored missionaries, nor from below, in terms of education, class, or social status, late ancient historians and chroniclers played a significant part in the process. Despite growing interest in “bottom-up” conversion, however, the role of historians, hagiographers, and other narrators of missionary history has until recently received little attention. Ian Wood's study of missionary saints and the evangelization of Europe marks a major step forward in this regard for the history of western Christianization, but similar work remains to be done for the east.Footnote ⁷ That much of what we know of eastern Christianization comes from church histories that focus on imperial rulers, doctrinal debates, and ecclesiastical intrigues makes the task of examining mission from below all the more daunting. Despite nuanced comparative studies of early Byzantine church historians, sensitive to their different perspectives and emphases, there is no avoiding the fact that their works were all structured around leaders in church and state, and emperors took pride of place over bishops.Footnote ⁸

Yet newer approaches to both Christianization and historical texts offer hope for more fruitful studies of eastern Christian mission, from below as well as from above. Reflecting on historiographical developments since the 1960s, Peter Brown has commented:

Brown goes on to examine as his primary case study the sermons of Augustine, who has done more than anyone else to shape medieval as well as modern perceptions of the process of western Christianization. Perspectives on the east, however, have been influenced to a large extent by the ecclesiastical historians of late antiquity, starting with Eusebius of Caesarea. Although some work has been done on the rhetorical function of Eusebius's work, it has been largely devoted to his Life of Constantine and orations, and most recently to his Preparatio evangelica, rather than his Church History.Footnote ¹⁰ The uses of representation in the church histories of his successors have received even less attention, perhaps because they are seen as mere continuators and imitators with little original to offer in terms of style or approach.Footnote ¹¹ But for the subject of eastern Christianization in this era, we have few better guides. Indeed, their “representations” of mission reveal an important dimension of the missionary process that is often overlooked, namely the function of texts and their authors.Footnote ¹²

This article, then, will explore the role of Christian historians in a longer process of religious transformation. Distinctive descriptions of mission and missionaries and the incorporation of conversion accounts into ecclesiastical and national histories suggest a multilayered process of mission, conversion, and Christianization that goes well beyond the standard imperial paradigm. Returning to three lands on the east Roman frontiers—Armenia, Georgia, and Yemen—my primary interest in the ensuing analysis will be neither mission from above nor from below but an entirely different layer of Christianizing activity. Here we will consider the objectives and approaches of the authors who shaped the narratives they recounted. Daniel Boyarin has emphasized the potential value of anecdotal accounts within rabbinic historiography and church history, especially the ways in which “varying legends themselves indicate specific stages in the discursive construction of religious identity.”Footnote ¹³ Embedded in extensive historical narratives, stories of female captives more closely resemble what Ihor Ševčenko has labeled “hybrid mission reports,” representing actual events in miraculous settings, than rabbinic legends.Footnote ¹⁴ Nevertheless, Boyarin's encouragement to abandon the search for the “historical kernel” of truth and to pursue instead the “motives for the construction of a narrative” is particularly helpful in examining distinctive details recounted by our late antique historians.Footnote ¹⁵ Such an approach may illumine not only particular authors' motives but also what those intentions reveal about developing conceptions of mission and conversion in the post-Constantinian eastern contexts in which they composed their accounts.

In a similar vein, discussing the evangelization of early medieval Europe, Ian Wood has affirmed that “the history of mission and of missionary saints is a history of texts; further, this history may best be seen as presenting us with a ‘delayed narrative,’ that is, one may look with more certainty at the ideas of writers than at the actions of their subjects. . . .”Footnote ¹⁶ In keeping with the recent work of Boyarin on rabbinic historiography, Ševčenko on later Byzantine mission, and Wood on western missionary hagiography, my focus here will be less on the missionary subjects or a historical reconstruction of their deeds than on representations of mission and missionaries within the larger scheme of Christianization. This analysis will be easier for the conversion of Georgia (Caucasian Iberia) since we have several narratives composed within the same short period of time to serve as a basis for comparison. Yet we will also consider a broader spectrum of eastern historians who incorporate accounts of female captive evangelists, an inversion of expected hierarchical patterns. Commonalities as well as variations in these narratives reveal distinctive theological perspectives and broader ideological developments that give us pause before any single proposed paradigm of Byzantine imperial missions.Footnote ¹⁷ Moving geographically through accounts of female captives and martyrs embodying mission from below, we will consider the context and intentions of their authors, the significance of particular “representations” of mission, and the contribution of these accounts to a longer process of Christian expansion on and beyond the eastern frontiers. My aim, then, is to explore the role of historians as self-conscious agents as well as interpreters of Christianization.

I. Armenia: Agathangelos and Rhipsime in Context

The historiographical tradition of late antique and early medieval Armenia, and especially Armenian Christianity, is extremely complex.Footnote ¹⁸ The traditional account of the kingdom's conversion, and the focus of my analysis here, is that of the pseudonymous Armenian, Agathangelos, who composed his History of the Armenians around 460, a century and a half after the events he narrates.Footnote ¹⁹ Although Gregory the Illuminator is celebrated as the apostle of Armenia, also central to Agathangelos's narrative is the role of the virgin Rhipsime, taken captive by the Armenian king Trdat III (Tiridates IV) after fleeing Emperor Diocletian and martyred together with her abbess and the entire convent of nuns who had accompanied her in her flight.Footnote ²⁰ Well before Agathangelos's account, however, the first church historian to mention Christians in Armenia was Eusebius of Caesarea, writing in the early decades of the fourth century. Eusebius spoke of Armenian Christians during the persecution of Maximinus Daia, although the term Armenians was used for those living in Armenia Minor (Cappadocia and Pontus), thus outside the historical boundaries of Greater Armenia.Footnote ²¹ Writing in the first half of the fifth-century, the church historian Sozomen, who was particularly interested in the spread of the Christian faith to neighboring tribes, indeed to all the ethnē, speaks only of a “marvelous divine sign . . . in his own house” that led King Trdat, and hence all of Armenia, to become Christian.Footnote ²² He then suggests that the Armenians played the major role in the conversion of the Persians who would have likely conversed with the “divine men” of Armenia, presumably monks, and have learned from their model of virtue.Footnote ²³

The desire to demonstrate apostolic origins for their church drove some Armenian historians to emphasize a connection with the apostle Thaddeus (the Syriac Addai) and the conversion of King Abgar of Edessa, and later they introduced Bartholomew to provide an even earlier apostolic foundation for the patriarchate. While these connections are tendentious at best, such references point to the formative role of Syrian Christianity in the Armenian Church, which is attested by linguistic borrowings, translations from Syriac, and architectural evidence.Footnote ²⁴ The Syrian current is also evident in accounts of the missionary work of the hermit Mashtots at the beginning of the fifth century. Both the Life of Mashtots by his disciple, Koriun, and the Epic Histories of P‛awstos Buzand, composed only slightly later than Agathangelos's History, speak of the unsuccessful efforts of a Syrian bishop to adapt a Semitic alphabet for the Armenian language before the successful invention of an Armenian script by Mashtots.Footnote ²⁵ Koriun also describes the feverish translation activity of the monk and his disciples, from both Syriac and Greek, as part of their effort to spread the gospel among the Armenians, a much longer process which was compressed by Armenian historians into a single generation.Footnote ²⁶

Agathangelos's representation of events, particularly his focus on Gregory and Rhipsime, must be interpreted in light of these variant traditions of Armenia's conversion. Using the career of Mashtots as a model and incorporating whole passages from Koriun's Life of him, Agathangelos attributes to his hero Gregory the apostolic activity of the fifth-century missionary monk, pushing back these accomplishments a century or more. Relatively unconcerned with the antiquity of Christianity in Armenia, Agathangelos was rather eager to establish the authority of the patriarch as a unifying force amidst political uncertainty, apostasy of the notoriously factious Armenian nobility, and a nation divided between Sassanian and Byzantine spheres of influence.Footnote ²⁷ Yet his History does far more than reflect his immediate political context or ecclesiastical concerns. His particular rendering of Armenia's conversion through the instrumentality of Gregory the Illuminator and the Rhipsimian martyrs reveals much about the cultural and religious ideals that motivated this late antique churchman and his vision of his own role as an interpreter of events.

Although the text was written in Armenian and must therefore postdate the creation of an Armenian script in the early fifth century, Agathangelos himself was well educated in Greek and (probably) Syriac literature.Footnote ²⁸ His Greek pseudonym provides a conspicuous clue to his cultural orientation, and pro-Roman political tendencies as well as Greek and Syrian hagiographic models clearly shaped his account of Armenia's conversion.Footnote ²⁹ Yet alongside Greco-Syrian paradigms, a substratum of Iranian elements in the account was clearly intended for an audience familiar with Iranian literature and symbols. For example, the transformation of King Trdat into a wild animal closely follows the biblical account of the Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar (Daniel 4:21–22), but Trdat is transformed into a pig (varaz) rather than a bull or an ox. The ox plays a neutral role in classical and Judeo-Christian writings, but in popular Zoroastrian tradition the ox, cow, or Primordial Bull appears repeatedly as an innocent victim, benefactor of humankind, and symbol of virtue. Such a creature would never be used to represent evil or divine retribution in an Iranian context; hence Agathangelos, followed by all other versions of this account, have Trdat metamorphosed into a wild pig or boar.Footnote ³⁰ Similarly, the royal hunt seems deliberately chosen as the scene of the king's crisis, for it was “the classic locus of the royal apotheosis . . . distinguishing the legitimate ruler in the Iranian tradition.”Footnote ³¹

Yet if Agathangelos upholds certain Iranian cultural values, he is also clear that the Zoroastrian religion holds no hope for the protection or salvation of the Armenian people. It is no coincidence that as punishment King Trdat was turned into a boar, the symbol of the Zoroastrian god of valor and strength, Vahagn, and the patron of the Arsacid dynasty. For his seeming display of power in the martyrdom of Rhipsime and the nuns, the once mighty king is reduced by the Christian God to a helpless pig wallowing naked on the reedy plain, unable to save himself or his people.Footnote ³² Also significant are Agathangelos's many references to Anahit, the Armenian goddess of fertility, birth, and beauty, at pivotal points in his History. An ancient Iranian deity who was identified with Artemis by the Greeks, Anahit was held by Armenians to be the daughter of Aramazd, the Iranian Ahura Mazda. While all the Persian rites were held in honor by the Armenians, according to Strabo, Anahit was the special object of Armenian devotion. Male and female slaves were dedicated to her service, and “the most illustrious men of the tribe actually consecrate to her their daughters while maidens; and it is the custom for these first to be prostituted in the temple of the goddess for a long time and after this to be given in marriage.”Footnote ³³ The pagan king Trdat hails Anahit as “our great lady . . . the glory of our race and our savior; . . . mother of all virtues, benefactor of all human nature, and the offspring of the great and noble Aramazd.”Footnote ³⁴ In fact Gregory's refusal to sacrifice to the goddess led to his first great confrontation with the Armenian king, ending in his torture and relegation to the pit; and upon his conversion to the Christian God, in the aftermath of his attempted rape of the virgin Rhipsime and the martyrdom of the nuns, King Trdat personally undertook the destruction of the shrines to Anahit.Footnote ³⁵ In a seemingly purposeful inversion, just as his sexual assault ended in ignominious failure for the strongman due to the supernatural strength granted to the virgin, so it was only by superhuman effort that the king later single-handedly moved eight enormous stones to build a chapel in the virgin-martyr's honor.Footnote ³⁶

These observations illumine not only the partly Iranian context of this first History of the Armenians but also certain concerns of its author. Along with his abundant use of biblical and Greco-Syrian hagiographic models, Agathangelos demonstrates sensitivity to the primary cultural background of his audience. He was conscious of his role not only in recording a history of his people and perhaps advancing a pro-Roman political stance but in evangelizing or more fully Christianizing the neophytes of Armenia, a population whose social and cultural sensibilities were more Iranian than Roman and a religious community that faced pressure to convert to Zoroastrianism, the Iranian state religion.Footnote ³⁷ Thus, the Armenian historian has his missionary heroes resist Zoroastrian religion, but he by no means proposes a wholesale rejection of Iranian culture or language. Indeed, Robert Thomson has suggested that the writing of the early Armenian histories were themselves part of the longer Christianization process.Footnote ³⁸ The pseudonym “Agathangelos” (literally, “Messenger of Good News”) by which he has become known to posterity, reveals something of the historian's self-representation as well as the reading of his text by tradition.Footnote ³⁹ In a lengthy and complicated prologue, Agathangelos compares the work of a historian, and thus his own role in constructing his text, to that of a merchant braving the dangers of the ocean to search in the “sea of history” for precious pearls.Footnote ⁴⁰ The epilogue, drawn largely from Koriun's biography of Mashtots, explicitly compares his own work with that of various biblical figures including Moses—who preserved the “divine sayings” for posterity—the prophets, and Luke. Here in particular, Agathangelos reveals his broader missionary vision as well as a sense of his own role in this evangelistic endeavor. Citing multiple biblical texts that enjoin the transmission of divine law or preaching the gospel to all people, he concludes, “In similar fashion we have made our narrative, not for the honor of God's elect . . . but for an awe inspiring example to their offspring and those who in every race will be instructed by them.”Footnote ⁴¹

Alongside his political and cultural context, then, Agathangelos's theological convictions and evangelistic ideals also shaped his reconstruction of Armenia's conversion. I have already discussed Rhipsime as a type of the power of the powerless, a missionary “from below” embodying the paradoxical inversion of certain classical values;Footnote ⁴² but the details of Agathangelos's representation of the missionary-martyr reflect his own understanding of mission and conversion. Immediately apparent in his History as a whole is the abundant, even excessive, use of scriptural citations and motifs. His account of Rhipsime and the nuns is replete with such citations and allusions starting with his description of Diocletian's bride show. Although a familiar motif in later Byzantine literature, the biblical account of King Xerxes' search for a suitable bride in Esther 2 provides the most likely framework for Agathangelos.Footnote ⁴³ After their flight and capture in Armenia, the exhortations of Gaiane and the prayers of Rhipsime are largely a concatenation of biblical texts while Rhipsime herself is explicitly compared with Jael and Deborah, whom God strengthened “to be saved from the impious tyrant's grasp,” and David, “who destroyed the ignoble giant” Goliath.Footnote ⁴⁴ Perhaps most potent are the repeated allusions to the Maccabean martyrs in the account of the virgins' martyrdom, for example, when Rhipsime offers her tongue to be pulled out. Indeed, after Rhipsime's murder King Trdat orders that Gaiane's tongue be pulled out, and the same torture is applied to her two companions.Footnote ⁴⁵ Other passages draw from a variety of liturgical, hagiographic, and theological themes which are themselves steeped with biblical allusions.Footnote ⁴⁶

As a captive foreign woman, Rhipsime has received no political or ecclesiastical sanction to preach the gospel to the Armenians. Through the course of her imprisonment and torture, however, her lengthy biblical prayers loudly affirm the character of God and the message of forgiveness and salvation in Christ. Likewise the text about the woman evangelist relates the message of the gospel she embodied and preached even if her own mission involved no official proclamation to the pagan king or his court. Along with Rhipsime's own prayers, the abbess Gaiane uttered biblical exhortations to her protégée in Latin (literally, “the dialect of the Romans”) from outside the chamber in which the virgin struggled with the king.Footnote ⁴⁷ Lest this seem to preclude an evangelistic motivation since only the two nuns could understand each other's language, Agathangelos is quick to explain that “there were some of the palace servants who heard all this in Latin” and soon removed Gaiane from the door, even knocking out her teeth and breaking her jaw, yet failing to halt her speech.Footnote ⁴⁸ Clearly the virgins' audience understood the import of their words. Moreover, their message was not merely one of endurance and comfort in the face of death but an evangelistic appeal. They called for repentance and faith and offered the hope of salvation to all, even to the perpetrators of their martyrdom.

If Rhipsime's missionary role is only implied in the account of her capture, torture, and martyrdom, it is explicit in Gregory's sermon expounding Christian doctrine and calling for repentance. In a lengthy section of Agathangelos's History published separately under the title The Teaching of Gregory, the author repeatedly affirms the significance of the martyrs' preaching and the ongoing necessity of their intercession on behalf of the Armenian people.Footnote ⁴⁹ Gregory allegedly preached his long sermon to the king and his court through the course of an entire day, and the text, which Agathangelos introduces, summarizes and recapitulates in the preceding and following sections of his History, is actually longer than the rest of the document.Footnote ⁵⁰ The main theme of the sermon, more accurately described as a catechism, is the incarnation of Christ and the “continuing mission of the church in bringing back all men to the cross, the antitype of the tower of Babel.”Footnote ⁵¹ The message preached by Gregory was not only the fulfillment of Old Testament prophecies in Christ and the doctrines of the Trinity and baptism, important as these teachings were in his exposition of the Christian faith, but an urgent call to repentance; and it is in this connection that reference to Rhipsime and her companions becomes most prominent.

Repeatedly employing the metaphor of two cups, one of joy and sweet wine and the other of fire and retribution for sin, the Teaching juxtaposes possible responses to the gospel as a stark contrast between blessedness and destruction, life and death.Footnote ⁵² Central to this critical choice between two cups is the role of the cupbearers or wine pourers, whom Gregory identifies as the apostles and their successors. Thus, he explains, “He who sent his twelve throughout the whole world as cupbearers, the same also sent these witnesses of his among you,” namely, Rhipsime and the other virgin martyrs.

In further exhortations to accept the gospel, Gregory returns to the same metaphor for the missionary martyrs, exclaiming, “Behold the thirty-seven cups who came to serve you.”Footnote ⁵⁴ He explains how “filled with the divine words they labored and with great travail preached and rained on you the rain of heavenly profits, and thundered on you light and fire together.” Moreover, their intercession has poured on the Armenians “rivers of preaching of the divine words” and has served them “the cup of creative love.”Footnote ⁵⁵ Indeed, the Teaching repeatedly affirms the power of the martyrs' intercession. Describing the apostolic nature of their mission, Gregory even describes St. Paul as “the companion to those apostles of yours” who similarly exhorted unbelievers to be reconciled to God.Footnote ⁵⁶

Although much of the story of Rhipsime and the nuns is purely legendary, since the study of the Bollandist Paul Peeters, many scholars take seriously the possibility that a martyrdom occurred in Valarshapat around 312, not during the reign of Diocletian but in the context of the renewed persecution of Maximinus Daia, who actually went to Armenia and enacted harsher measures against Christians than those of his predecessors.Footnote ⁵⁷ There was a cult of Rhipsime by the end of the fourth century, and other early Armenian histories refer to the martyr, the resting place of the virgins, and the church eventually constructed at this site.Footnote ⁵⁸ None, however, emphasizes her role in Armenia's conversion as much as Agathangelos. Robert Thomson's analysis of Agathangelos's motivations helps to frame his emphasis on Gregory the Illuminator, whose foundational role in Armenia's conversion is also much more prominent in Agathangelos's text than in the other Armenian histories. While the latter more accurately attribute to Mashtots and his disciples the missionary work anachronistically ascribed to Gregory, Agathangelos believed that a renewed emphasis on the authority of the patriarchs, descended from the great Gregory, would serve as a unifying agent for the Christian population.

While Rhipsime's importance in medieval Caucasian hagiography has been acknowledged, Agathangelos's distinctive emphasis on her apostolic role, in contrast to near silence on the part of other fifth-century accounts and later Armenian histories, has been largely overlooked.Footnote ⁵⁹ Like Eusebius and unlike most later Armenian historians, Agathangelos viewed martyrdom more as witness to a universal faith than as a symbol of national identity or resistance to foreign political and religious forces.Footnote ⁶⁰ At a time when powerful noble families vied for influence, and Christianity easily fell prey to competing political and ecclesiastical factions, he emphasized personal repentance and conversion and kept alive the memory of those martyrs who had died for the faith they brought to Armenia. Moreover, the recent failed rebellion (450–451) had eased the persecution and forced conversion of Christians, but memories of religious oppression and martyrdom under a hostile Zoroastrian regime were still fresh. Agathangelos built upon those memories. He addressed a people for whom victory of the weak over their temporal lords would have been important and a culture in which the role of women as well as children was particularly influential in the process of Christianization.Footnote ⁶¹ The account of the virgin Rhipsime was well suited for such audiences. Captured, tortured, and martyred for her faith, yet overcoming the tyrannical king and becoming with Gregory the apostle of a new Christian land, she embodies the paradoxical message of weakness overcoming strength as well as the promise of redemption and transformation. Accordingly, Gregory exhorts the “murderers” of the virgin martyrs to “become witnesses of the truth of these preachers. Drink the same cup of spiritual drink and become their companions.”Footnote ⁶² The task of mission, serving as a “cupbearer” to the world, was not merely a political ploy for unifying the populace, exalting the ruler, or sanctioning the ecclesiastical hierarchy but the vocation of all those who had drunk from the cup of life and joy. As a self-proclaimed good messenger, in both the History and in his transmission of The Teaching of Gregory Agathangelos felt called to propagate this message of salvation as had his heroes—Gregory the Illuminator and the female captive missionary martyrs.

II. Editing Rufinus: Fifth-Century Greek Accounts of Iberia's Captive Evangelist

The story of the conversion of Georgia (ancient Iberia) through the apostolic life and witness of an anonymous captive woman has come down to us in one Latin and three Greek versions that predate the medieval Georgian and Armenian variants.Footnote ⁶³ These considerably earlier Latin and Greek narratives, written within a 30–40 year period during the first half of the fifth century, present the same basic story.Footnote ⁶⁴ Although in Georgian tradition the female captive becomes known as St. Nino, neither her name nor her origins are revealed in any of the fifth-century accounts. Having provoked curiosity among the barbarians for her pious and ascetic way of life, the captive woman effects the healing of a young child through her prayers; similarly brings about the healing of the queen; wins over the king after his personal crisis on the hunt, which leads to the conversion of the entire nation; and guides the construction of the first Iberian church, including the miraculous placement of an immovable column. The Latin church historian Rufinus wrote the earliest account of this national conversion, and his narrative has received the most attention from scholars.Footnote ⁶⁵ Particularly interesting, however, are the slight but telling ways in which Sozomen and Socrates edit the account of Rufinus and Theodoret edits Socrates.Footnote ⁶⁶ Ignoring these differences, most treatments of Iberia's conversion tend either to conflate Rufinus's narrative with the earliest Georgian accounts or to jump quickly from the former to the latter apparently assuming that the fifth-century Greek historians indiscriminately copied from their Latin predecessor.Footnote ⁶⁷ Closer examination of the variations in their representations of mission, however, is quite revealing. Nuances in the Greek accounts suggest that early Byzantine historians perceived their own role in the missionary process and deleted, developed, or emphasized different aspects of the story in keeping with their particular vision of Christianization.

Although the narrative of Socrates Scholasticus is the only account explicitly to mention Rufinus as its source, it nonetheless includes distinctive features.Footnote ⁶⁸ In several ways Socrates accentuates the role of the Iberian king in the conversion process. He alone among the fifth-century historians identifies the recipient of the captive woman's first healing miracle as the Iberian king's son.Footnote ⁶⁹ After the miracle of the hunt, in which the king is wondrously rescued from a dark cloud by calling on the captive's god, Sozomen, following Rufinus, says that the captive woman instructed the king in the faith. Socrates, meanwhile, drops any mention of the woman teaching the king and simply affirms that she “made the king of the Iberians a preacher of Christ” (κήρυκα τοῦ Χριστοῦ τὸν τῶν ᾿Ιβήρων βασιλα ποίησϵν).Footnote ⁷⁰ He explains further that the king exhorted the people to worship the God of the captive and repeats that he became a herald of Christ “to the men” while the queen became a preacher “to the women.”Footnote ⁷¹ While Rufinus and Sozomen speak of the whole nation's desire to build a church, Socrates attributes to the Iberian king both the order to build and the immediate provision of materials. Hence the captive woman's role in the nation's conversion is subtly diminished after the king's acceptance of the faith while the king's own apostolic actions are exalted.Footnote ⁷²

While Socrates emphasizes the king's role in the Christianization of his land, Sozomen suggests multiple influences and a more gradual process of persuasion. For example, Sozomen's narrative is the only account to include distinct reference to the conversion of the queen. After the first healing miracle, he writes, the captive woman

The queen not only explains to her husband the cause of her miraculous healing but urges the king to worship the Christian God, whom she describes in terms that reflect the captive's teaching. The king remains unconvinced until his own experience of crisis on the hunt, which Sozomen describes in the following terms:

After emerging safely from the forest, the king shares his experience with his wife, summons the captive woman asking her to “teach him how to worship Christ,” and then calls together his people. Regarding the miracle of the column, Sozomen relates the same details as Rufinus and Socrates, but he interprets the response of the Iberian people differently. While his predecessors both emphasize how this miracle confirmed for them the truth of “the king's faith” and “the captive's religion,” Sozomen makes no mention of the king or the captive at this point but reports that the people themselves “all confessed together that Christ alone is the true God.” Both the column miracle and the preceding marvel of the king's deliverance, he suggests, were intended “to make the Iberians more firm concerning the deity.”Footnote ⁷⁵

Terminology and details as well as the respective roles of the main actors in the two accounts reflect slightly different notions of mission and conversion. Whereas Socrates frames his account between two uses of the more generic terms “Christianize” and “Christianity,”Footnote ⁷⁶ a review of the progression of verbs in Sozomen's narrative reveals his more complex and dynamic understanding of the evangelization process. By her piety, prayer, and faithful testimony to Christ, the captive woman “prepared” (παρϵσκϵύασϵ) the Iberians to reject their ancestors' religion. She “taught the knowledge of Christ” (τὴν τοῦ Χριστοῦ γνῶσιν παίδϵυσϵν) to the queen, “who was convinced by her personal experience” (τῇ πϵίρᾳ . . . πιστϵύσασα) that the captive's words were true. The queen then testified to her husband and urged him to worship God. Although “she seemed to argue very well” (πολλάκις ϵὖ λγϵιν δοκούσης), Sozomen writes, the king “remained doubtful . . . and was not fully persuaded” (ἀμϕίβολος ἦν . . . καὶ οὐ πάνυ πϵίθϵτο). After his own experience of deliverance, however, the captive woman “instructed” (διδάσκϵιν) him in the faith, and although not yet initiated, the king “changed the minds of his subjects concerning the religion” (τὰ πϵρὶ τοῦ δόγματος μϵτδωκϵ τοῖς ἀρχομνοις).Footnote ⁷⁷

Sozomen like Rufinus stresses various active stages of the evangelization process: virtuous living, the captive woman's testimony, healing miracles, the queen's conversion, her attempt to persuade the doubting king, the king's experience, the captive's teaching, and the miraculous sign confirming the Iberians' belief. Whereas Socrates affirms that the king “exhorted [the Iberians] to worship the captive's God” (παρήνϵι σβϵσθαι τὸν τῆς αἰχμαλώτου Θϵόν), in Sozomen's more nuanced account he actually changed the minds of his subjects. Indeed, “they persuaded the whole people to worship Christ” (τὸν Χριστὸν πανδημϵὶ σβϵιν πϵίθουσιν); the king persuaded the men while “the queen together with the captive persuaded the women.”Footnote ⁷⁸ While Rufinus and Socrates both emphasize the role of the royal pair, Sozomen's inclusion of the captive here is unique keeping her central not only in the conversion of the king and queen but also in the evangelization of the nation as a whole.Footnote ⁷⁹ His use of such verbs as “changed the minds” (μϵταδοκω) and “persuaded” (πϵίθω) throughout his narrative accentuates the agency of the king, the queen, and the captive woman in the whole nation's turn to the worship of Christ.

Along with the Iberian account, a comparison of other parallel conversion narratives in the two authors' Church Histories suggests different perspectives on Christianization as well as differences in style.Footnote ⁸⁰ Socrates most often uses the phrase “became Christian” or speaks of the nation receiving Christianity.Footnote ⁸¹ Sozomen uses the verb “to become Christian” (χριστιανίζϵιν) more rarely, and when he does, it is generally in the context of a much more complex scenario, for example, the various phases of the Goths' transition from paganism, to Christian faith, to acceptance of Arianism.Footnote ⁸² For Socrates their Christianization is simpler: the emperor helps a party of Goths; these Goths in return accept the emperor's religion. Sozomen's conversion accounts show much greater interest in ethnography and the pagan religions from which the nations are converting to the Christian faith. In the case of Iberia's conversion, for example, he notes the king's original hesitancy to accept the Christian message because “he suspected the novelty of the matter and he respected the religion of his fathers.”Footnote ⁸³ Sozomen often describes people professing, acknowledging, or coming to know Christ. Omitting any reference to the nation being “Christianized,” his Iberian account begins and ends with the people coming “to know” and “to worship” Christ.Footnote ⁸⁴

Perhaps his favorite word for “conversion” to Christianity is μϵταβολή, a term Socrates never uses in this way. Sozomen, for example, employs the verbal form μϵταβάλλω twice in his account of the Saracens' conversion following the ordination of the monk Moses.Footnote ⁸⁵ Both Rufinus and Socrates relate the ordination of Moses as bishop of the Saracens at the insistence of Queen Mavia and the doctrinal tension between this Nicene monk and the Arian bishop of Alexandria.Footnote ⁸⁶ Sozomen, however, adds to his narrative a description of how a Saracen chief and his tribe “converted to Christianity” (ϵὶς Χριστιανισμὸν μϵταβαλϵῖν). In keeping with his more complex, process-oriented view of conversion, he explains that Moses “prepared many to be Christianized” (πολλοὺς χριστιανίσαι παρϵσκϵύσασϵ) and explains that the conversion of Zocomus's tribe was “the beginning of the conversion” of the Saracens (τὴν ἀρχὴν ϵὶς Χριστιανισμὸν μϵτβαλον).Footnote ⁸⁷ This passage is completely absent from the histories of Rufinus and Socrates. Similarly, where Socrates describes pagans on an Egyptian island being “led . . . to Christian faith,” Sozomen says that the inhabitants “converted” (μϵτβαλϵ) to Christianity.Footnote ⁸⁸ In the Iberian account, the term is not used for literal turning to Christian faith, as it is in these other passages, but rather figuratively in the king's miraculous deliverance on the hunt. Once he determined to worship God, immediately the darkness dissipated and the air “changed” (μϵτβαλϵν) to clear, bright weather.

Transformation from darkness to light was one of the most common metaphors for conversion in antiquity, and likely Sozomen uses it here to foreshadow the spiritual transformation of the Iberian king and people. Sozomen may have found aspects of Christianization such as notions of inner transformation, gradual change, and communal involvement particularly important to emphasize in a period when whole people groups were in fact converting en masse. He also tends to emphasize the role of those who directly bear the Christian message, even if such missionaries have been sent on behalf of imperial or ecclesiastical authorities. Theresa Urbainczyk has discussed several themes on which Sozomen's Church History differs from that of Socrates, arguing that Sozomen corrects Socrates on certain issues of interpretation.Footnote ⁸⁹ The subject of mission and conversion, I would add, is another distinct area in which Sozomen thinks Socrates gets it wrong and hence edits his text.Footnote ⁹⁰ Indeed, in the opening chapter of his history, Sozomen clearly indicates that the amazing spread of Christianity beyond the Roman Empire, among the other nations (διὰ τῶν ἄλλων θνῶν), is both a motive and a major theme of his work.Footnote ⁹¹ Little wonder, then, that he represents the details of Iberia's Christianization in terms that reflect his particular interests in ethnography, individual initiative, and spiritual transformation.

Theodoret's Iberian narrative also follows the main outline of Rufinus's account, mediated through Socrates, including its placement immediately after the story of the Christianization of Axum.Footnote ⁹² Yet he leaves out details that his predecessors recount at some length while adding his own implicit as well as explicit theological commentary on certain points. In Theodoret's account, the Iberian king's conversion is explicitly identified with that of the apostle Paul, who, in a play on words, went out hunting only to be hunted down by God (ϵἰσ θήραν ξῆλθηϵν . . . κατὰ τὸν Παῦλον θήϵρϵυσϵ).Footnote ⁹³ Like Sozomen and Rufinus, Theodoret uses the metaphors of darkness and light for the king's spiritual transformation, but the building of a “divine temple” is another central image for the conversion of the Iberian king and his people. In her instruction to the queen following her healing, the captive woman urges the queen to build a temple to Christ, her savior, and the queen transmits this exhortation to her husband. The king delights in his wife's miraculous cure but declines to build a temple. Soon after this refusal, however, the king is plunged into obscurity on the hunt causing him to acknowledge his incredulity and call on the aid of the captive's god. Upon his safe emergence from the darkness, his very first request of the “amazing prisoner” is not further teaching about Christ but rather to be shown “a plan for construction” of a temple.Footnote ⁹⁴ Theodoret completely omits the miracle of the column, which is integral to the other narratives. Instead, he exalts the grace given to the captive woman to design not a church, much less a church in the style of the Romans, as Socrates specifies, but rather a “temple of God.” Footnote ⁹⁵ In keeping with his penchant for biblical typologies, he even compares her divinely inspired wisdom with that of the craftsman Bezalel (Exodus 31:2–4), who was filled with the Spirit of God and hence great wisdom and skill as an architect.Footnote ⁹⁶

Despite the identification of the Iberian king with Paul in the episode on the hunt, his role is actually minimized in this account of the nation's conversion. While the captive transmits to the queen “the divine teachings” and the queen exhorts the king to acknowledge the only true god, to build a temple to him, and even “to convert the whole nation to his service,” Theodoret completely omits any references to the king preaching or persuading his people that appear in Socrates and the other accounts.Footnote ⁹⁷ Meanwhile he explicitly affirms the apostolic function of the captive, whom he describes as a “holy woman.” Indeed, his depiction of the female captive is distinctly monastic, and it is due to her asceticism that she was “rewarded by gifts similar to those of the apostles.”Footnote ⁹⁸ The attribution of such grace to a woman seems uncharacteristic for Theodoret. Although he includes three holy women in his Historia religiosa, all noblewomen noted for extreme asceticism and excessive weeping, they perform no healings or other miracles. He contrasts their quiet, self-effacing nature with the public prophetic and apostolic vocation of monastic men.Footnote ⁹⁹ The humility and modesty of the female prisoner are also affirmed in the Ecclesiastical History, yet Theodoret sanctions or legitimizes her missionary function on the basis of her ascetic life. As in the other Iberian narratives, the captive woman also solves the dilemma of a lack of priests, for she persuades the king to send an embassy to Constantine requesting a “teacher of religion.” In response the pious emperor sends not simply a priest or even a bishop and his clergy, but a “holy bishop,” no doubt a monastic, who has been “counted worthy” by his faith, his judgment, and his way of life to preach the knowledge of God to their nation.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ As for bishops, so for missionaries, both male and female. Ascetic virtues qualify their bearer for apostolic ministry both in the church and to the world.

Like Socrates and Sozomen, then, Theodoret clearly adds his own voice to his narration of Georgia's conversion, and his theological perspective on missionary process and agency is implicit in the story he tells. The captive woman evangelist remains the protagonist in his account, while the king's apostolic role is diminished. Distinctive features of Theodoret's narrative include his use of biblical figuration, more common in his Historia religiosa, and a notion of mission that entails an explicit ascetic justification for apostolic gifts. Both Claudia Rapp and Derek Krueger have explored the spiritual dimension of Theodoret's role as an author in the Historia religiosa.Footnote ¹⁰¹ Rapp presents Theodoret among other fifth-century hagiographers as storytellers engaged in a new type of “spiritual communication” (diegēsis). Krueger emphasizes his self-representation as a painter and his hagiographical writing as “a mimesis of God's work . . . analogous to God's work, since Theodoret and God were sorts of painters.”Footnote ¹⁰² The Ecclesiastical History has received much less attention in connection with the devotional or spiritual practices of its author since it is generally viewed as a polemical text where the monk-bishop's pastoral vocation is much less obtrusive. Oddly enough, however, both ideas of the author as spiritual storyteller and as painter appear in Theodoret's brief but important preface to the work. Here he compares his task as a historian to the work of painters (ζωγράϕοι); and while the term diegēsis is not prevalent in his Church History, he uses it in his preface when he declares his intention to keep from oblivion illustrious acts and edifying stories or narratives (ὀνησιϕόρων διηγημάτων).Footnote ¹⁰³

In light of such passages, a strict division between spiritual writings, on the one hand, and polemical or historical works, on the other, may not be so easily sustained when it comes to an author's self-representation. This is especially the case when hagiographical as well as polemical material is woven into the fabric of the author's historical account, as in the narrative of Iberia's captive apostle. Theodoret's sense of his own spiritual vocation as an author was limited neither to his composition of the Historia religiosa nor to his correspondence, in which he has been described as a “dramatic self-presenter.”Footnote ¹⁰⁴ In the writing of history as well, Theodoret was consciously serving the church as a pastor, bishop, and theologian, passing on the apostolic message to his readers.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ Orthodox bishops are clearly his heroes in the Ecclesiastical History, and it is no accident that the task of instructing the Iberian nation as a whole is left to a holy bishop. Yet the message of salvation in Christ and the call to serve and worship him is entrusted to all believers, even to a humble female captive, who initially “led the Iberians to the truth” and who alone in this narrative is explicitly credited with apostolic gifts.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ Representing her mission from below in biblical and apostolic terms was part of Theodoret's own spiritual calling as a historian of the church.

III. John of Nikiu, Theognosta, and the Christianization of South Arabia

Moving to our final frontier area connected with a captive woman who converts in late antiquity, we encounter a series of complexities. The narrative of Theognosta and the conversion of Yemen that appears in John of Nikiu's Chronicle and, with slight variations, in the later Copto-Arabic Synaxarion, bears obvious similarities to accounts of Iberia's female captive. Writing in the mid-seventh century, the anti-Chalcedonian Egyptian bishop John of Nikiu describes Theognosta as “a Christian virgin who had been carried off captive from a convent on the borders of the Roman empire and had been conducted to the king of Yemen and presented to him as a gift.” She “wrought many healings” and “brought over the king of India to the faith . . . as well as all the people of India.”Footnote ¹⁰⁷ The setting of this narrative in Yemen has been attributed to scribal error. Michel van Esbroeck affirms that in John's account, “Iberia, doubtless through the medium of Ethiopic, is already transformed into the Yemen or India.”Footnote ¹⁰⁸ Given the similarities between the accounts of Theognosta and the narratives of Iberia's conversion by the anonymous captive woman, later identified as St. Nino, van Esbroeck's explanation seems plausible. Moreover, John of Nikiu is known to have confused the nomenclature of some of the peoples he describes in his Chronicle.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ Hence, while scholars often include John's narrative in their discussion of the Christianization of South Arabia, Himyar, or India,Footnote ¹¹⁰ most concede that the story of the missionary Theognosta does not represent a separate tradition but is simply another redaction of the Christianization of Georgia.

However, this explanation fails to account for several puzzling statements and discrepancies in the accounts. Besides the mention of Emperor Honorius, who is nowhere else connected with Iberia's conversion nor with developments in the eastern empire, the repetition of both Yemen and India in this account as well as the connection John makes between this region and “great India,” namely Ethiopia or Axum, further complicates the issue of the alleged error in the extant text of his Chronicle. The woman in John's account also differs from the fifth-century descriptions of the captive evangelist of Iberia. Theognosta is not a captive at the outset of the story but rather a virgin “who had been carried off captive from a convent on the borders of the Roman Empire.”Footnote ¹¹¹ Moreover, although the virgin is later credited with “many healings,” there is no mention of the healing of a particular child or of the queen. Instead, Theognosta is said to have been presented to the king of Yemen “as a gift”; and while in John's account the king experiences no crisis either on the hunt or at war, it is nonetheless “through her agency” that both the king and all the people of India became Christians.Footnote ¹¹²

Before dismissing the significance of John's account as a simple conflation or confusion of Iberian narratives, it is worth considering several other accounts that connect captives with the conversion of southern Arabia. Sassanian deportations of Roman prisoners of war were a common phenomenon in late antiquity, and historical and hagiographical texts attest to the Christianizing influence of these male and female captives across the eastern frontiers.Footnote ¹¹³ Another kind of captive missionary appears in narratives likely of Syrian provenance, but preserved in Arabic. Several medieval Muslim authors attribute the evangelization of Najran to a wandering Syrian ascetic named Faymiyūn, known for his regimen of prayer and gifts of healing, who is captured by a caravan of Arab Bedouins and sold into slavery at Najran.Footnote ¹¹⁴ The ascetic's holiness and prayer come to the attention of his noble master, who inquires about his religion and receives instruction from his servant. After Faymiyūn's miraculous destruction of the Najranis' sacred palm tree, all the inhabitants of Najran convert to Christianity. This account has been described as “a floating Syriac story relating the conversion of Arabs who may have been anywhere,”Footnote ¹¹⁵ but the parallels with John of Nikiu's account of the captive woman evangelist of Yemen are noteworthy. Indeed, Theognosta has recently been described as “a female version of Faymiyūn.”Footnote ¹¹⁶

There is also further testimony of specifically female evangelistic activity in the region. The Syriac chronicle attributed to Dionysius of Tel-Mahre, written by a monk of Zuqnin in the late eighth century based on earlier historiographic sources, includes the following brief entry: “In 616 (305) the Himyarites were led to the faith of the Christians by a captive woman.”Footnote ¹¹⁷ In this section of the chronicle, the author claims to be drawing from Socrates' Ecclesiastical History.Footnote ¹¹⁸ While most ensuing entries parallel passages in Socrates' text—including the division of missionary territory between the apostles, the conversion of Axum, and even brief mention of Iberia—there is no reference in Socrates to the conversion of Himyar or Yemen.Footnote ¹¹⁹ It has been suggested that the author or editor of this Syriac lemma, like John of Nikiu or his redactor, has mistakenly inserted Himyarites for Iberians.Footnote ¹²⁰ However, the separate reference to the conversion of Iberia in a slightly later section of the chronicle and the evidence of Syrian initiative in the Christianization of southern Arabia should give us pause before the assumption that the chronicler has inadvertently conflated two narratives.

A final comparable account for this region comes also from the Syrian tradition. The eleventh-century Arabic Chronicle of Se‘ert, derived from older Syriac historical sources, describes the religious influence of another captive woman in Arabia. After narrating the conversion of Najran in the fifth century through the evangelistic efforts of the merchant Hayyan, the chronicler refers to a slightly later period when a Jewish woman taken captive in Nisibis “was bought by a king of Yemen.” Paralleling Theognosta's Christianizing influence on the king and the kingdom in John of Nikiu's account, this Jewish captive played a role in the Judaization of Yemen, “for she taught her son the Jewish religion.”Footnote ¹²¹ Her son was none other than the Jewish convert Masruq (Yusuf Dhu-Nuwas), the last king of the Himyarite kingdom of Yemen, otherwise renowned for his persecution and massacre of Christians in the early sixth century.Footnote ¹²² Whether or not the location of John of Nikiu's conversion account was mistakenly transferred from Iberia to Yemen at some stage of transmission or copying, the motif of captive women evangelists was not unique to Georgia or the Caucasus in late antiquity, and perhaps not even restricted to the Christian community.Footnote ¹²³

Although we know very little about John of Nikiu from the extant sources, even the inclusion of his brief account of Theognosta suggests an understanding of mission that harmonizes with earlier eastern accounts. The imperial dimension of Christianization is certainly present in his narrative in the unexpected role of the western emperor Honorius. While the alleged role of Honorius is puzzling here, John's portrayal of the “God-loving emperor” as the patron of Yemen's conversion accords with his otherwise positive descriptions of this ruler as a devout Christian, an opponent of paganism, a rigorous ascetic, even a “holy emperor” and a “saint” who was hated because of his good life.Footnote ¹²⁴ The emphasis of the account, however, is once again on mission from below, specifically on the evangelistic function of a foreign captive woman. Like other late antique historians, John has put his own particular spin on the narrative. Theognosta is explicitly an ascetic in his account, described as a “holy woman” and a “holy virgin” taken captive from a convent, and Theonius, sent by the emperor in response to the request of the king of India, is described as a “holy bishop.” Paralleling Theodoret's account of the captive woman and perhaps reflecting John of Nikiu's own monastic background, ascetic virtues may qualify even a woman for apostolic ministry.

Unlike most of our other historians, John says very little about the broader purpose of his work, a universal chronicle covering the period from Adam to the end of the Muslim conquest of Egypt; so any attempt to interpret his choice or particular representation of events must remain largely speculative.Footnote ¹²⁵ However, the very fact that he passed on such an account of evangelistic activity suggests that mission to non-believers continued to be of interest to some Christians in the seventh century despite the besieged state of the church in the east as a whole and in Egypt in particular. Indeed, descriptions of the missionary success of the lowly—women, captives, and monks—may have been particularly timely for the anti-Chalcedonian faithful of this era, condemned by the imperial church, on the one hand, and repressed by Muslim overlords, on the other.