Armenian and Georgian Eschatology

The Christian kingdoms of the Caucasus became, from the fourth century, a conduit and a reworking of older apocalyptic material. Armenia accepted Christianity as a state religion in 301, before Rome, and Georgia followed within a generation; both inherited the Jewish and Greek end-time literature through Syriac and Greek channels and made parts of it distinctly their own.

The most striking instance is Enoch. The Armenian Church preserved the Book of Enoch in a Ge'ez (Ethiopic) version that became canonical only there, and the Slavonic and Armenian apocrypha carried Enochic and Adamic testament literature deep into the region. The Armenian Apocalypse of Peter, a vivid account of the heavens, the fate of souls, and the final judgment, belongs to this stream and was copied and read for centuries as a guide to the last things.

Geography did the rest. The Caucasus sits at the edge of the inhabited world in the older cosmographies, and the Alexander Romance's story of the gates built to contain Gog and Magog took root there in particular. The mountains became the wall behind which the nations of the end were penned; when they broke out, the age would close. Movsēs Khorenats'i's History weaves such motifs into a national foundation story in which the fate of the Armenian people is bound to a larger, divine chronology.

What the Armenian and Georgian material lacks is an indigenous, non-Christian frame. As in the Slavic lands, the end arrived with the book and the monastery, and it remained a received eschatology rather than a constructed one. The contribution is custodial: a mountainous Christianity that held and transmitted the apocalyptic inheritance of late antiquity when other routes were cut.