Interesting page, learned a lot i didnt know

[bell-the-cat]

Everyone is pretensious on this here internet.

And pretentious too.

Ozymandias has nothing on most of them, and like him and his statue, just wait a few years and they are gone, leaving nothing but a desert of dead threads and long forgotten arguments.

"I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive (stamped on these lifeless things),
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal these words appear:
'My name is Ozymandias, king of kings;
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!'
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away."

Percy B. Shelley

[bell-the-cat]

Steve: First of all, since it was your reply to my post that started this all, I wanted to clarify something. My remark to the statement from the link had nothing to do with my stance on 301 AD. I was merely asking why, if the author was trying to imply the conversion was for political reasons, and not genuine faith, would we have done it "more then a decade" before it was tolerated?

That's why I was trying to prove that the 301AD date is not the real date of his conversion - that it wasn't done before it was tolerated.

Now.....I've read through the articles you've presented/posted, and I don't see how any of it definitively disperses the 301 "myth", as you put it. All I see are speculations on all ends. This neither proves, nor disproves the 301 AD hallmark, as your findings can be just as much a myth. I do have one question, though. If no single expert, Armenian or non-Armenian, will support the 301AD date, how did it come to be? Why is it the readily accepted date? Did Armenians just kinda' say "hey, we converted to Christianity in 301", and everyone just....sorta' believed them? I'm not asking to make a point, but rather I just want to know how this transpired.

The 301AD date is maintained because of tradition - if a thing is said often enough and for long enough then it becomes true, especially if it enters into the collective knowledge of an entire people. But knowledge has moved on from that tradition, and nobody (in the know) now accepts the 301AD date. Even the late archbishop Ashjian, who organised the 1500 Anniversary celebrations in Yerevan, did not believe that the 301AD date was an historical fact. Probably, nobody is ever going to know the real date - sometime between 304 and 315 is all that can be said with certainty. That, and that it was certainly not 301AD.