Pastor Sean Finnegan, President of Living Hope International Ministries and adjunct professor at Atlanta Bible College, presents "The Key of Truth: A Monument to Armenian Unitarianism" at the 2022 Unitarian Christian Alliance (UCA) Conference at Lawrenceville Church of God in Springfield, Ohio.

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Below is the abstract from Sean Finnegan's paper "The Key of Truth: A Monument to Armenian Unitarianism".

Although commonly labeled adoptionist, The Key of Truth is in fact a biblical unitarian text. What’s less clear is who authored it and when. In this essay, I will critically examine three main possibilities: (1) The Key of Truth is a medieval text used by the Paulicians in the seventh to tenth centuries; (2) it is a Tondrakian text from the tenth to fourteenth centuries; and (3) it was composed in the eighteenth century by Armenians living under the Ottoman Empire. After concluding the last possibility is most plausible, I will weigh potential influences, including Protestants, Anabaptists, and Socinians.

In 1898 Frederick Conybeare, professor of theology at Oxford University, published The Key of Truth: A Manual of the Paulician Church of Armenia (henceforth The Key). The volume contained a nearly 200page introduction, The Key in Armenian, Conybeare’s English translation, and nine appendices containing historical sources related to the Paulicians and Tondrakians.

In 1891, Conybeare had gone to Armenia looking for information about the Paulicians and discovered The Key in the Library of the Holy Synod at Ejmiatsin. Written in Taron in 1782, the small octavo manuscript totals 149 leaves with 30 missing. Upon first inspection, he identified it as an internal treatise of the Paulicians, on account of its rejection of icons, Mariolatry, and crosses. Unable to copy it himself, he departed, waiting until 1893 to receive a copy from Galoust Ter Mkherttschian. Conybeare told of his surprise when he examined The Key in greater detail:

"My first impression on looking into it afresh was one of disappointment. I had expected to find in it a Marcionite, or at least a Manichean book; but, beyond the extremely sparse use made in it of the Old Testament, I found nothing that savoured of these ancient heresies. Accordingly, I laid it aside, in the press of other work which I had undertaken. It was not until the summer of 1896 that … I returned to it, and translated it into English in the hope that it might advance his [colleague’s] researches [sic]. And now I at last understood who the Paulicians really were. All who had written about them had been misled by the calumnies of Photius, Petrus Siculus [Peter of Sicily], and the other Greek writers, who describe them as Manicheans. I now realized I had stumbled on the monument of a phase of the Christian Church so old and so outworn, that the very memory of it was wellnight lost. For The Key of Truth contains the baptismal service and ordinal of the Adoptionist Church, almost in the form in which Theodotus of Rome [2nd century] may have celebrated those rites. These form the oldest part of the book, which, however, also contains much controversial matter of a later date, directed against what the compiler regarded as abuses of the Latin and Greek Churches. The date at which the book was written in its present form cannot be put later than the ninth century, nor earlier than the seventh."

Conybeare’s assertions that The Key is Paulician, that it is medieval, and that the Greek writers were wrong about the Paulicians have all received significant criticisms. We will consider the case for and against the document’s antiquity before investigating its community of origin. But first, I would like to make a correction to Conybeare’s assessment above and show that The Key is not adoptionist, but biblical unitarian in theology.

The Key is not a systematic theology, but a composite document containing a treatise on Jesus’ baptism, admonitions about Satan, detailed instructions on repentance, baptism, and communion, a liturgy for ordination, and a catechism. Sprinkled throughout we find several places where The Key refers to Jesus as a created being. In many of these, someone has erased the offending word from the manuscript, though thankfully the censor often failed to completely obliterate the word, making it possible for Conybeare to restore it with varying degrees of confidence. According to The Key, the Father is the uncreated one who created Jesus as a new Adam.

Several times The Key offers unitarian statements, extoling the Father as the only God. The author recognized Jesus’ exalted position as the head of all, while simultaneously affirming God’s superiority over him. Standard unitarian prooftexts like John 17.3, Hebrews 3.2, 1 Corinthians 11.3, and 1 Timothy 2.5 appear throughout the document, making The Key sound similar to today’s biblical unitarians.