Cony_keyoftruth

xxx THE KEY OF TRUTH
would deny the book to be as old as the ninth century, because of '
the many vulgarisms of the text. These chiefly consist in a loose
use of prepositions, such as would be most likely to creep in. Of
the leading characteristics, however, which distinguish the modern
dialects of Armenian from the old classical language there is barely
any trace, as any one acquainted with them will be able to judge.
Some of these characteristics, e. g. the lengthened form of verbs
like karenam for karem already confront us in more popularly
written books (like the Armenian version of the Geoponicd) of the
thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. The Key of Truth must
long precede that age. The use of the accusative of the relative
pronoun zor at the beginning of a new sentence, to connect it with
what precedes, is very common in the Key, and is at first sight
modern; yet it is frequent in Zenob, who wrote about a.d. 800
a history of Taron, the region in which Thondrak or Thonrak,
a centre of the Armenian Paulicians, lay. This fact of the near
geographical origin of both books also explains the considerable
resemblance of style between Zenob's history and the Key. There
are not a great many words in the Key foreign to classical
Armenian of the fifth century; but what there are we find, with
three or four exceptions, in writers of the eighth to the thirteenth
centuries, particularly in Gregory of Narek in the tenth. This
statement is based on a study of nearly thirty such words l .
It has to be borne in mind that, whereas all the works of the
orthodox Armenian Church of an earlier time were composed in
the learned language, The Key of Truth is not likely to have
been written in any tongue except that which was spoken among
the poorer country people to whom the great Paulician leaders
addressed themselves. Certainly the use of the Armenian New
Testament might impart a slight classical tinge to their writings ;
but there was no other influence at work to produce such a result.
Like the great heretical writers who founded the vernacular literatures
of modern Europe, Huss, Wycliffe, Luther, the unknown
translators of the Provencal Testament of Lyon, so the founders
of the Paulician Church must have addressed themselves not to
monks and learned men but to the common people. But if this
be so, we cannot suppose The Key of Trttih to have been written
later than 850.
The prayers in it remain pure and limpid examples of the
1
See the excursus at the end of the appendices, in which I enter into a moie
technical discussion of the style of the book.