Shrouded in myth, the rediscovery of the Armenian alphabet is credited to Mesrop Mashtots, who, under the patronage of King Vramshapour and the Catolicos Sahak Parthev (387-428 AD), traveled to the great centers of learning in Asia Minor before "receiving a vision where Christ struck the alphabet on stone"

     From its inception, the Armenian Church was allied with the Greek Orthodox faith, the center of Christianity in that time. Using Syrian and Greek texts for the scriptures, Armenian services were far removed from the language of the local population. In addition, there was dissent between the Armenian Church and the Greek patriarch around the interpretation of the divine nature of Christ was he both man and God, or divine spirit alone? Struggling with the Sassanid Persian Empire, the Armenian kingdom was also wary of Roman designs, and felt far removed from the doctrinal debates that were held in Caesura and Greece. These debates affected the entire structure of doctrinal supremacy, which led to several schisms between branches of the church over the next centuries, but that between the Armenian Church and the Greek Orthodox church was one of the earliest.

While the struggle between Christianity and paganism continued, to the east of the kingdom a new crisis arose. The Sassanids began to make inroads into the Armenian kingdom, bringing with them the Zoroastrian religion (which was based on the worship of sun and fire). Armenian paganism revolved around worship of the sun, even in Greco-Roman times, the favored gods and goddesses were connected to the sun, the ultimate fire symbol and giver of life. The peasant class long alienated by the ruling class use of Greek, Persian and Latin, were not that far removed from their pagan roots, and would have found an attractive alternative in the Zoroastrian beliefs.

King Arshak II (345-367 AD) formed an alliance with the Roman Emperor Julian in an attempt to stay the invasion by the Sassanids. Neither Julian nor his successor, Valens, complied with this pact, using the failure of the Armenian Church to recognize the Roman Oriental Church as a pretext. The Armenians were thus forced to come to terms with the Sassanid Persians who, in turn, refused to recognize them in negotiation. Among the many decisions aimed at limiting the influence of the Armenian Church made by the successor of Arshak II, Pap (368-374 AD), one in particular put an end to the tradition of the ordination of the Armenian Catolicos in Caesura, distancing the Armenian Church from Greek influence.

The Armenian Arshakid kingdom was subdivided in 387 by an agreement between the Roman emperor Theodosius and the Sassanid King Shapur Ill, to the clear advantage of the Sassanids, who were assigned four-fifths of the territory. Nevertheless the two segments of the former Armenian kingdom always remained in contact, thanks to their common faith. In order to preserve the Armenian culture and protect the royal house, the Armenian king Vramshapour and the Catolicos Sahak Parthev (387-428 AD), undertook to ‘create’ a new Armenian alphabet. An alphabet would guarantee the influence of the Church over the entire people, avoiding the need to filter passages from the Sacred Scripture (written in Syrian or in Greek) during the mass by means of oral repetition by figures known as 'translators'.

An Armenian alphabet was one of the key components of preserving Armenian identity in the face of Sassanid incursions and those that followed. Shrouded in myth, the rediscovery of the Armenian alphabet is credited to Mesrop Mashtots, who, under the patronage of King Vramshapour and the Catolicos Sahak Parthev (387-428 AD), traveled to the great centers of learning in Asia Minor before "receiving a vision where Christ struck the alphabet on stone".

Legend has it that the hermit monk Mesrop Mashtots created the alphabet through divine inspiration in 401-406 AD. A pupil of Mashtots, Koriun, in his history of the Armenian Alphabet adds fuel to the controversy by carefully avoiding giving total credit to Mashtots for creating a script. In fact, Koriun avoids using the word "creation" or "invention" anywhere in his account, referring to Mashtots as a ‘translator’ who was "looking for a thing" that was "found" in Edessa when Mashtots had his vision.

As the crisis with the Sassanids and the Roman empire deepened, it is conjectured that Mashtots who was the personal translator to the king was dispatched to uncover the older version of Armenian which Gregory’s campaign against paganism had destroyed. More than one hundred years had elapsed since Gregory began his campaign to convert the country, and no traces of any native Armenian script remained in the kingdom.

With his pupils Mashtots traveled throughout Asia Minor to "find the thing you are looking for". They began at the kingdom of Goghtu (present-day Nakhichevan), which had not yet converted to Christianity, and was thought likely to have the older text. Failing there, they traveled to Edessa, where he was told that there was an old scholar ‘who has the thing you are looking for’, but that he converted to Christianity and now lived in Samusart. In Koriun’s text, at Samusart Mashtots found "the thing he was looking for,’ and that night he had a vision where the right hand of Jesus struck the letters of the alphabet on stone. Mashtots and his entourage triumphantly returned to Armenia, greeted by the king and Catolicos and pronounced savior of the Armenian people.

Since there are no stones in Samusart like that described in Koriun’s text, historians believe that the ‘thing’ Mashtots was looking for was a sample of old Armenian script, the Haikasian Script. Travelling through the Sinai, he would have seen examples of the Odessian Script, and linked it to the Haikasian Script. With these two examples, he was able to reconstruct the alphabet, making a few alterations in the design.

This conjecture is by no means universally accepted, it is constantly under vehement debate. To some, any questioning of the divine inspiration of the Mesropian Script is a heresy. To others, it is merely speaking historical fact. To many, it illustrates the inscrutable aspect of inspiration: who can say that God didn’t speak to Mashtots, leading him to earlier scripts and striking the new form for him in his dream?

However it happened, the introduction of the alphabet allowed the Armenians to create distinct identity in the face of surrounding enemies, and for the Armenian church to translate the scriptures into written Armenian, leading to its separation from the influence of the Greek Orthodox (and Byzantium) influence. The Armenian’s were suddenly a nation as well as a cultured people, and a flowering of written culture appeared in the country, the most stunning examples of which are the tens of thousands of manuscripts which have been preserved to this day. Works of art, these manuscripts were often embellished with gold and rare color, and they fostered a period of scientific and philosophic learning which gave rise to Europe’s Renaissance.