Miracles and the Mission: The Journey to Mtskheta

The narrative of Nino’s mission as the developed Georgian Life tells it: the journey from Jerusalem by way of Armenia — where, the Life says, Nino was among the virgins of Rhipsime and Gaiane martyred under Diocletian and Tiridates, and alone escaped into Iberia — her arrival at the capital Mtskheta amid the festival of the idol Armazi, her lodging in the royal garden with the gardener’s family, her healings, the destruction of the idols by her prayer, and the conversion of Queen Nana. All of it belongs to the later layer and is reported as the Life attests it, with its legendary and synchronistic elements flagged.

Tradition: Georgian Orthodox / Pan-Orthodox

A Mission Narrative of the Developed Layer

The deeds gathered here — the journey, the idol-storm, Nana’s healing — are the connective tissue of the developed Georgian Life of St. Nino (see The Developed Hagiography). Their kernel is old: Rufinus already has the captive’s ascetic life, her healing of a child and then of the queen, leading toward the king’s conversion (Rufinus, HE 10.11; see Rufinus and the Captive Woman). What the Georgian Life adds is the itinerary and the cast — names, places, a synchronism with the Armenian conversion, the named idols — and these are reported here as the Life gives them, pinned to that source and not asserted as documented history.

The Journey by Way of Armenia

The Life sends Nino from Jerusalem toward Iberia by a route that deliberately welds her story onto the Armenian conversion cycle. She is associated with the band of consecrated virgins led by Rhipsime (Hripsime) and their elder Gaiane, who flee the persecution of Diocletian and reach Armenia, where they are martyred by King Tiridates (Trdat). Nino alone, the Life says, escapes — hidden, in the narrative, among rose or bramble bushes — and crosses into Iberia (Life of St. Nino, in Lerner, Wellspring, 2004; Wardrop, “Life of St. Nino,” Studia Biblica et Ecclesiastica V, 1900). The Rhipsime martyrs are the same virgins whose deaths, in the Armenian tradition, precede the conversion of Armenia under St. Gregory the Illuminator. By making Nino a survivor of that company, the Georgian Life ties the two Caucasian conversions together and gives Nino a martyric pedigree.

This synchronism is chronologically strained and is best read as a hagiographic harmonization of the Georgian and Armenian conversion legends rather than as history; it is reported here as a feature of the developed Life.

[Disputed: The Life of St. Nino makes Nino a companion of the Armenian virgin-martyrs Rhipsime and Gaiane, martyred under Diocletian and King Tiridates, from whose massacre she alone escapes into Iberia (in Lerner, Wellspring, 2004). This synchronism harmonizes the Georgian and Armenian conversion cycles and is chronologically strained; it is a feature of the later Georgian recensions, absent from Rufinus’s earliest account, and is reported as developed tradition, not as attested fact.]

Arrival at Mtskheta

Nino reaches Mtskheta, the old capital of Kartli at the confluence of the Mtkvari (Kura) and Aragvi rivers, by the Life’s account in winter and amid a great pagan festival in honor of the idol Armazi. On the way she lodges about a month among the Jewish community at Urbnisi, learning the language and customs (Life of St. Nino, in Lerner, Wellspring, 2004). The Jewish community of Mtskheta is important to the whole Georgian narrative, because it is to that community — and to the Robe of Christ they are said to have brought from Jerusalem — that the Life ties its account of Svetitskhoveli (see The Robe of Christ Tradition).

The Garden and the First Miracles

At Mtskheta, the Life says, Nino settled in the royal garden, lodging under a bramble bush with the family of the royal gardener and his wife — named Anastasia (Anasto) — a childless couple to whom, through Nino’s prayers, a child is granted: her first Mtskheta miracle (Life of St. Nino, in Lerner, Wellspring, 2004). She heals the sick brought to her, and the Life preserves, in developed form, the door-to-door healing of a dying infant that Rufinus already reports of the unnamed captive: Nino lays the child on her bed of leaves, prays over the grapevine cross, and the child recovers (cf. Rufinus, HE 10.11; see Rufinus and the Captive Woman). A small chapel over the bramble-bush site at Mtskheta — within the precinct later associated with the Samtavro church — preserves the local memory of her dwelling.

The Healing of Queen Nana

The climactic healing of the mission narrative is that of Queen Nana, the wife of King Mirian III, who falls gravely ill. As in Rufinus’s account of the queen, Nana has herself brought to Nino; Nino has her laid on the bed of leaves, prays over her, and Nana is restored and confesses Christ (Life of St. Nino, in Lerner, Wellspring, 2004; cf. Rufinus, HE 10.11). Nana’s conversion is the first royal breakthrough and the necessary prelude to the king’s — exactly the queen-before-king sequence of the earliest layer, now with the royal couple named. The king’s own conversion, the hunt and the darkness on Mt. Thoti, is treated in its own section (see The Darkness and the Prayer).

The Destruction of the Idols

A scene without counterpart in Rufinus, and characteristic of the developed Life, is the destruction of the idols. At the festival of Armazi, Nino prays, and a violent storm — wind, hail, and lightning — shatters the great idols of Kartli, toppling them from their heights: Armazi and Zaden (Zadeni), the principal pair, together with the lesser Gatsi and Gaim (the names vary slightly across recensions) (Life of St. Nino, in Lerner, Wellspring, 2004; Wardrop, 1900). The idol-storm is the Life’s dramatization of the displacement of the old Iberian cult — itself heavily Iranian in character, fitting the wider Iranian formation of pre-Christian Kartli that modern scholarship emphasizes (S. H. Rapp Jr., The Sasanian World through Georgian Eyes, Ashgate, 2014). It is reported here as what the Life narrates.

The Conversion of the Mtskheta Jews

A strand of the mission narrative without counterpart in Rufinus, and characteristic of the Georgian Life, is the conversion of the Jewish community of Mtskheta, led by the priest Abiatar and his daughter Sidonia. In the Life, Nino’s preaching wins Abiatar — whom the tradition styles a “second Paul” — and his household, and it is through this converted Jewish family that the Robe-of-Christ tradition is narrated (see The Robe of Christ Tradition). The prominence of the Mtskheta Jews in the Georgian narrative is striking and has drawn scholarly attention: it ties the conversion of Iberia to the ancient Jewish diaspora of the Caucasus and to the Holy Land, and it makes the bridge between the Old Covenant and the New a theme of the conversion story itself (T. Mgaloblishvili, ed., Ancient Christianity in the Caucasus, Curzon, 1998). Like the rest of the developed mission narrative, it is reported here as the Life attests it; the historical kernel — a Jewish community at Mtskheta with ties to Jerusalem — is plausible, but the narrative of Abiatar and Sidonia belongs to the developed layer.

The Shape of the Mission

Read whole, the developed mission narrative follows a deliberate shape that the Georgian Life gives to the spare report of Rufinus. Nino comes as a stranger and a refugee, lodges among the humble (the gardener’s family, the Jews of Urbnisi and Mtskheta), and works first among the powerless and the sick before reaching the queen and the king; the false gods are thrown down; the royal house is converted; the church is built and the nation baptized. The movement is from the margins to the center — from a bramble bush in the royal garden to the throne and the cathedral — and it is driven throughout by holiness and miracle rather than by power. This shape is the developed Life’s reading of how a captive woman converted a kingdom, and it is the narrative behind the title the Church gives her, Equal-to-the-Apostles (see Equal-to-the-Apostles).

Reading the Mission Narrative

The mission narrative is the developed Life‘s expansion of Rufinus’s spare report into a full apostolic itinerary, peopled and placed. Its stable, early core — the ascetic captive, the healings, the queen’s conversion leading toward the king’s — is firmly attested; its added itinerary, synchronism, named gardener, and idol-storm are the later layer’s elaboration, reported as the Georgian tradition transmits them and pinned to it (METHODOLOGY §3.5). The mission’s institutional fruit — a kingdom made Christian, an embassy to Constantine, a church organized — is treated in section 04 and section 07.

The Bramble Bush and the Holy Places

The developed mission narrative leaves its mark on the sacred geography of Mtskheta, and the local cult has long pointed to the places it names. The bramble bush in the royal garden where Nino first lodged is associated with the precinct of the Samtavro church and convent at Mtskheta, where a small chapel preserves the memory of her dwelling and where, by tradition, King Mirian and Queen Nana were later buried. The garden and the spot of Sidonia’s grave become Svetitskhoveli (see The Living Pillar); the sites of the king’s conversion on Mt. Thoti and of the planted crosses become commemorative landmarks. The narrative and the landscape thus interpret each other: the Life gives the places their meaning, and the places give the Life its local anchorage. These associations are part of the developed cult and are reported as such; what is historically firm beneath them is the early and continuous Christian centrality of Mtskheta, the old capital where the conversion is remembered (see Christianity as State Religion).

References

The Life of St. Nino, in Constantine B. Lerner, The Wellspring of Georgian Historiography. London: Bennett & Bloom, 2004.
Wardrop, Marjory. “Life of St. Nino.” Studia Biblica et Ecclesiastica V. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1900, pp. 3–88.
Rufinus of Aquileia. Historia Ecclesiastica 10.11. Trans. Amidon, Oxford 1997.
Rapp, Stephen H., Jr. The Sasanian World through Georgian Eyes: Caucasia and the Iranian Commonwealth in Late Antique Georgian Literature. Farnham: Ashgate, 2014. (On the Iranian character of pre-Christian Kartli.)
Saint Nino, Equal of the Apostles, Enlightener of Georgia. Orthodox Church in America (oca.org), Lives of the Saints, January 14. (Devotional form of the mission narrative.)