The Dispersal of the Disciples

The second sending: how St. John of Zedazeni, at a renewed command of the Theotokos, dispersed his twelve disciples from Mount Zedazeni to plant monastic life across Kartli and Kakheti. This file follows the tradition’s map of the dispersal — who was sent where — and draws out why this moment, more than the arrival at Mtskheta, is the real substance of the Fathers’ work: the turning of one community into a network of foundations covering eastern Georgia.

Tradition: Georgian Orthodox

The Second Commission

The Lives relate that the community on Zedazeni was not meant to remain gathered. After a period of common ascetic life on the mountain, the Most Holy Theotokos again appeared to St. John, directing that the disciples be sent out from Zedazeni into the regions of Iberia, each to establish monastic life where he was sent (Machitadze, Lives of the Georgian Saints, “Ioane of Zedazeni and His Twelve Disciples”). This second commission is the strategic heart of the whole mission. The first sending brought the Fathers to Georgia; the second scattered them across it, so that the seed planted at one mountain became a harvest of foundations reaching from the environs of Mtskheta to the eastern marches of Kakheti (Matitashvili, “The Monasteries Founded by the Thirteen Syrian Fathers in Iberia,” Studies in Late Antiquity 2.1 [2018]: 4–39, on the settling first at Zedazeni and the later sending to “different parts of the Iberian kingdom to oppose paganism and Zoroastrianism”).

Read as tradition — pinned, as always, to the later Lives (see The Lives and Their Dating) — the dispersal encodes a genuine historical insight: what makes a monastic movement a civilization is not a single great house but a distributed network of them, each rooting the faith in its own region. Whether the sixth-century reality was one coordinated sending or a longer, less orderly spread, the tradition’s architecture correctly identifies the dispersal as the decisive act.

The Map of Foundations

The Lives assign each disciple a region and a foundation, and the resulting map covers the two great provinces of eastern Georgia — Kartli in the center and west, Kakheti in the east. As the tradition gives it (Machitadze, Lives of the Georgian Saints, “Ioane of Zedazeni,” summarizing the dispersal):

  • St. Shio withdrew to the caves of Sarkineti in the Mgvime gorge northwest of Mtskheta, where the great lavra of Shiomgvime would grow (see St. Shio of Mgvime).
  • St. David went to the arid wilderness of Gareji southeast of Tbilisi, founding the desert monasticism of the Gareji complex (see St. David of Gareji).
  • St. Anton settled at Martqopi in Kakheti, where he ended his life as a pillar-dweller (see Anton of Martqopi and the Icon).
  • St. Abibos was consecrated bishop of Nekresi and evangelized the eastern mountains, dying a martyr against the Zoroastrian fire-cult.
  • St. Isé (Jesse) became bishop of Tsilkani and founded its monastery.
  • St. Ioseb (Joseph) settled in the Alaverdi wilderness of eastern Kakheti, the seat of the later great cathedral of Alaverdi.
  • St. Zenon founded the monastery of Iqalto in Kakheti.
  • St. Isidore founded Samtavisi, on the eastern bank of the Rekhula.
  • St. Stepane (Stephen) founded Khirsa, in the Kharnabuji region of Kakheti.
  • St. Tadeos (Thaddeus) labored near Zedazeni and at Urbnisi.
  • St. Piros (Pyrrhus) founded Breti, on the Jvaristsqali.
  • St. Mikael (Michael) labored in the Ulumbo region of northern Kartli.

These twelve destinations (with St. John remaining at Zedazeni) make the “thirteen” a map as much as a roster — the founders distributed so that no major region of eastern Georgia was left without a monastic anchor. The individual Fathers beyond the two greatest are treated in The Remaining Fathers, where the softer edges of the roster are flagged.

Coenobitic and Eremitic: Two Patterns from One Sending

The dispersal did not plant one kind of monasticism but two, and the difference is essential to the Fathers’ achievement. Some disciples founded coenobitic (communal) houses — organized monasteries with a common rule, buildings, and a settled brotherhood, of which St. Shio’s Shiomgvime is the type. Others planted eremitic (solitary, desert) life — the extreme withdrawal of the hermit, of which St. David’s Gareji is the type. And several combined the two, or moved from one to the other over a lifetime, as St. Shio himself did in withdrawing from the abbacy of his growing lavra into reclusion in a pit (see The Lavra and the Rule). The dispersal thus seeded the full range of the monastic tradition in a single generation — a point developed in Coenobitic and Eremitic Monasticism.

That both forms are Syrian in derivation — the lavra and the desert cell alike belonging to the ascetic world of Syria and Mesopotamia — is part of why scholarship reads the dispersal as a genuine transmission of an eastern monastic repertoire into Georgia, whatever the precise historicity of the twelve named foundings (Loosley Leeming, Architecture and Asceticism, Brill, 2018, ch. 1; Matitashvili, Studies in Late Antiquity 2.1 [2018]).

The Missionary Edge

The Lives present the dispersal not only as monastic settlement but as mission: the Fathers are sent “to oppose paganism and Zoroastrianism,” planting their houses in a landscape still contested between the Christian faith of the court and the surviving cults of the countryside and the fire-religion of the Persian-dominated east (Matitashvili, Studies in Late Antiquity 2.1 [2018]; Rayfield, Edge of Empires, Reaktion, 2012, chs. 2–3). St. John’s own settlement on the ruined temple of Zaden sets the pattern (see The Leader of the Thirteen), and it culminates in the martyrdom of St. Abibos of Nekresi, who dies for dousing a Zoroastrian fire-altar (see The Remaining Fathers). The dispersal is therefore, in the tradition’s telling, the moment at which monastic asceticism and frontier mission become one work — the monasteries functioning as the strong-points from which the christianization of eastern Georgia was carried into the mountains and the marches.

Held to its sources, the dispersal is the tradition’s account of how Georgian monasticism became a national institution in a single founding generation. Its map is the map of the great early monasteries, and its logic — distribute the founders, plant both community and desert, root the faith region by region — is the logic by which a mission becomes a Church. The particulars are hagiography attested centuries later; the pattern they describe is the shape of the monastic Georgia that unmistakably existed by the end of the sixth century.

See Also

References

  • Machitadze, Archpriest Zakaria. Lives of the Georgian Saints. Platina, CA: St. Herman of Alaska Brotherhood, 2006 (also at OrthoChristian.com / Pravoslavie.ru). (“Ioane of Zedazeni and His Twelve Disciples”: the second vision and sending; the map of who went where.)
  • Matitashvili, Shota. “The Monasteries Founded by the Thirteen Syrian Fathers in Iberia: The Rise of Monasticism in Sixth-Century Georgia.” Studies in Late Antiquity 2, no. 1 (2018): 4–39. (The settling at Zedazeni and the sending to oppose paganism and Zoroastrianism; the monasteries as sixth-century religious centers.)
  • Loosley Leeming, Emma. Architecture and Asceticism: Cultural Interaction between Syria and Georgia in Late Antiquity. Texts and Studies in Eastern Christianity 13. Leiden: Brill, 2018. (The Syrian derivation of both coenobitic and eremitic forms.)
  • Rayfield, Donald. Edge of Empires: A History of Georgia. London: Reaktion Books, 2012. (The contested religious landscape of sixth-century eastern Georgia.)