Pardon the long post, but there was no web link available. Part 1 of 2 parts.
Extract from the Introduction (pages xxxiii to xl) to The Key of Truth: A Manual of the Paulician Church of Armenia by Fred C. Conybeare (Oxford, at the Clarendon Press, 1898). A Summary of Paulician Tenants.
(1) The writer and reader of the Key did not call themselves Paulicians, still less Thonraketzi. They were the ‘holy, universal, and apostolic Church,’ founded by Jesus Christ and his apostles. In describing themselves the words catholic and orthodox are sometimes, but less often, added; perhaps because they shrank from the use of titles so closely identified with their persecutors.
(2) The church consists of all baptized persons, and preserves the apostolic tradition which Christ revealed to the apostles and they to the Church, which has handed it on by unbroken transmission from the first.
(3) The sacraments are three which are requisite to salvation, to wit, Repentance, Baptism, and the Body and Blood of Christ. Marriage, ordination, confirmation, extreme unction are not necessary to salvation.
(4) All true baptism in accordance with the precepts of Christ, especially Mark xvi. 16, must be preceded by repentance and faith.
(5) Consequently infant baptism is invalid; and, in admitting it, the Latins, Greeks, and Armenians have lost their Christianity, lost the sacraments, forfeited their orders, and have become a mere Satanic mimicry of the true faith. If any of them, even their patriarchs, would rejoin the true Church, they must be baptized.
(6) The catechumen or candidate for baptism must be of mature age, as was Jesus of Nazareth, in order that he may be able to understand, recognize, and repent of his sin, which is twofold, viz.: original and operative.
(7) Baptism is only to be performed by an elect or ordained member of the Church, and in answer to the personal demand of the person who seeks to be admitted into the Church.
(8) On the eighth day from birth the elect one shall solemnly confer a name on the new-born child, using a prescribed form of prayer. But he shall not allow any mythical or superstitious names.
(9) In doctrine the Paulicians were Adoptionist, and held that Jesus the Messiah was born a man, though a new man, of the Virgin Mary; and that, having fulfilled all righteousness and having come to John for baptism, he received in reward for his struggles the Lordship of all things in heaven and earth, the grace of the divine spirit, whereby he was anointed and became the Messiah, and was elected or chosen to be the eternal only-born Son, mediator of God and man, and intercessor.
(10) They may also be called Unitarians, in so far as they believed that Jesus Christ was not creator but created, man, made and not maker. He was never God at all, but only the new-created Adam.
(11) Jesus was born without original sin.
(12) The Holy Ghost enters the catechumen immediately after baptism (to exclude evil spirits), when a third handful of water is, in his honor, poured out over the catechumen’s head. He is also breathed into the elect one by the bishop at the close of the ordination service.
(13) The word Trinity is nowhere used, and was almost certainly rejected as being unscriptural. In baptism, however, three separate handfuls of water were poured over the head in the name of the father, in the name of the Son, and in the name of the Holy Spirit. Two or three words are erased in the baptismal formula, which would have explained more clearly the significance they attach to the proceeding, but it was clearly heretical or they would not have been erased. A ‘figure’ follows in the text, p. 98, shadowing forth the meaning. The king, we learn, releases certain rulers from the prison of sin; the Son calls them to himself and comforts and gives them hope; and then the Holy Spirit at once crowns them and dwells in them for ever and ever. This figure is also meant to exhibit the significance of genuine baptism.
(14) The Virgin Mary lost her virginity at the birth of Jesus, and is not ‘ever virgin.’ She was a virgin, however, till the new Adam was born. She cannot intercede for us, for Christ, our only intercessor, expressly denied blessedness to her because of her unbelief.
(15) There is no intercession of the saints, for the dead rather need the prayers of the living than the living of the lead.
(16) The idea of Purgatory is false and vain. There is but one last judgment for all, for which the quick and the dead (including saints) wait.
(17) Images, pictures, holy crosses, springs, incense, candles are all to be condemned as idolatrous and unnecessary, and alien to the teaching of Christ.
(18) The Paulicians are not dualists in any other sense than the New Testament is itself dualistic. Satan is simply the adversary of man and God, and owing to the fall of Adam held all, even patriarchs and prophets, in his bonds before the advent of Christ.
(19) Sin must be publicly confessed before God and the Church, which consists of the faithful.
(20) The elect ones alone have the power of binding and loosing given by Christ to the Apostles and by them transmitted to their universal and apostolic Church.
(21) Their canon included the whole of the New Testament except perhaps the Apocalypse, which is not mentioned or cited. The newly-elected one has given to him the Gospel and Apostolicon. The Old Testament is not rejected; and although rarely cited, is nevertheless, when it is cited, called the God-inspired book, “Astouadsashountch”, which in Armenian answers to our phrase ‘Holy Scripture’ or ‘Bible.’
