Ephrem Minor, Instruction on the Conversion of the Georgians

Knowledge of the Cause of the Conversion of the Georgians, and in Which Books It Is Mentioned. To our spiritual father and venerable ecclesiarches of us Georgians, the priest of the Lord John Kyrikes, the utterly small and unworthy in form and name, Ephrem the monk, I greet you with prostration. Since by the grace of God your diligence concerning this festal book has been fulfilled, which you, in the narrowness of the times, with a swift expansion of thought, offered to that common gift of our nation’s church of the holy Symeon the Wonderworker, which, as a good and life-giving beginning of the loaf of life, is truly and purely designated as coming, it was fitting that your command be fulfilled by me in this matter as well, so that in writing there be placed therein a commemoration of the time of our conversion, and in which books of the Greeks it is mentioned, should it be necessary for someone among the inquirers to know.

Let it be known that from the very preaching of the holy apostles, when, according to the prophecy of David, "their voice spread over the whole earth and their words to the ends of the world," among these ends it is also said concerning us, in the course of the visitation of the holy apostles, that there was preaching by Andrew the First-Called among Avazgia, which is Abkhazia, and from there a passage to Ossetia, and again a circuit of the north by Bartholomew, which is Kartli. But these holy apostolic seeds of teaching, once sown, were long held back by the thorn of idolatry not only among us, but even among the Greeks themselves, until the times of the great Constantine, the second Paul called from heaven. In the times of this pious king, God, who cared for the great and many-seeded nations, did not leave us, the small ones, without reward, but arranged our recall in such a way as Theodoret recalls in his book of ecclesiastical history, in the twenty-fourth chapter, and speaks thus: