Classical authors Three possible early references to Movses in other sources are usually identified. The first one is in
Ghazar Parpetsi's
History of the Armenians (about 495 or 500 A.D.), where the author details the persecution of several notable Armenian individuals, including the "blessed Movses the philosopher", identified by some scholars as Movses Khorenatsi. The second one is the
Book of Letters (sixth century), which contains a short theological treatise by "Movses Khorenatsi". The third possible early reference is in a tenth-to-eleventh-century manuscript containing a list of dates attributed to Athanasius (Atanas) of Taron (sixth century): under the year 474, the list has "Moses of Chorene, philosopher and writer". Many European and Armenian scholars writing at the turn of the twentieth century downplayed its importance as a historical source and dated the
History to sometime in the seventh to ninth centuries. Stepan Malkhasyants, an Armenian philologist and expert of
Classical Armenian literature, likened this early critical period from the late nineteenth to early twentieth centuries to a "competition", whereby one scholar attempted to outperform the other in their criticism of Khorenatsi.
Modern studies In the early decades of the twentieth century, scholars such as
F. C. Conybeare,
Manuk Abeghian, and Malkhasyants rejected the conclusions of the scholars of the hypercritical school and placed Khorenatsi back in the fifth century. During the second half of the twentieth century, the arguments made by the hypercritical school were revived by a number of scholars in Western academia.
Robert W. Thomson, the former holder of the chair in Armenian Studies at
Harvard University and the translator of several classical Armenian works, became the most vocal critic of Khorenatsi with the 1978 publication of his English translation of
History of the Armenians. Thomson labeled Khorenatsi an "audacious, and mendacious, faker" and "a mystifier of the first order". He wrote that Khorenatsi's account contained various anachronisms and inventions. Thomson's arguments were criticized by a number of scholars both in and outside Armenia.
Vrej Nersessian, the curator of the Christian Middle East Section at the
British Library, took issue with many of Thomson's characterizations, including his later dating of the writing and his contention that Khorenatsi was merely an apologist work for the princely Bagratuni dynasty:
Gagik Sargsyan, an Armenian scholar of the Classics and a leading biographer of Khorenatsi, also criticized Thomson for his "anachronistic hypercriticism" and for stubbornly rehashing and "even exaggerating the statements once put forward" by the late nineteenth and early twentieth-century scholars, particularly Grigor Khalatiants (1858–1912). Sargsyan noted that Thomson, in condemning Khorenatsi's failure to mention his sources, ignored the fact that "an antique or medieval author may have had his own rules of mentioning the sources distinct from the rules of modern scientific ethics". Thomson's allegation of Khorenatsi's
plagiarism and supposed distortion of sources was also countered by scholars who contended that Thomson was "treating a medieval author with the standards" of twentieth-century
historiography and pointed out that numerous classical historians, Greek and Roman alike, engaged in the same practice. Aram Topchyan, then a research fellow at the
Hebrew University of Jerusalem of Armenian Studies, agreed and noted that it was odd that Thomson would fault Khorenatsi for failing to mention his sources because this was an accepted practice among all classical historians. In 2000, historian
Nina Garsoïan wrote that the dispute over Khorenatsi's dating continued and that "no final agreement on this subject has yet been reached" at the time. In a study first published in 2003–2004, Garsoïan argued that the final version of the history should be dated to the half-century following 775, although she did not rule out the possibility that this final version was based on a history under the name of Movses Khorenatsi dating back to the fifth century. In 2021, historian Albert Stepanyan noted that "some skepticism remains regarding the person and work of Khorenatsi", but he affirms Khorenatsi's fifth-century dating and attributes the modern criticism of Khorenatsi to the misinterpretation of interpolations into the work from later times. Today, Movses Khorenatsi's work is recognized as an important source for the research of
Urartian and early Armenian history. It was Movses Khorenatsi's account of the ancient city of Van with its cuneiform inscriptions which lead the
Société Asiatique of Paris to finance the expedition of
Friedrich Eduard Schulz, who there discovered the previously unknown
Urartian language. == Manuscript history ==