All this points to the importance of social memory; as the example of the relationship between modern and ancient Greeks shows, ethnies are constitut… - Anthony D. Smith

In each case, the concept of chosenness played a central role. For Greeks and Armenians, the myth of ethnic election was both direct and transmitted. It was an act of God who had singled out a special community of His faithful to live according to His holy laws and receive His special blessings, the blessings being conditional on the holding of correct beliefs and the performance of sacred obligations. As with the Jews, the overriding purpose was to become a holy people beloved of God, a people of priests worthy of the status and location which God had bestowed on the community. But, unlike the Jews, Armenians and Greeks saw their election as a reward for receiving the true faith rejected by the Jews. They were therefore required to supplant the Jews as the chosen people, and become the heirs of a people who had fallen from grace. In this sense, the chosen status of Greeks and Armenians was a legacy from the Jewish people, and only much later did the Orthodox community of true believers become imbued with Greek culture and a sense of Greek-speaking community, and to the outside world Orthodoxy became synonymous with Greek culture and origins.

Examples could be multiplied to show that language, long held to be the main, if not the sole, differentiating mark of ethnicity, is often irrelevant or divisive for the sense of ethnic community.... Yet scholars persist in regarding language as the distinguishing mark of ethnicity, a standpoint that leads to gross simplification and misunderstanding of both ancient and modem periods of ethnic community. ... Besides language is one of most malleable and dependent of cultural categories ... particular linguistic formations are largely the product of the interplay of religion and political organization in a given area. Hence any delineation of the “cultural” aspect of ethnie must include all manifestations of culture and look beneath the immediate and salient sign of communication which a shared language expresses, to the underlying lifestyles and values of a community.

But the parallels go further, Greeks, Jews, and Armenians after their subordination to others and emigration or expulsion from their original homelands became Diaspora ethno-religious communities cultivating the particular virtues and aptitudes of their traditions. These included a respect for scholarship and learning, derived from constant study of sacred texts (and in the Greek case some of their ancient secular texts seen through religious filters); and hence a generally high status accorded to religious scholars and clergy within each enclave. Allied to this was a marked aptitude for literary expression—poetic, philosophical, legal, liturgical, linguistic, and historical.