They were thus identified with the old party of the Pauliani, condemned at the first council of Nice in 325, and diffused in Syria a century later.
It may be that under stress of common persecution there was a certain fusion in Armenia of Pauliani and Manicheans.
It is then on the whole probable that the Paulicians who appear in Armenian records as early as 550, and were afterwards= called Thonraki, by the Greeks by the Armenian name Paulikiani, were the remains of a primitive adoptionist Christianity, widely dispersed in the east and already condemned under the name of Pauliani by the council of Nice in 325.
Already at the Council of Nicaea in 325 the Pauliani were put outside the Church and condemned to be rebaptized.