New Indian-Chennai News + more

Guru · Guru

RE: St.Thomas in India Fables -Continued

Guru · Guru

கபாலீச்சுரம் கோவிலின் புராதன வரலாற்று விளக்ககூட்டம்!

ஜூலை 31, 2010 by vedaprakash

கபாலீச்சுரம் கோவிலின் புராதன வரலாற்று விளக்ககூட்டம்

கபாலீச்சுரம் கோவிலின் புராதன வரலாற்று விளக்ககூட்டம்: கபாலீச்சுரம் கோவிலின் புராதன வரலாற்று விளக்ககூட்டம் மயிலை மாங்கொள்ளை மைதானத்தில் இன்று சனிக்கிழமை மாலை – 6.00 மணிக்கு நடைபெறும் என்று மைலாப்பூர் பக்கம் சில சுவரொட்டிகள் பார்த்தபோது வியப்பாக இருந்தது.

கபாலீச்சுரம் கோவிலின் புராதன வரலாற்று விளக்ககூட்டம்இடம்: மயிலை மாங்கொள்ளை மைதானம்

நேரம் : சனிக்கிழமை மாலை – 6.00 மணி

தேதி: 31-07-2010

கிருத்துவர்களா, நாத்திகர்களா, யார் இந்த கூட்டத்தை நடத்துவது? ஏனெனில், ஏற்கெனவே கிருத்துவ தெய்வநாயகம் பலதடவை[1] இங்கு வந்து கலாட்டா செய்துள்ளது நாளிதழ்களின் மூலம் தெரிய வந்துள்ளது[2]. அந்நிலையில், இது அந்த கிருத்துவக்கூட்டமே நடத்தும் கூட்டமா, இல்லை பெரியார் பனியன்கள் அணிந்துகொண்டு வந்து ஆர்பாட்டம் செய்த கூட்டமா, செபாஸ்டியன் சீமானின் கூட்டமா, நெடுமாறன் கூட்டமா, இல்லை சில இந்துக்களுக்கே ரோஷம் வந்து நடத்தப்படும் கூட்டமா என்று ஆச்சரியமாக இருக்கிறது.

“ருத்ர சேனா” என்றால் என்ன? “ருத்ர சேனா” அன்ற அமைப்பு நடத்துகிறது என்றுள்ளது! ஆனால், தெய்வநாயகம் போன்ற சரித்திர புரட்டர்களுக்கு, “ருத்ரன்” என்பது ஜேஹோவா / ஹேஹோவா[3]என்ற கடவுள் ஆவர்! ஆக யார் இந்த கூட்டத்தை நடத்துகின்றனர் என்பது, அவர்கள் பேசுவதிலிருந்து தான் தெரியவரும் போலிருக்கிறது! “ருத்ரன்” என்றாலும் தமிழ் கடவுள் ஆகாது[4], ஏனெனில் திராவிட புரட்டர்கள் அது ஆரியமயமாக்கப் பட்ட “சிவன்” என்று கூறுவார்கள்!

தமிழர்கள் கோவிலுக்கு விரோதமாக இருப்பது ஏன்?தமிழர்களுக்கு இப்படி அவர்களுடைய கோவில்களைப் பற்றிய வரலாற்றைச் சொல்லவேண்டிய அவசியம் என்ன? தமிழ், தமிழர் என்றெல்லாம் சொல்லிக்கொண்டு, நாத்திக பித்து பிடித்து தமது கலாச்சாரம், பாரம்பரம், பண்பாடு, நாகரிகம் முதலியவற்றை மறந்து, சொந்தத் தாயை விடுத்து, மாற்றாந்தாயோடு வாழும் போக்கில், கிருத்துவ-முஸ்லிம்-கம்யூனிஸ கோஷ்டிகளுடன் சேர்ந்து கொண்டு, இழிவு படுத்தி வருகிறார்கள். கோவிலைச் சேர்ந்த எந்த பொருள், வஸ்து, வாஸ்து[5], விஷயம் என்றாலும், அதில் தங்களுக்கு என்ன காசு கிடைக்கும் என்ற நோக்கில்தான் இந்த பாதகர்கள் இருக்கிறார்கள், செயலில் இறங்குகிறார்கள்.

[1] பிரதோஷம் அன்று கிருத்துவமத பிரச்சார நோட்டீஸுகளை கொடுத்தது – இந்து முன்னணி ராமகோபால் புகார் கொடுத்துள்ளார்.

கோவிலில் நுழைவோம் என்று இருமுறை ஜூன் மாதத்தில் கலட்டா செய்யப்பட்டுள்ளது.

செபாஸ்டியன் சீமானுடன் ஒருமுறை கூட்டம் போட்டது – 02-05-2010.

நெடுமாறன் மற்றும் பெரியார் பனியன்கள் அணிந்துகொண்டு வந்த கூட்டத்துடன் கலாட்ட செய்தது – 13-06-2010

[2] இதைப் பற்றிய விவரங்களை, இதே தளத்தில் மற்ற கட்டுரைகளில் விவரங்களுடன் காணலாம்.

[3] அர்னால்ட் டோயன்பி (Arnold Toyanbee) என்ற பிரபலமான சரித்திர ஆசிரியர் எப்படி ஒரு காட்டுவாசிகளின் கடவுள், காலனி ஆதிக்கக் காலத்தில், கிருத்து பரப்பு முறைகளில், ஒரு அனைத்துலகக் கடவுள் ஆக்கப்பட்டார் என்று தமது நூலில் “An Historian’s Approach to Religion” விளக்கியுள்ளதைப் பார்க்கலாம்.

[4] தொல்லியல் நிபுணர் டாக்டர் ஆர். நாகசாமி பலதடவை ருத்ரன், சிவன்……. எல்லாம் ஒன்றுதான் என்று விளக்கியுள்ளார். ஆனல், அரைகுறை வேக்காடுகள், மூலங்களைப் படிக்காமலேயே, பொய்களைப் பரப்பி, மக்களை மடையர்களாக்கி விட்டுள்ளதை தமிழகத்தில் பார்க்கலாம்.

[5] வஸ்து-வாஸ்து என்றெல்லம் பேசும் திரு. கணபதி ஸ்தபதி கூட நாத்திகர்கள் போல பேசுவது வேடிக்கையான விஷயம். “கடவுளையே” நாங்கள்தாம் உருவாக்குகிறோம் என்ற அகம்பாவமும், சில நேரங்களில் காணப்படுகிறது

Guru · Guru

-- Edited by devapriyaji on Sunday 1st of August 2010 07:45:54 AM

Guru · Guru

26 TOMBS OF THE 12-APOSTLES IN GERMANY
Published on September 4th, 2008 In Uncategorized, Photography, Blogging, Friends, Goals,Plans, News, Philosophy, Travel, Writing-Poetry, Politics \| Views 453

Peter"s Bones and Rome"s Truth Bart Brewer, an ex-Catholic priest and head of Mission to Catholics International, addressed the foolishness of the Catholic love of, and veneration for, bits and pieces of dead people in his autobiography: Even Martin Luther wondered how there could be 26 apostles buried in Germany, when they were only twelve in the entire Bible. . . It is clear that most ‘relics" are frauds.–Bart Brewer, Pilgrimage From Rome, (C) 1986 Bob Jones University Press , p. 126 Two 20th century popes underscored the truth of Brewer"s words by their “authentications" of Peter"s tomb and bones. In his Christmas radio message on December 23, 1950, Pope Pius XII announced that, confirmed by work and study, the actual tomb of “St. Peter" had been found. He went on to make a second revelatory statement: A second question . . . concerns the relics of the saint: have they been found? . . . New investigations, most patient and accurate, were subsequently carried out with the results that we, comforted by the judgment of qualified, prudent and competent people, believe are positive. The relics of Saint Peter have been identified in a way we believe convincing. Some 18 years later, another pope made a similar confirmation that the remains of Peter had been found and confirmed: [W]e believe it our duty, in the present state of archaeological and scientific conclusions, to give you and the church this happy announcement, bound as we are to honor sacred relics, backed by a reliable proof of their authenticity… In the present case, we must be all the more eager and exultant when we are right in believing that the few but sacred mortal remains have been traced of the Prince of the Apostles, of Simon son of Jonah, of the fisher-man named Peter by Christ, of he who was chosen by the Lord to found His church and to whom He entrusted the keys of His kingdom … until His final glorious return.–Text of Announcement by Pope Paul VI Concerning the Relics, The New York Times, 27 June 1968 Now, just where was Peter buried? And what relics of his were found at the burial site? This is where things get rather interesting. With these announcements concerning Peter"s bones, Rome has again shown her willingness to believe anything, make up anything, and just plain lie, in her wonderful march to perdition. The sadness of it is that she is dragging so many souls with her. The high altar of St. Peter"s Basilica is a magnificent work of religious architecture. Just 20 feet or so beneath the high altar, in the basement of the Basilica, one can view an ugly, graffiti-covered brick-and-plaster wall. Inside the wall, known as the Graffiti Wall, there is a rectangular cavity containing nineteen clear plastic boxes filled with old bones, some of which are claimed to be the mortal remains of St. Peter himself. A bronze gate, set at some distance from the wall, prevents visitors from getting too close. However, there is a opening in the wall, through which one can see two of the boxes and their bony contents. Are the bones in these boxes, so carefully protected in the very bullseye of Catholic focus, those of Peter? Well, it seems that ten of the boxes hold the remains of domestic animals — goats, sheep, cows, swine, and a chicken. In another of the boxes rest the mortal remains of a mouse. The other eight boxes hold human remains. There can be no doubt these are the remains of Peter, for an “infallible" pope has declared them to be such. Unfortunately, Pope Paul VI neglected to explain how Peter came to include the bones of a mouse and various farm animals in the inventory of his skeletal remains. Rather makes one curious as to what Peter really looked like in the flesh, doesn"t it? The most precious of Peter"s bones found in the Graffiti Wall are the 29 fragments of the Apostle"s skull. Note: the 29 pieces of Peter"s skull found in the Grafitti Wall are not to be confused with Peter"s other skull, which is stored in the Cathedral of St. John Lateran. The Graffiti Wall bones of Peter and Peter"s other skull are not the only true relics of the “Prince of the Apostles" found in and around the Vatican. In a page one article in the August 22, 1949 edition of the New York Times, Camille Cianfarra revealed that Vatican archeologists had discovered another of Peter"s skeletons in the Red Wall, yards away from the place where the plastic boxes of Peter"s bones are worshipped today. Pope Pius XII is reported to have kept these bones in his private apartment for 14 years, during which time he had his personal physician, Dr. Galeazzi-Lisi, and several medical experts, examine them. The consensus of the authorities was that the bones were those of a powerfully built male who died in the seventh decade of his life. That just had to be Peter, didn"t it? Well . . . In 1956, the Vatican hired anthropologist Venerando Correnti to study the bones that Pius XII had certified had been found in the genuine tomb of Peter. It must be remembered that, when speaking ex cathedra in matters touching on faith and morals involving the whole church, the popes are infallible. And, certainly, the identification of the tomb and relics of Peter, of whom Pius XII was one of an unbroken line of successors, must touch on the faith of all the Catholic church. Wouldn"t you think? Anyway, Correnti and his team began their detailed study of the bones taken from the papal-certified “authentic tomb of St. Peter." It is pretty well accepted, at least in medical circles I should think, that human beings each have two fibula, one in each leg. Imagine Correnti"s shock when he discovered a third fibula among the bones he was examining. How his consternation must have increased when he identified five tibias (Again, the normal human allotment is two tibias per person). What is more, one of the tibias was definitely that of a woman. Hmmmmm. Could there have been some things about Peter we have not been told? The situation continued to deteriorate as Correnti"s collaborator, Luigi Cardini positively identifed some half a hundred of the bones and fragments to have originally been used to hold up the skin of hogs, sheep, goats and a few chickens. The bones found by the Red Wall, and certified by one of those “infallible" popes as having been found in the “true tomb of the Prince of the Apostles," were quietly stored away in some secret location. Unlike the bones found in the Graffiti Wall, they are not venerated. You can read all about these bones and their story in Venerando Correnti"s own words in \“Relazione dello studio compiuto su tre gruppi di resti scheletrici umani gia rinvenuti sotto la Confessione della basilica vaticana, in Le Reliquie di Pietro Sotto La Confessione della Basilica Vaticana, by Margherita Guarducci, Libreria Editrice Vaticana, Rome, 1965, pp. 83-160. Now, mixing the bones of barnyard animals with those of saints might be something of a problem for Catholic apologists. Sort of makes it difficult to prove that any of these bones really are those of historical Peter, the “Prince of the Apostles." And why would the bones of the most famous of all Catholics (Not that Peter ever was Catholic) have been stuck away inside an ugly old hollow wall instead of some fancy sarcophagus? Doesn"t seem to match up with the RCC"s own histories. In the 6th century, the Liber Pontificalisinformed that the emperor Constantine built the basilica on the site of the former Temple of Apollo and enclosed Peter"s remains in a five-foot-high cubical bronze structure. (Engelbert Kirschbaum, The Tombs of St Peter " St Paul,translated by John Murray, St. Martin"s Press, N.Y., 1959, pp. 51, 219 n. 3) In his 1968 pronouncement that the Graffiti Wall relics were authentic, Pope Paul VI quoted 4th century church historian Eusebius: It is said that Paul was beheaded by him (Nero) and Peter crucified at Rome and the monuments inscribed with the names of Peter and Paul still testify to this and are still visited in the cemeteries of the city of Rome.–Text of Announcement by Pope Paul VI Concerning the Relics, The New York Times, June 27, 1968 Let"s look a little more closely at what Eusebius wrote. The Bishop, a close confidant of the Emperor, wrote of cemeteries, not basilicas, as being the sites where the “monuments" of the apostles were located. That would place the remains outside the area of the Vatican archeological digs. In fact, when Eusebius wrote to Theophania in 333AD (well after the construction of the basilica was completed), he reported that the Romans had honored Peter “with a splendid sepulcher overlooking the city – a sepulcher to which come crowds from all over the Roman Empire as though drawn to a great sanctuary and temple of God." (Hugo Gressmann, Eusebius Werke, Dritter Bank, Zweiter Teil, Die Theophanie. Die Griechischen Bruchstucke und Ubersetzung der Syrischen Uberlieferung, 2nd Ed. by Adolf Laminski, Die Griechischen Christlichen Schrifsteller Der ersten Jahrhunderte, Akademie Verlag, Berlin, 1992, p. 175) Now just exactly where the Tropaion of Peter was located is sort of difficult to discover from Eusebius" account. The Latin version of what Gaius had written puts it on the Appian Way, a public road leading to the Vatican. The Greek version of the same account places the thing on the Vatican Hill itself. (Daniel Wm. O"Conner, Peter in Rome: The literary, Liturgical, and Archaeological Evidence, Columbia University Press, New York, 1969, pp. 95-96) About all we can really be sure of, if we are to rely on Eusebius, is that whatever the Tropaion of Peter may have been, it for sure is not to be found under the high altar of St. Peter"s. In his 1968 announcement, Paul VI declared the Graffiti Wall site as not only being the tomb of Peter but as being the wonderful “Tropaion of Gaius" as well. In his Ecclesiastical History [II xxv 6-7], Eusebius wrote of an ecclesiastic named Gaius who, around the year 200AD, was quarreling over who had the best holy sites with a certain Proclus. “Gaius," Eusebius writes, “in a written dialog with Proclus, the leader of the Phrygians, says the following about the places where the sacred relics of the apostles mentioned [Peter and Paul] are deposited: ‘But I can point out the tropaia of the apostles; for if you go to the Vatican or the Ostian way, you will find the tropaia of those who founded this church."" What are tropaia? Monuments? Graves? Tombs? Memorials? Relics? Despite the arguments of Catholic apologists, from the context of Gaius" argument with Proclus it is clear that tombs or graves can be ruled out as meanings of tropaia, The Red Wall structure cannot be a Tropaion of Gaius. As I mentioned earlier, the Pope kept the discovery of the bones a secret for some years. In her New York Times article, Cianfarra explained why: According to officials the reason for keeping the discovery secret is that the Pontiff, before making the announcement which, they said, will certainly be of tremendous interest for both Roman Catholics and non-Catholics, wants his archaeological experts to gather proofs so incontrovertible that no one will be able to challenge their authenticity. Accordingly, tests were said to have been made, the nature of which was not disclosed.(Text of Announcement by Pope Paul VI Concerning the Relics, The New York Times, 27 June 1968) Notice how that works? From the statement, it is clear that the Pope was not so interested in discovering the truth concerning the bones, but in “gathering proofs" to support the conclusions he already had reached. That is the same process that Rome has always used when “interpreting" Scripture. They decide what they want the Word of God to say, then they set out to find the texts in the Bible that they can force to support that understanding. We see the same thing today in the utterances of RCC, and a lot of professing Christian, apologists. Could the bones found in either of the “True" tombs of St. Peter actually be those of the Apostle? I suppose there is a remote possibility, but let us explore another avenue for a bit. When Constantine built the old St. Peter"s Basilica, sometime around 320-325 AD, he had it constructed on the surface of a magnificent pagan cemetery. In the process, numerous tombs and mausolea were violated. This was no big deal because, as pontifex maximus of the Roman religion, Constantine could grant official pardons for this “violatio sepuchri." Though the builders likely tried to minimize the damage to existing graves, they surely did disturb the rest of some old bones. When this happened, they were careful to pile the bones neatly with sarcophagi. This latter was a practice dating from well before the time of Constantine, and clearly was being done at the time the Graffiti Wall was built beside the Red Wall. On the north side of the “Tomb of the Egyptians," one of many tombs discovered beneath the floor of St. Peter"s, a chest was found filled with human bones, clearly the remains of earlier inhumations reburied when the tomb was built. (Jocelyn Toynbee and John Ward Perkins,The Shrine of St. Peter and the Vatican Excavations, Longmans, Green and Co., London, 1956, p. 53) What it all boils down to is that Pope Pius XII was wrong when he announced to the world that Peter"s tomb had been found and, when Pope Paul VI announced that the bones of Peter had been identified he also was wrong. In common with so many of the relics so dear to Roman Catholicism, their discovery and authentication is awash with evidence of superstition, ignorance, incompetence and just plain chicanery. If the Catholic faithful are told to believe that the bones authenticated by Paul VI as being those of Peter of the five legs, two heads and two genders, why shouldn"t they believe that the 11th century skull in the Lateran also is his? This fraud is nothing more, nor anything less, than archeological eisegesis. Leviticus 19:4, “Turn ye not unto idols, nor make to yourselves molten gods: I am the LORD your God." 2 Corinthians 6:14-18, “Be ye not unequally yoked together with unbelievers: for what fellowship hath righteousness with unrighteousness? and what communion hath light with darkness? And what concord hath Christ with Belial? or what part hath he that believeth with an infidel? And what agreement hath the temple of God with idols? for ye are the temple of the living God; as God hath said, I will dwell in them, and walk in them; and I will be their God, and they shall be my people. Wherefore come out from among them, and be ye separate, saith the Lord, and touch not the unclean thing; and I will receive you, And will be a Father unto you, and ye shall be my sons and daughters, saith the Lord Almighty." http://hissheep.org/catholic/peters_bones_and_romes_truth.html

Guru · Guru

St Peter was not the first Pope and never went to Rome, claims Channel 4

By Jonathan Wynne-Jones, Religious Affairs Correspondent
Last Updated: 10:54PM BST 18 Apr 2008

St Peter was not the first Pope claims Channel 4

Catholicism holds that the Pope is the sole successor to the "supremacy" of Peter

St Peter"s journey to Rome led to the spread of Christianity in the West and the foundation of Roman Catholicism, so the Church has always taught.

But a new documentary will challenge the link as nothing more than a “conspiracy of faith". In it, prominent academics accuse the Vatican of misleading the world over the fate of the man regarded as Jesus Christ"s closest disciple. In allegations likely to spark controversy, they accuse the Church of fabricating a connection with the apostle to validate giving ultimate power to the papacy.

Catholicism has taught for centuries that Peter was martyred and buried in Rome and that all popes succeed him, but the documentary will challenge this by asserting that he never reached the Italian city. Instead, it will accuse the Church of ignoring the discovery of a tomb in Jerusalem that archaeologists believe contains the bones of Peter.

Leading theologians said that these views were an “attempt to smear Catholicism" and criticised Channel 4 for allowing such “outlandish" claims to be broadcast.

They expressed concern that they would appeal to people who are easily persuaded by conspiracy theories, such as the idea that Jesus had a child with Mary Magdalene, as proposed in Dan Brown"s best-seller The Da Vinci Code.

Dr Robert Beckford, a theology lecturer at Oxford Brookes University, who presents the documentary, denied that this was an attempt to attack the Catholic Church. “This is about looking at what the pillars of power are founded on and examining the scholarship that most Catholics take for granted," he said.

“We found that there is no scientific evidence to support the idea that Peter was buried in Rome, but yet the rival theory has not got out because it challenges the Church.

“If you undermine its basis for power you undermine the Church. It"s tragic that the faith gets reduced to manipulating the facts and to one Church trying to make itself superior to others."

As Christianity spread following the crucifixion of Jesus, it became important for the new churches to claim a link with the disciples and led the Catholic Church to establish a connection with St Peter.

Catholics believe the proof that Christ constituted St Peter head of His Church is found in the two Petrine texts, Matthew 16:17-19, and John 21:15-17. In Matthew, the office is solemnly promised to the apostle as Jesus addresses him: “Blessed art thou, Simon Bar-Jona: because flesh and blood hath not revealed it to thee, but my Father who is in heaven. And I say to thee: That thou art Peter; and upon this rock I will build my Church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it. And I will give to thee the keys of the kingdom of heaven."

Roman Catholicism holds that the Pope, also known as the Bishop of Rome, is the sole successor to the “supremacy" or primacy of Peter and is thus the “Vicar of Christ" for the world.

It is traditionally believed that he was crucified in Rome and buried where the Basilica of St Peter was later built, beneath the high altar.

In 1939, the Vatican announced that the bones of Peter had been found in Rome during an archaeological dig. But the documentary casts doubt on this, questioning why the dig was carried out “in total secrecy", and led by a “personal friend" of the Pope.

“The Pope"s authority over the world"s one billion Roman Catholics derives from the belief that Peter died and was buried here almost 2,000 years ago," said Dr Beckford.

The documentary, The Secrets of the Twelve Disciples (Channel 4 today at 5.45pm), suggests it that is much more likely that St Peter was buried in an ossuary found in Jerusalem with the inscription Shimon Bar Jonah - Simon son of Jonah - the Hebrew name for Peter.

However, Gerald O"Collins, professor emeritus of Systematic Theology at the Gregorian University in Rome, said that the documentary contradicted the “great weight" of tradition that accepted Peter had been martyred and buried in Rome. “This is awful stuff, total nonsense," he said. “This kind of outlandish garbage drives me nuts."

John Medlin, the general manager of the Latin Mass Society, said of the “intellectually-challenged" arguments: “They are on a par with Dan Brown"s Da Vinci Code and are unsubstantiated. It shows undisguised disdain for the Catholic Church."

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/1582585/St-Peter-was-not-the-first-Pope-and-never-went-to-Rome,-claims-Channel-4.html

Guru · Guru

ஆர்ச் பிஷப் – சின்னப்பா தமிழர் விரோத போக்கு

7:18 மு.பகல் இல் ஜூன் 14, 2010 | இந்தியா இயேசு, இயேசு, கருணாநிதி, கிறித்துவம் - கிறிஸ்துவம், சிலுவை, திருக்குறள், தோமையார், பரிசுத்த ஆவி இல் பதிவிடப்பட்டது | 14 மறுமொழிகள்

Santhome Church Stooges at Mylai Temple

தன் புத்தகங்களில் தெய்வநாயகம் தெளிவாக பணம் மற்றும் ஆய்வு விஷயங்களில் சந்தோம் சர்ச் உதவுகிறது என தெளிவாக கூறியுள்ளார்.

தெய்வநாயகம் சொல்வது- கிடைத்துள்ள புதைபொருள் ஆய்வுப்படி இன்றைய சாந்தோம் சர்ச் முன்பு கபாலீஸ்வரர் கோயிலை இடித்துக் கட்டியது எனத் தெளிவாகக் கூறுகிறார்.

திருஞானசம்பந்தரும் அப்பரும் வழிபட்ட அந்த மயிலைக் கோயிலை அங்கே மீண்டும் அமைக்க ஆர்ச் பிஷப் தூண்டுகிறாரா?

தன் புத்தகங்களில் தெய்வநாயகம் தெளிவாக பணம் மற்றும் ஆய்வு விஷயங்களில் சந்தோம் சர்ச் உதவுகிறது என தெளிவாக கூறியுள்ளார்.
தெய்வநாயகம் சொல்வது- கிடைத்துள்ள புதைபொருள் ஆய்வுப்படி இன்றைய சாந்தோம் சர்ச் முன்பு கபாலீஸ்வரர் கோயிலை இடித்துக் கட்டியது எனத் தெளிவாகக் கூறுகிறார்.
திருஞானசம்பந்தரும் அப்பரும் வழிபட்ட அந்த மயிலைக் கோயிலை அங்கே மீண்டும் அமைக்க ஆர்ச் பிஷப் தூண்டுகிறாரா?

Tension near Mylai Kapaleeshwarar Temple
Sunday, 06.13.2010, (GMT+5.5)

Chennai: Tension prevailed in the areas close to Kapaleeshwarar Temple in Mylapore on Sunday as two groups were engaged in a slogan-raising clash over entry into the temple. Activists of one group gathered on a road near the shrine to enter the temple, touch the idol and do services themselves, while members of another opposed them.

Devotees headed to the Kapaleeshwarar Temple on Sunday afternoon were in for a shock. Roads leading to the temple were cordoned off and swarming with policemen, who questioned everyone going to the temple.

The provocation arose after a bunch of activists, who gathered on Kutchery Road, declared that they would not give up till they entered the temple, touched the idol and performed their services themselves.

Around 30 activists of the Confederation of Self Respecting Tamilians, led by church and Tamil activist M Deivanayagam, had gathered on Kutchery Road, with Tamil nationalist P Nedumaran. Also present were young activists, clad in black t-shirts with Periyar’s picture printed on them.
The activists also voiced other grouses. “There is a legislation in Tamil Nadu to ensure that persons belonging to any caste can become a priest at temples and that the services can be performed in Tamil”, said Nedumaran.

“But there is a lobby in many temples to make sure this does not happen”, he alleged. Repeated requests by senior police officials not to spark tension in the area fell on deaf ears. “We know we cannot enter the temple. But we will still head towards it”, said Deivanayagam to a highly placed police officer. The activists also insisted that the police should not intervene in the issue unlesssomething untoward happened.

Similar was the picture near the temple itself, where Vishwa Hindu Parishad cadre engaged in rabble rousing, refusing to cooperate with the police. They even headed towards the gathered activists and engaged in counter-slogan raising. Temple activists, meanwhile, insisted the VHP cadre had come there on their own and that they had nothing to do with it.

Police, who had been standing guard outside the temple since Saturday evening, said they would continue doing so till the temple is shut on Sunday night. “This is a sensitive issue. We will not take any chance”, said a senior police official who did not want to be named.

The tension surrounding the temple ended only when police picked up 11 men, including Deivanayagam and Nedumaran, and one woman. They were released later in the evening.
http://www.timeschennai.com/index.php?mod=article&cat=Chennai&article=1803

Guru · Guru

Archbishop Arrested for Defense of

The following comes from the Salesian News Agency:

On Friday, March 5, the Archbishop Malayappan Chinnappa, SDB, of Madras-Mylapore was arrested near Guindy, close to Chennai (Madras), for having taken part in a demonstration in defense of the rights of Christian “Untouchables.” Arrested with him were the Archbishop Peter Fernando of Madurai, Bishop Anthonisamy Neethinathan of Chinglepet, and a number of priests, sisters, and lay Christians.

The Indian police held them for four hours outside Chennai, the capital of the State of Tamil Nadu, at the end of march of 500,000 people, which lasted a month, having started from the city of Kanyakumari, in the south of the country.

Fr. G. Cosmon Arokiaraj, executive secretary of Bishops’ Commission for issues regarding the Indian caste system, told the AsiaNews Agency that the arrests started on Friday morning when the demonstration involving thousands of Christian citizens was joined by a group of the faithful led by Bishop Neethinathan. Informed of what had happened, Archbishop Fernando, and Archbishop Chinnappa went to the place to try to speak with the authorities, but they also were arrested.

The demonstration was being held to draw the attention of the Indian people and of the authorities to the situation of marginalization of which the Christian “untouchables” are victims. The “untouchables,” also know as Dalits, which literally means "trampled upon," are the members of the lowest castes in traditional Indian society, who lived in segregated neighborhoods and were confined to menial jobs.

In 1950 the Indian government established new programs giving Dalits special preference in education and public employment. But these preferences – originally provided only for Hindu Dalits, then later extended to Sikhs and Buddhists – have never applied to Christians, who account for about 18 million of India’s 27 million Dalits. The protest marchers, including the bishops, were released after being held until the evening.

"We are shocked that this is the way the government is responding to the legitimate democratic struggles of the peace-loving Christian community,” Fr. Arokiaraj commented.

Guru · Guru

Chennai prelate accused of supporting Syrians

Published Date: October 13, 2009

Tags: Archbishop Malayappan Chinnappa, Forum for Catholic Unity, Migrants, SMC, St. Thomas Christians, Syrian Christians

Chennai prelate accused of supporting Syrians thumbnail

Some lay people in Chennai have accused Archbishop Malayappan Chinnappa of Madras-Mylapore of supporting Oriental Syro Malabar Catholics’ demand for a diocese in the city.

The lay organization, Forum for Catholic Unity, circulated a letter addressed to the archbishop that says the prelate’s “unilateral decisions” support the Syrian demands.

The people of Syro Malabar Church (SMC) are originally migrants from Kerala and trace their faith to Saint Thomas the Apostle, who according to a tradition preached the Gospel in southwestern India.

The letter dated Oct. 8 said Syrian Christians from Kerala, with their demand for a diocese in Chennai, are trying control to some prime properties dedicated to the saint in the city.

The letter pointed out the Syro-Malabar people have lived in Chennai for generations and fully assimilated in the Latin Rite practices of the local Church.

The SMC people, it added, started suddenly to call themselves the “true children of St. Thomas” and asked the archdiocese to return the property they say the archdiocese so far has managed “illicitly.”

The letter accused the archbishop of unilaterally agreeing to an independent SMC diocese. It also criticized him for creating personal parishes for the SMC people.

However, the Church rules show the creation of a diocese is long process, and the final decision is with the Vatican. Personal parishes are part of provisions recommended by the Church laws to cater to the spiritual needs of linguistic and ethnic minorities in a diocese.

The lay group’s letter said it cannot accept the archbishop’s “unilateral, unprincipled, unethical and undemocratic” decisions.

For over past two decades SMC people in India’s metropolitan cities have demanded their own Church structures to address the spiritual needs of their people.

In 1989, Kalyan diocese was created for SMC people in Mumbai area. Demands for similar dioceses in Chennai, Bangalore and Delhi are under Vatican’s consideration, according to SMC officials.

Guru · Guru

'Dr.' Deivanayagam the mad prophet of "Tamil Thomas Religion".

Guru · Guru

Dr. R. Arulappa: Late archbishop of the Madras-Mylapore Archdiocese.

Guru · Guru

Viviliyam, Thirukkural, Saiva Siddantham oppaayvin Maruppu Nool: Arunai Vadivel Mudaliar's refutation of Deivanayagam's spurious book.

Guru · Guru

Acharya Paul Adds A Footnote 1

By Ganesh Iyer & K.P. Sunil

His frame is sparse. He looks older than his 67 years. His white attire is crumpled and dirty. It is torn in a few places, indicating obvious paucity of finances. His long, flowing white beard gives him an ascetic look.

He speaks in spurts. In fluent Tamil and faultless English, unexpected in one who did not even complete his schooling. He is a great accumulator of books on a variety of subjects. From philosophy to religion, law to communism, in addition to complete sets of the Encyclopaedia Britannica and Americana. He is capable of speaking at length on any subject. An ability that endeared him to several persons, notably the Archbishop of Madras.

Ganesh Iyer, Paul Ganesh, John Ganesh, Janakiram Ganesh, Paul Gouthaman, Acharya Paul

Iyer was initially hesitant to talk to the Weekly about how he allegedly defrauded the Catholic mission in India of Rs. 14 lakhs. "The case has only now come to an end, he explains. "My opponents tried everything to crucify me before coming to a sort of compromise. I do not wish to tell you the truth of the whole affair. Because that will infuriate them further and they might renew their attacks on me. And I am financially in no position to defend myself, leave alone retaliate.

On his background

I have not had much by way of formal education. Only up to standard seven. My father was very poor and could not afford to educate his children much. He moved from his native village of Kannadikaathan in Ramnad district to Ceylon. It was there that I came into intimate contact with a college professor, A.H. Williams. He taught me English. He also introduced me to Christianity. I became so proficient in English that very soon, on my return to my native village, I was giving tuitions to some students.

On his association with Christianity

I read a lot of books on Christianity. I became convinced that Christ was the almighty God-the saviour of the world. I voluntarily converted myself to Christianity. Nobody forced me or compelled me. I changed my name to John Ganesh. I started addressing prayer meetings and preaching. I gained so much knowledge on the subject of Christianity that I was the main speaker at several conventions. The people so loved my talks that when it was advertised in newspapers, they just thronged to hear me.

On one occasion, authorities even ran a special train to carry people coming to one of my meetings. My relatives did not object to my close links with Christianity because I was bringing in money. Though I was married, I was away most of the time and for the best part of 20 years, I had little contact with my family.

On his introduction to the Archbishop of Madras, Father Arulappa

I reached a stage when I knew Christian theology better than most priests. I knew the Bible word for word. During my travels, I met some Catholic fathers in Sriviliputhur. They were quite taken aback by my knowledge of Christian theology. One of them took a fancy to me. It was he who introduced me to Father Arulappa. This was around 1973-74.

On How he became a Religious Pioneer

For the first three months Archbishop Arulappa treated me very nicely. I never even dreamt that one day he would misguide me. He used to frequently say: "Despite being Christians we do not have knowledge equal to yours on the subject. We are in a situation in which we have to learn Christianity from you.

I was perpetually short of money those days. And he used to give me some cash off and on.

One day, he told me: "You have tremendous knowledge. Now I want you to do something for me. I have a long-standing desire which you alone can fulfil and in the process, you will be able to do a tremendous service for the cause of Christianity as well.

I asked him what he wanted me to do.

Christianity, he said, was in India right from the beginning. But the general impression is that it had been brought here by foreigners. "I want to prove to the world, he said, "that lots of evidence exists in our country to prove that Christianity was here all along. I am not interested in spreading this finding among Indians. But I want it to be taken to the Westerners. It is they who are perpetuating the theory that they brought Christianity to India. I want you to do something in this connection.

He told me that he had written a book in Tamil, Perinba Villakku, in which he had propounded the theory that Tiruvalluvar was a Christian. I later found out that the book was not a popular one at all. That even today copies of it are gathering dust in bookstalls all over the country. He wanted me to do some work based on the contents of that book. Though Tiruvalluvar and St. Thomas, one of Jesus Christ's twelve disciples, had lived in different periods, he wanted me to unearth evidence to the effect that the two great personages had indeed met and that St. Thomas had converted Tiruvalluvar to Christianity and baptized him. He assured me: "If you do this successfully, both of us will become internationally famous. We will also get a lot of money. It will be very useful to you.

I had misgivings about the whole project. Because I knew that in India there were no ancient documents or monuments on Christianity. Some documents are there, no doubt, to the effect that St. Thomas came to India. But doubts still persist whether the person mentioned in those documents is indeed apostle Thomas or his disciple.

In fact, when some celebrations were held in Kerala over two decades ago, Jawaharlal Nehru, our then prime minister, who attended the functions, asked the learned priests who had gathered: "Is it really true that St. Thomas came to India? Nobody answered him. They merely smiled. They were unable to answer his query because they had no proof.

When I told the archbishop all this, he said: If that is so, then we will have to concoct evidence to prove our point. Evidence like palm frond writings, copper plate inscriptions and all that. I did not like the plan one bit. But I wanted money. And this he promised to arrange for me. So I went along with him.

On his modus operandi

The archbishop had planned minutely how this was to be done. It was simple but ingenious. Simply brilliant, if perverted. He made me cut brown paper into long strips-irregular and uneven like ancient palm frond scrolls. I then wrote whatever he asked me to on these strips. I adopted a scrawl that was similar to ancient writings-often indecipherable. And the style of language was also lifted from the past. Laborious and involved.

These strips of brown paper were then pasted with glue on white cardboard and then photographed. The photo print looked exactly like a photograph of ancient palm frond scrolls. The archbishop intended to pass these off to unsuspecting people as the real stuff. I was still hesitant. But a friend, Santiago, who used to work in a bank, advised me to go ahead and comply with the archbishop's request.

I made several such photographs. Hundreds, thousands. Entire portions of Tirukkural were written this way and interspersed with Christian thought. He used to give me money for expenses. Five thousand. Four thousand. Ten thousand. Whatever was left, he told me, I could keep for myself. And make myself comfortable. The money, he told me, came from abroad. It was for the specific purpose of my research. And so there was no necessity to account the same to the Church.

On his growing intimacy with the archbishop

I had informed the archbishop that I was a married man. Because of financial problems, I am roaming around looking for some money, I said. I do not wish to get involved in something illegal. I do not want to get into trouble. And my family should not suffer on that account.

Whenever I used to voice such misgivings, the archbishop used to reassure me: "Don t worry. I ll stand by you. No government or police will do anything against you. I will see to that. And no one in this diocese will dare do anything against my will. He repeated this to me several times, holding my hands in his.

He also used to consult me on several other matters. In the archbishop s residential complex in Madras, there is an ashram called Shanti Ashram. This was actually constructed under direction from me. He used to tell me that I was to him what St. Paul was to Jesus Christ.

To drive home the point he even began calling me Paul. He began introducing me to others as Acharya Paul. He told me that he had informed everyone that the research on Tiruvalluvar and St. Thomas was being done by Acharya Paul, a bachelor—a brahmachari. He requested that I keep up this pretence before others. But he gave me enough money to keep my family happy.

On the material benefits he derived out of this association

This house in Srirangam in which I am still staying was bought with money given by the archbishop. I also purchased some jewellery for my wife and two daughters. I had an Ambassador car at that time. In addition, the archbishop gave me the car he was personally using. I did not pay him any money for this. But he showed in his books that he had sold it to me for Rs. 25,000.

His constant refrain was: "You have whatever you want. But fulfil my life's mission. You will not have any problems. I must have benefited to the tune of over Rs. 14 lakhs during my association with the archbishop.

On the first rumble of trouble

Many individuals in the Church resented my intimacy with the archbishop. I used to visit Madras frequently and on these occasions used to stay in some of the leading hotels there. The archbishop used to bear all these expenses.

There were rumours at that time that some like Father D Souza and Father Francis (the archbishop's personal assistant) were likely to file a complaint against me before the police. But again, Father Arulappa assured me that no one under him would dare to breach his authority and file a complaint. He has even sent me letters which were seized by the police, to this effect.

On his trip to the Vatican

In 1977, the archbishop and I went to Rome. We visited the .i.Vatican;Vatican. And there I was presented to the Pope. The archbishop introduced me to the Pope as Acharya Paul, a great researcher who had done a lot to get at the roots of Christianity in India. He showed the Pope copies of some of the "documentary evidence" I had unearthed .

Let me tell you one thing. The Pope, great man that he was, was not impressed. Though he was saying "very good, very good" all the while, he took the photographs in his hands, glanced at them and then just let them fall out of his hands.

He did not care for them. Nor did he pay much heed to what the archbishop was saying. But he was very kind to me. Despite the fact that several dignitaries including heads of states were waiting for an audience, he spent about 20 minutes with me.

On how he was finally exposed

From the Vatican, we toured several places in Europe and finally returned to India. I straightaway went to my home in Srirangam. Since I did not hear from the archbishop for a number of days, I went over to Madras to meet him. It was then that he told me that during his absence, things had taken a turn for the worse. Someone had filed a complaint before the police, he informed me. But there is no cause for worry. When the matter comes to court, I only have to say a word and the case will be dropped. I worried a lot, nevertheless.

Immediately after, the police came. They raided my house and searched all over. They seized all documents and letters pertaining to the case. And they arrested me and placed me under remand. They seized my bank accounts and interrogated my family members.

I was made out to be a cheat, and a fraud. They even made out a case against me that I had taken a passport using a false name and a false address. In the passport my name was Acharya Paul, the name given to me by Archbishop Arulappa. The application had been made out by him and he had given my address as care of the archbishop's residence in Madras.

So what wrong have I done? But who would listen to me? Who was there to talk on my behalf? No one. Why? Because everyone had been heavily bribed. That is why. I understand that they gave away as much as Rs. 15 lakhs by way of bribes.

In the metropolitan magistrate's court, they convicted me to 10 months imprisonment. Later, in the high court, acting on a compromise petition filed, the sentence was reduced to 2 months. As I had already been under remand for nearly that period, I was let off. As part of the compromise, I had to forfeit all that I had earned through the archbishop-my money, jewellery, everything except my house which I was permitted to retain. I have no complaints about all that.

What I feel sad about is that I had done all this at the instance of the archbishop who had held all along that he would help me out at the time of trouble. But he himself came to court and testified that I had duped him and defrauded him of money. That was the last straw.

1 Originally published under the title "What Wrong Have I Done?" in The Illustrated Weekly of India, April 26 - May 2, 1987, Bombay.

Guru · Guru

Archbishop Arulappa Makes History 1

By K.P. Sunil

The case has been closed. And the dramatis personae prefer to maintain a studied silence. For fear that a post-mortem would reveal hidden cadavers in their cupboards. For even a superficial examination of the fraud that shook the foundations of the Catholic Church in Madras in the late seventies and early eighties indicates that a lot of embarrassing details have been swept under the mat.

Reverend Dr. R. Arulappa, former archbishop of the Madras diocese, who claims to have been duped by one Acharya Paul, also known as Ganesh Iyer, is ill. Incapacitated by serious cardiac problems. In fact, it is his ill-health that forced him to retire from his post as head of the diocese. So the infamous scandal had to be pieced together from court records, police files and the ramblings of the main character-Ganesh Iyer.

It all began in the early seventies. Ganesh Iyer, who had adopted the Christian faith and was a self-styled Bible preacher known as John Ganesh, went to Tiruchi in the course of his evangelical journeys and met a Catholic priest Father Michael of the Tamil Illakiya Kazhagam (Tamil Literary Society). He is reported to have presented himself to the priest as Dr. John Ganesh, professor of philosophy and comparative religions at the Banaras university, and recently returned from Jammu and Kashmir where he was involved in research on Christianity in India. Michael put him on to another priest, Father Mariadas of Sriviliputhur.

John Ganesh impressed Mariadas with his mastery over Christian theology. He showed him copies of notices extolling him as a speaker. He reportedly produced letters written to him by various scholars in the fields of education and religion. He is also reported to have shown Mariadas photographs of palm leaf writings and copper plate inscriptions several centuries old.

These documents, he reportedly claimed, traced the origins and development of the Christian faith in India. Since further research on the subject required money which John Ganesh claimed not to have, Mariadas took upon himself the task of locating funds for the project the successful completion of which, he felt, would provide a shot in the arm for Christianity in India.

Mariadas gave John Ganesh something in the range of Rs. 22,000 toward the research. And as his own funds were depleted, he introduced the researcher to the head of the Catholic Church in Madras, R. Arulappa.

Arulappa was a Tamil scholar who also had the reputation of being a researcher. He had translated the New Testament into Tamil and set to tune the Book of Psalms. He had also rendered in Tamil the life of Christ,Ulagin Uyir ( A The Life of the World ). He had learned Sanskrit and translated several Christian tenets into that language. He had also done extensive research on Tirukkural, the creation of the Tamil bard, Tiruvalluvar.

Tiruvalluvar is known to modern generations through his immortal literature. The exact time of his existence is lost in the mists of the hoary past. Some historians believe Tiruvalluvar to be a product of the early Sangam period in Tamil literature, several centuries before Christ. The Tamil Nadu government bases its calendar on the year of his birth. For this purpose, it is assumed that Tiruvalluvar was born exactly 2018 years ago, i.e. in the first century before Christ. Some literary experts place Tiruvalluvar in the first century after Christ, others date him 300 years after.

Just as little is known about Tiruvalluvar's origins, his religious beliefs are also shrouded in some mystery. Attempts have been made, going by the precepts contained in his verse, to speculate about his religion. While he is widely believed to have been a Hindu and the Tirukkural considered a revered Hindu scripture, other religions too have staked a claim on him. Since the Tirukkural enshrines the ideals of ahimsa , dharma and asceticism, many experts consider Tiruvalluvar to have been considerably influenced by Jain thought.

A recent paper presented by Dr. S. Padmanabhan makes Tiruvalluvar out to be a Hindu chieftain from the Kanyakumari district. Archbishop Arulappa felt that the Tirukkural was so profound and filled with compassionate sentiments that it must have been influenced by early Christian missionaries who came to South India in the first century after Christ, notably St. Thomas, one of the apostles of Christ.

The Christian Church of India, considered to be amongst the oldest in the world, is believed to have been founded by St. Thomas in 52 A.D. Arulappa held the view that St. Thomas, before his martyrdom on a hill near Madras, now called St. Thomas Mount, met Tiruvalluvar and influenced the bard to the extent of converting him to the nascent faith. The theory had been propounded. What remained to be obtained was proof of such an occurrence.

It was this that Ganesh Iyer, posing as John Ganesh, reportedly promised to unearth for the archbishop.

Since this suited the archbishop's scheme and since Arulappa was convinced that Ganesh was in a position to ferret out the evidence necessary to prove his pet theory, he engaged him to take up the research. The archbishop was apparently lulled into complacency by Ganesh's mastery of Christian theology and his apparent sincerity of purpose. As if establishing a nexus between St. Thomas and Tiruvalluvar were not enough, John Ganesh also informed the archbishop that he could bring evidence that the three wise men from the East who prophesied the birth of Christ were none other than the epic Hindu sages, Vasistha, Viswamithra and Agasthya.

In 1975-76, John Ganesh began his research. And the archbishop started funding the same.

Ganesh produced photographs of palm leaf writings and copper plate inscriptions at periodic intervals. When the archbishop asked to see the originals, he was informed that they were stashed away in the safe custody of the archaeological departments and museums all over the country. It would therefore, not be possible to persuade these agencies to part with the priceless documents. He, however, promised to get his photographs authenticated by the respective agencies themselves. Thereafter, all photographs produced by Ganesh Iyer before the archbishop bore seals of the museums and departments from which he claimed to have obtained them.

Using the funds provided by the archbishop, Ganesh Iyer made a pretence of travelling extensively. It was a well-orchestrated programme. He would first inform the archbishop that he was going to Kashmir in connection with his research.

Next, the archbishop would receive letters from some Christian and Hindu religious heads in Kashmir informing him that they had come across Ganesh Iyer or, as he now called himself, Acharya Paul. The letters spoke in superlative terms about his sincerity of purpose and his noble research.

Whatever doubts the archbishop may have entertained about his researcher vanished in the face of these letters from eminent personages. More money changed hands. Though he was quite poor when he first met the archbishop, by the time he was through, Iyer had his own house in Srirangam. He owned two cars. He had purchased considerable gold jewellery for his wife and daughters. He had substantial deposits in banks in his name.

Most of the funds for the research had come from individuals and organisations abroad. If Iyer is to be believed, the archbishop even made out his personal car in Iyer's name for a nominal Rs. 25,000. .i.Iyer;Iyer himself claims that he had not paid anything.

Questions were being asked around this time about the large sums of money being given to Acharya Paul for his research. The sceptics demanded proof that something tangible, that would benefit Christianity in the long run, had indeed been achieved. Only the archbishop's pre-eminence prevented a direct confrontation.

In 1976, Iyer obtained a passport in the name of Acharya Paul. In 1977, accompanied by the archbishop, he went abroad. To the Vatican, among other places, where he had a lengthy audience with Pope Paul VI. The duo then visited several religious congregations and spoke about comparative religions. Everywhere he went, he spoke about the origins of Christianity in India and about his A monumental research while the archbishop displayed the evidence. Money was collected for funding further research.

During their absence from India, individuals inimical to John Ganesh had organised themselves into a powerful force. Even as he was relaxing in his home in Srirangam after his return, the archbishop was pressurised to file a complaint with the police. That he had been duped by Ganesh Iyer who had claimed to be a bachelor, but was in reality a married man. That he had defrauded the archbishop to the tune of around Rs. 14 lakhs in the name of research into Christianity.

Investigations into the sordid episode began. The police, led initially by Inspector Seshadri and later by Inspector Chandraya-perumal, searched Iyer's residence. They unearthed the A originals of all the photographs produced by Iyer as proof of his research-writings on strips of brown paper cut to resemble medieval palm frond writings, pasted on sheets of white paper. The police learnt that the photographs had been taken at a studio in Tiruchi and this led to the seizure of all the relevant negatives.

The police discovered how the photographs had been authenticated by various institutions-seals and rubber stamps of all the concerned institutions were lying in Iyer's home. Letter-heads bearing the names of various Hindu and Christian scholars were recovered. The letters purported to have been received by Iyer from these personages, which he allegedly used to dupe Mariadas and later the archbishop, were declared to be clever forgeries by the state handwriting expert Srinivasan. The writing on these and the writing on the brown paper, though cleverly disguised, compared favourably with Iyer's specimen. Account books showing details of amounts received from the archbishop and the amounts spent by him were recovered.

Iyer's antecendents were thoroughly investigated and it was proved that he was a middle school dropout, not having studied beyond standard seven. Further confirmation was obtained from the Banares university that they did not have Dr. John Ganesh on their staff either teaching or doing research into philosophy and comparative religions.

The police case was complete. On April 29, 1980, Iyer was arrested and placed under remand, while prosecution proceedings were instituted under sections 419 (cheating by impersonation), 420 (cheating and dishonestly inducing delivery of property), 465 (forgery), 471 (using as genuine a forged document), 473 (making and possessing counterfeit seals with intent to commit forgery) of the Indian Penal Code and under section 12-B of the Indian Passports Act (obtaining a passport supplying false information).

Archbishop Arulappa testified against Iyer before the court. Iyer initially pleaded innocence, but later admitted to the fraud on all counts. He prayed that in view of his advancing age and critical family circumstances, he be shown leniency.

On February 6, 1986, P. Aruvudayappan, second metropolitan magistrate, Madras, delivered his judgment in case number 100087/82: A Taking advantage of the soft attitudes of public witnesses 2 and 3 (Father Mariadas and Father Arulappa), he averred, A the defendant (Ganesh Iyer) had taken from them about Rs. 13.5 lakhs between 1975 and 1980. This has been clearly established. Taking into consideration the nature of the offences, the defendant is being held guilty under various sections of the I.P.C. and has to undergo 10 months imprisonment and 5 month's rigorous imprisonment under section 12-B of the Indian Passports Act. These sentences are to run concurrently. He had been arrested on April 29, 1980 and let off on bail on June 27, 1980. These 59 days of imprisonment are to be deducted from the total sentence as required under section 428 of the code of criminal procedure.

The magistrate's judgment notwithstanding, doubts still linger. Why were the archbishop's suspicions not aroused until he had handed over a whopping Rs. 13,49,250 (according to records, though Iyer claims to have received far in excess of that sum) on a spurious research project? Why had the archbishop not bothered to verify the authenticity of the A documents produced by Iyer with the museums and other institutions concerned, directly? Why did he not bother to accompany Iyer to the actual site of his A research when he had found time to accompany him to Rome, the Vatican, Germany, France, Spain, the United States?

With the archbishop still indisposed, answers to these questions are not forthcoming.

What is even more curious is that even as criminal proceedings against Iyer were in progress in the magistrate's court, a civil suit for a compromise had been filed in the Madras high court. The compromise decree was taken up immediately after the conclusion of the criminal case. Since Iyer had admitted the offence, his jail term was reduced to a mere two months imprisonment. And since he had already served 59 days of remand, this period was adjusted against the sentence.

In other words, Iyer, who had defrauded the archbishop to the tune of about Rs. 14 lakhs, was let off without any further punishment. He was ordered to forfeit all claim on the money given to him by the archbishop. Accordingly, the ornaments and money seized from him by the police were returned to the archbishop. As part of the compromise, Iyer was allowed to retain the large bungalow he had purchased with the archbishop's money.

A I agreed to this compromise because there was nothing else I could do, says Iyer. His viewpoint in understandable. For, going by the lower court's verdict, he would have not only had to serve 5 months of rigorous imprisonment, but would have automatically had to forfeit all his properties including the house. Why the archbishop agreed to the compromise is not understandable.

Today Ganesh Iyer lives on the first floor of his house in Srirangam—the lower portion is let out on rent, enabling him to receive a monthly income. He is by no means affluent, but is certainly a far cry from the penury to which his family and he would have been consigned, if it were not for the compromise. Father Arulappa is convalescing, recovering from a major surgery. He has handed over the mantle of archbishop to Reverend G. Casimir on A health grounds .

And the case, though officially closed, remains in many minds, an unsolved mystery.

[1] Originally published under the title "Hoax!" in The Illustrated Weekly of India, April 26 - May 2, 1987, Bombay.

Guru · Guru

Archbishop of Madras-STOP 45 YEARS CONTINUING SCANDAL.

By தேவப்ரியாஜி

Archbishop of Madras-MylaporeSanthome Cathedral Basilica -STOP 45 YEARS CONTINUING SCANDAL.

To : The Archbishop,

Archbisop’s House
41, San Thome High Road

Chennai – 600 004

SANTHOME CHURCH HAS BEEN BEHIND ONE Mr.M.DEIVANAYAGAM, WHO First Pulished the book “TIRUVALLUVAR CHIRSITHUVARAA? “ With foreword from Archbishop Arulappa.

Deivanayagam went on to write many books misinterpreting Thirukural in Christian way, and later in the 100% church funded Christian Tamil Studies of Madras University got his P.Hd.(ARCHDIOCESAN CHRISTIAN STUDIES). And Many more Such P.hd. were issued by your authority.

Viviliam, Thirukkural Saiva Siddhantam Oppaivu-(Tamil) Comparative Study of the Bible, Thirukkural and Saiva Siddhanta)-Ph. D. Thesis by Dr.M.Deivanayagam-University of Madras-1985

Tamil Bhakti Iyakkathin Thotramum Valarchiyum – Vivilia Oliyil (Tamil) (The Origin and Development of Tamil Bhakti Movement (in the Light of the Bible) by Dr.D.Devakala – Ph.D. Thesis –University of Madras - 1993

Ilakkiyangalil Moovorumai Kotpadu(Tamil) (Trinity Concept In Tamil Literature)–Ph.D. Thesis by Dr. A. Johnson Thankiah – University of Madras-2003

Siddhar Padalkalum Viviliyamum (Tamil)(Songs of Tamil Siddhars and the Bible) Ph.D. Thesis by Dr. Moses Michael Farradey – University of Madras.-1999

Aru Vagai Darisanangalum Tamilar Samayamum – Viviliya Oliyil (Tamil)- (Six Darshanas and the Religion of Tamils – in the Light of the Bible)by Dr .J. D. Baskara Doss- Ph.D. Thesis – University of Madras -1998.

Sir, is part of that Article of Marvin Olasky as I have saved many years before-

//No one today knows for sure, and the three sites traditionally associated with Thomas in the city of Chennai, formerly known as Madras, do not exactly inspire confidence. One looks like a putt-putt golf course with larger-than-life colored Jesus and Thomas statues and footprints in stone that some say Thomas leftâ€”except that the footprints are about double the size that even Shaquille O’Neal would leave. Another site includes a portrait of Thomas purportedly painted by Luke, except that the style is that of paintings done 1,000 years later.//

Very Clearly the original book of Deivanayagam was refuted and Tamil scholars were totally against it and the “International Institure of Tamil Studies” Disowned it as an worthy Research paper after publishing with your 100% Grant.

இந்தியாவில் செயின்ட் தாமஸ் கட்டுக்கதை-தொகுத்தவர்: வேதபிரகாஷ்

பதிப்பகத்தார் மேனாட்டு மதங்கள் ஆராய்ச்சிக் கழகம்
57, பூந்தமல்லி நெடுஞ்சாலை
மதுரவயல், சென்னை – 602102

வெளியீட்டுத்தேதி ஆகஸ்டு, 1989 விலை ரூ. 3/-

This was sent to Arch Bishop, Deivanayagam and all important persons of your Diocese under Registered Post. No Response.

Later Tamil Sholars published the book

which clearly proves that your department certified scholar has not followed any Principles of Tamil or research and totally the book is a Trash. The copy of the book was sent to Archbishop.

Inspite of this Your Arch Diosese still supports

“International Conference on the Religion of the Tamils” was inaugurated at the Archdiocesan Pastoral Centre, 25, Rosary Church Road, Santhome, Chennai – 600 004 on Thursday evening (August 14^th, 2008).

The main paper session of Deivanayagam was headed by Dr.Ovvai Natarajan who said on the Dias that the Paper is totally flawed and meaningless. Earlier another Paper Presenter Johnson Thangaiah was hesitant to take Questions in spite of Session Head saying so.The Conference was such a meaningless show and final day few ordent tamil lovers refuted all falses by your church’ scholar.The Link gives all details.

http://www.tamilhindu.com/2008/08/christian-conspiracy-thwarted/

Till date church or Deivanayagam has not responded. What then is the Dialogue about.

http://saintthomasfables.wordpress.com/2010/05/10/%e0%ae%aa%e0%af%81%e0%ae%a9%e0%ae%bf%e0%ae%a4-%e0%ae%a4%e0%af%8b%e0%ae%ae%e0%af%88%e0%ae%af%e0%ae%be%e0%ae%b0%e0%af%8d-%e2%80%8d-%e2%80%8d%e2%80%8d%e2%80%8d-%e0%ae%af%e0%ae%be%e0%ae%b0%e0%af%8d/

What is the opinion of Catholic Scholars about Alleged Saint Thomas visit-

Holy see’s Publisher “Burn Oates & Wash BouRne Ltd”has Published Multi Volume “Butler’s Lives of Saints” Edited by Rev.Alban Butler (with Nihil Obstat & Imprimatur from Two Archbishop for its Doctrinal Acceptance)says-“.. the Syrian Greek who was probably the fabricator of the Storywould have beenable to learn from Traders and Travelers such details as the name Gondophorus with Tropical details.”. Pages 213-218, in Volume December.

The Authors have gone through all the major works of the claims of St.Thomas Indian visit claims and one of the highly acclaimed work of ‘The Early Spread of Christianity in India’- Alfred Mingana connected this with Apostle Thomas visit claims and clearly affirms-

“It is likely enough that the Malabar Coast was Evangelized from Edessa at a Later date, and in the course of time a confused tradition connected this with Apostle Thomas himself.”

Present Pope also in his speech in Vatican clearly said so. All this can be seen in this Link

Renowned Tamil Writer Jayamohan Wrote : http://www.jeyamohan.in/?p=600

It is high time Your Office give a clear clarification that there is no historic basis for the visit of St.Thomas to India and revoke those P.Hds.

Tamil

Guru · Guru

மே 21 முதல் 23 வரை திருச்சியில் உலக கிறிஸ்தவ தமிழ் மாநாடு!
புதன்கிழமை, மே 12, 2010, 12:14

http://thatstamil.oneindia.in/art-culture/essays/2010/0512-world-christian-conference-trichy.html

திருச்சி: மே 21ம் தேதி முதல் மே 23ம் தேதி வரை உலக கிறிஸ்தவ தமிழ் மாநாடு திருச்சி பிஷப் ஹீபர் கல்லூரியில் நடைபெற உள்ளது.

இது குறித்து திருச்சி- தஞ்சை மண்டல பேராயர் மற்றும் பிஷப் ஹீபர் கல்லூரி தலைவர் பால் வசந்தகுமார், உலக கிறிஸ்தவ தமிழ்ச் சங்க செயல் தலைவர் ஏசுதாஸ் ஆகியோர் செய்தியாளர்களிடம் கூறியதாவது:

தமிழ் ஆர்வலர்கள் விருப்பத்தின் பேரில், கிறிஸ்தவ இலக்கியம் வளர்ச்சி பெற கிறிஸ்தவ தமிழ் இலக்கியங்களை மேம்படுத்த, உலக கிறிஸ்தவத் தமிழ்ப் பேரவை, 1981ல் முன்னாள் பிரதம பேராயர் சாலமன் துரைசாமியால் துவக்கப்பட்டது. ஆறாவது கிறிஸ்தவ உலக தமிழ் மாநாடு, மே 21ம் தேதி முதல் மே 23ம் தேதி வரை, திருச்சி-தஞ்சை மண்டல பேராயர் பால் வசந்தகுமார் தலைமையில் பிஷப் ஹீபர் கல்லூரியில் நடைபெற உள்ளது.

இந்த மாநாட்டில் தமிழ் அறிஞர்கள், கல்வியாளர்கள், எழுத்தாளர்கள், கவிஞர்கள், ஆய்வாளர்கள் உட்பட 500க்கும் மேற்பட்டோர் மாநாட்டில் கலந்து கொள்ள உள்ளனர்.

மாநாட்டில் கிறிஸ்தவ இலக்கிய சங்கம் வெளியிட்டுள்ள புத்தகங்களின் கண்காட்சி மற்றும் விற்பனை நடக்கிறது.

கோவையில் நடக்கவிருக்கும் செம்மொழி மாநாட்டில் கிறிஸ்தவ தமிழ் இலக்கியத்துக்காக அரசிடம் தனி இடம் கோரப்பட்டுள்ளது என்றார்.

முதல் உலக கிறிஸ்தவ தமிழ் மாநாடு திருச்சியில் 1981ம் ஆண்டு நடைபெற்றது. அதைத் தொடர்ந்து, அமெரிக்காவில் நியூயார்க் நகரில் இருமுறையும், சென்னையில் இரு முறையில் மாநாடு நடந்தது. கடைசியாக, 1996 ம் ஆண்டு நியூயார்க் நகரில் மாநாடு நடைபெற்றது குறிப்பிடதக்கது.

Guru · Guru

Controversial crucifix creates rift at Warr Acres church

The controversial crucifix has caused a deep divide among members of St. Charles Borromeo Catholic Church, where it hangs above the main altar.

"There are a couple people who have left the parish,” said the Rev. Philip Seeton, the church’s pastor. "There are people in the parish who don’t like it and have stayed.”

Critics of the crucifix take issue with what appears to be a large penis covering Jesus’ abdominal area. Seeton said the portion of the crucifix in question is meant to be Jesus’ abdomen "showing distension” — not a penis.

Seeton said, "I’ve had people who have vocally said that that’s what they see there. I’ve had people who have been just as vocal who said that’s not what they’re seeing there.”

Janet Jaime, a local iconography artist who designed the crucifix, had no comment.

"I think it was painted according to the certain specific rules of iconography and church art,” Seeton said of the crucifix.

The crucifix is about 10 feet tall. It has been hanging above the altar since Feb. 21.

Seeton said the crucifix doesn’t concern him, and there are no plans to remove it.

Monsignor Edward Weisenburger of the Oklahoma City Archdiocese also said he has no problems with the crucifix. He said the archdiocese has received no complaints about it.

However, numerous current and former church parishioners contacted The Oklahoman this week expressing outrage at what many called a "pornographic” depiction of Jesus. Many asked that their identities be withheld.

Parishioner Rita Cook said the crucifix is one of many recent decisions by Seeton, who has been at the church since 2008, that longtime parishioners are concerned with.

"The crucifix is the straw on the camel’s back,” said Cook, who has attended the church for 35 years. "I think it’s an embarrassment to our Lord. I think it’s an embarrassment to our parishioners. And I think it’s an embarrassment to our visitors.”

Molly Jenkins, who is not a member of the church, said she attended a funeral at the church recently and immediately noticed the crucifix.

"I was appalled at the sexualization of Christ,” said Jenkins, who is not Catholic. Jenkins said she contacted a Catholic friend to ask whether such crucifixes are common.

Her friend, Seannene Smith, said she visited the church Friday and also was disturbed.

"I was horrified,” Smith said. "I believe in freedom of expression. I believe in artistic freedom. I believe that a church is a holy place, and I certainly don’t want people telling anyone how to worship, but I was shocked, stunned, and if I hadn’t been prepared already, I think I would have just been ill.”

Smith said she grew more concerned upon learning that students from the neighboring St. Charles Borromeo Catholic School regularly attend Mass in the church.

"I’m already very sensitive because of the pedophilia issue,” Smith said, referencing sexual abuse scandals that have plagued the Catholic Church in recent years.

Smith said she stopped going to church because of those scandals.

"This doesn’t make it any better,” Smith said.

Crucifix is a Catholic icon

Jaime, a local iconographer known for her religious artwork, was commissioned by the church to design the crucifix. Seeton wouldn’t disclose whether Jaime was paid.

Jaime’s husband, Reggie, said his wife will not discuss the crucifix publicly until she meets with officials from the church and Oklahoma City Archdiocese to discuss the controversy it has caused.

Reggie Jaime said critics of the crucifix probably aren’t aware of its history and meaning to the Catholic Church.

"This isn’t just a subjective drawing. This is a historical icon of the church,” Reggie Jaime said.

"I can’t help what you see in things, or she sees in things, or anyone.”

The crucifix in question is a San Damiano cross, a common Catholic icon that originated in Italy in the 12th century and is widely associated with St. Francis of Assisi and the order he founded, the Franciscans.

The original cross is in Assisi, Italy.

The San Damiano cross is considered an icon because it depicts biblical figures.

The crucifix hanging at St. Charles Borromeo resembles other San Damiano crucifixes except for Jesus’ abdominal area, which is noticeably more pronounced than on similar crucifixes.

Seeton said he and Janet Jaime reviewed numerous San Damiano crucifixes to decide how the crucifix should look.

Several parishioners have since come to Seeton with complaints about how the crucifix looks. Seeton said he tries to alleviate their concerns by explaining the history of the crucifix and pointing them to places where they can learn more about it.

He said most parishioners are OK with the crucifix once they learn its history.

News OK

Date: May 7, 2010

When did St.Thomas the Apostle go to India?
In: India, New Testament, India History [Edit categories]
Royal Sundaram Insurance
Providing insurance for your Car, Health & Travel Needs. Buy Online!
RoyalSundaram.in/Insurance

[Improve]
There is no authentic historical record of St. Thomas traveling to and living in India. The early Church Fathers record that he went to Syria and Persia (or Parthia as it was called in the 1st century CE). Pope Benedict XVI has also stated that he traveled to Syria and Persia and what is now western Pakistan (Baluchistan).

The first verifiable record of Christians in India is dated to ca 345 CE They were refugees from Syria and Persia fleeing religious persecution by the Persian king Shapor II. They were led by a man called variously Thomas of Cana, Thomas the Canaanite, Thomas Cananeus, Thomas the Merchant, Thomas of Jerusalem, and Knaye Thoma. Historians believe that it is this merchant Thomas from Jerusalem whom Indian Christians have mistakenly identified with the 1st century apostle Thomas.

The first account of St. Thomas traveling to India is found in the Acts of Thomas written by the Gnostic Christian poet Bardesanes in ca 200-225 CE at Edessa in Syria. This is a religious romance full of the fantastic miracles and dramatic encounters of Judas Dydimus Thomas (as St. Thomas is called in the story). Its central theme is that a Christian must remain celibate throughout life even when married. Judus Didymus Thomas (St. Thomas) is described as the lookalike twin brother of Jesus Christ who has sold him into slavery because he has refused to obey orders.

The designation "India" in ancient geographies was a synonym for Asia which was used by ancient writers for all countries south and east of the Roman Empire's frontiers. India included Ethiopia, Arabia Felix, Edessa in Syria (in the Latin version of the Syriac Diatessaron), Arachosia and Gandhara (Afghanistan and Pakistan), and many countries up to the China Sea. In the Acts of Thomas, the original key text to identify St. Thomas with India (which all other India references follow), historians agree that the term India refers to Parthia (Persia) and Gandhara (Pakistan). The city of Andrapolis named in the Acts, where Judas Thomas and Abbanes landed in India, has been identified as Sandaruck (one of the ancient Alexandrias) in Baluchistan.

The story of St. Thomas being martyred by a Hindu king and his priests in Mylapore, Madras (Chennai), India is fictitious and was invented by the Portuguese to cover up their destruction of the ancient Kapaleeswara Temple on the Mylapore beach. The present San Thome Cathedral and Bishop's House stand on the ruins of that great temple, a Buddhist temple built in the same area, and a Jain temple dedicated to Neminathaswami.

The whole story of the various legends of St. Thomas in India - there are five different legends - has been discussed by Ishwar Sharan in his path breaking book The Myth of Saint Thomas and the Mylapore Shiva Temple . The book is available on line in both English and Tamil at www.hamsa.org This website also hosts numerous articles on the St. Thomas in India controversy by noted historians, researchers, and journalists.

Guru · Guru

Kanimozhi, Seeman -Demolish Santhome church & build Mylapore Kapaleeshwarar Temple

May 3, 2010 by devapriyaji

Director Seeman, KANIMOZHI, Jagat Casper Demolish Santhome church and build Mylapore Kapaleeshwarar Temple at its original Place.

KANIMOZHI You are Using Tamil Mayyam – Santhome church firm for your Political Raise. Get us back Temple at its original PLACE.

Demolish This and build

Yesterday M.Deivanayagam with his Paid assistants made aComedy Fasting show near Kapaleeshwarar temple and Seeman addressed that comedy show- Photo below

loading

Dr. Deivanayagam’ Tamil research claims over Tirukural have been said meaningless by other Christian Scholars.

Deivanayagam is firm that The Present Santhome Bascilca was the Original Place of Mylapore Kapaleeshwarar Temple. Throw out Church and build Temple.

http://devapriyaji.wordpress.com/saint-thomas/

Seeman – you say you are a Pure Tamilan – prove it by demolishing Santhome Basilca.

செபாஸ்டியன் சீமானுக்கும் கபாலீஸ்வரர் கோயிலுக்கும் என்ன சம்பந்தம்?-vedaprakash எழுதியது

செபாஸ்டியன் சீமான் ஒரு கிருத்துவன். “பிரபாகரன்” பெயரை வைத்துக் கொண்டு “தமிழர்கள்” உணர்வை தூண்டிக்கொண்டு, தமிழ் கலாச்சாரம், நாகரிகம், பண்பாடு…………..முதலியவற்றிற்கு எதிராக செயப்படும் கூட்டங்களுடன் தொடர்பு கொண்டவன்.

எம். தெய்வநாயகம் என்ற ஆளோ, முந்தைய மோசடி பிஷப் சின்னப்பாவுடன் சேர்ந்து கொண்டு, தமிழைக் கேவலப் படுத்திய கும்பலை சேர்ந்த இன்னொரு மோசடி பேர்வழி. [ஆங்கிலத்தில் இவர்களைப் பற்றி நிறையவே எழுதியுள்ளேன். www.indiainteracts.com தளத்தைப் பார்க்கவும்]

Seeman-Kapeleswarar-temple

இப்பொழுது, இந்த இரண்டு இந்து விரோத பேர்வழிகளுக்குண்டானக் கூட்டு என்ன என்பதை, உண்மையான தமிழர்கள் ஆராய வேண்டும். தமிழ் இந்துக்கள் தெரிந்து கொள்ளவேண்டும்.

சுயமரியாதை தமிழர் கூட்டமைப்பு என்ற பேரவை என்ற போலிப் பெயரில், கிருத்துவர்கள் மிகவும் கேவலமாக, வெட்கமில்லாமல், இப்படி வேஷம் போடுவது என்னவென்று சொல்வது என்று தெரியவில்லை. எவ்வலவு அசிங்கப் பட்டாலும், இவர்கள் இவ்வாறு நடந்து கொள்வது, அரசு எந்திரங்கள் அவர்களுக்கு சாதகமாக இர்க்கின்ரன என்பதும் தெரிகின்றது.

We all would be with you

Guru · Guru

Did a Hindu king kill St. Thomas? – Ishwar Sharan

January 29, 2010 · 4 Comments

“Hindus will never hear from Christian leaders a sincere confession of wrong doing. What Hindus will hear and see are more spurious histories of St. Thomas and charges of “deicide” by motivated faith writers like Ponnu Elizabeth Mathew and unscrupulous newspaper editors like Aditya Sinha and Manoj Kumar Sonthalia. It is a crying shame and a sad testimony to what India has not gained after sixty years of independence–that is, independence from an imperialist Roman Catholic Church and its soothsayers in the English-language media.” – IS

Sixty years after Independence, a great newspaper, The New Indian Express, lies dying in Mount Road, brought low by unprincipled editors and an indifferent owner. [1] The editors believe that cultivating religious superstitions and caste prejudice will raise readership and save their power positions. They are unscrupulous, no different than the criminal and communal politicians who sit in our Indian legislatures. But Aditya Sinha and Manoj Kumar Sonthalia, try as they might, have lost the race for subscriptions.

Informed readers of The New Indian Express have left the drab broadsheet for the more enlightened and interesting Deccan Chronicle. Still, Sinha and Sonthalia clutch at straws to maintain a presence in Madras, publishing Catholic propaganda to appease a minority readership and keep missionary travel writers employed. The result is that at least one incensed reader, B. R. Haran, has dubbed the paper the “Evangelical Express”. Ramnath Goenka, great freedom fighter and founder of The Indian Express, must be turning somersaults in heaven!

The tourist feature at issue here is a top-of-the-page, in-your-face piece of “historical” travel writing by Ponnu Elizabeth Mathew called “Where faith resides/The story of faith and courage/The story of a slain apostle/The story of St. Thomas Mount”. It appeared on 20 August 2007, in the Chennai edition of The New Indian Express. It was the usual sentimental story about St. Thomas in Chennai and focused on a description of the 16th Century Portuguese church at the top of Big Mount, called St. Thomas Mount.

The church is built on the foundations of a Hindu temple, though Ponnu Elizabeth Mathew neglected to mention this fact. The church contains on its altar reredos a famous “bleeding” stone cross said to have been carved by St. Thomas. That St. Thomas has never been described anywhere as a stone cutter seems to have escaped the writer’s notice, as does the old Palhavi inscription on the carving’s border which identifies it to be of Persian origin. It has been dated to the 8th Century by experts, as have other “St. Thomas” crosses found in Kerala churches. Crosses were not used by Christians to identify their religion until long after the Council of Nicea in the 4th Century, probably not until the 7th Century.

Another item of interest the article brought to the reader’s attention is the icon of the Virgin Mary, allegedly painted by St. Luke and brought to India by St. Thomas. There are seven of these icons by “St. Luke” distributed around the world, the most famous one being in Santa Maria Maggiore Basilica at Rome. All of them are medieval productions, and the idea that they could be associated with either St. Luke or St. Thomas is absurd. Both 1st Century apostles were practicing Jews and fierce iconoclasts. The cult of the Virgin Mary, like the cult of the cross, is a late development in the evolution of Christian religion. The protagonists of the St. Thomas tale always forget to put all the accoutrements and accretions of the apostle’s Portuguese legend into a 1st century context.

All these pious items of fable and romance would be of no account except that the legend carries at it heart a vicious communal tale of harassment and murder. St. Thomas, according to Ponnu Elizabeth Mathew, “…lived in hiding [at Little Mount] before he was slain by Raja Mahadevan, the leader on Mylapore, [on Big Mount].” Other versions of the Portuguese fable target Brahmins as the assassins of the apostle. The charge is false and deeply offensive to Hindus, and this has been brought to the attention of The New Indian Express editors years ago, when they were challenged about other stories of St. Thomas they had published and presented to readers as Indian history. On 29 June 2004, we wrote to the editor as follows:

“The allegation that St. Thomas converted a Mylapore king to Christianity and was then murdered is deeply offensive to Hindus as it implicates Hindus in the assassination of an important Christian saint. The true martyrs of the whole affair were the Hindus who lost their ancient Kapaleeswara temple on the beach when the Portuguese destroyed Mylapore. The Vatican has stated in a letter to me that the question of whether or not St. Thomas came to India is one for historians to decide.”[2]

This letter was published in The New Indian Express on 16 July 2004, after a reminder had been sent to the managing editor. He and his chief, blind and stubborn as they are about the implications of spreading the St. Thomas tale, did not want to know about it.

Ironically, the “historian” who has spoken out on the travels of St. Thomas, is the Pope himself. He has stated that the apostle got as far as western India, now Pakistan, called Parthia or Gandhara in the 1st Century.[3] He is following the Persian cultural ambience and desert geography described in the Acts of Thomas, which is logical for a Catholic scholar to do. Another Christian historian, better equipped than the Pope to decide on St. Thomas in India, is Bishop Stephen Neill. In History of Christianity in India: The Beginnings to 1707 A.D., he wrote:

“A number of scholars…have built on slender foundations what may be called Thomas romances, such as reflect the vividness of their imaginations rather than the prudence of rigid historical critics.”

Bishop Neill was greatly pained by the spread of a spurious St. Thomas history among Indians, such as Ponnu Elisabeth Mathew and her editors at The New Indian Express promote, and observes:

“Millions of Christians in India are certain that the founder of their church was none other than apostle Thomas himself. The historian cannot prove it to them that they are mistaken in their belief. He may feel it right to warn them that historical research cannot pronounce on the matter with a confidence equal to that which they entertain by faith.”

More recently, Dr. Koenraad Elst, in an article called “Towards A Real Hindu-Christian Dialogue” (which appears in full on The Ishwar Sharan Archive and is recommended reading for Indian Christians and Churchhierarchs),[4] wrote:

“In South India, the myth of St. Thomas provided the background for a few instances of temple destruction at places falsely associated with his life and alleged martyrdom, especially the St. Thomas Church replacing the Mylapore Shiva temple in Madras. In this case, the campaign of fraud is still continuing: till today, Christian writers continue to claim historical validity for the long-refuted story of the apostle Thomas coming to India and getting killed by jealous Brahmins. The story is parallel to that of Jesus getting killed by the Jews, and it indeed served as an argument in an elaborate Christian doctrine of anti-Brahminism which resembles Christian anti-Semitism to the detail. At any rate, it is a fraud.”

Indeed, it is a fraud, and a wicked fraud at that, filled with communal venom and religious bigotry. It is expected that lndian Christian writers like Ponnu Elizabeth Mathew would subscibe to it, but that editors Aditya Sinha and Monoj Kumar Sonthlia should assist in spreading the poison in Indian society is shocking and inexcusable, especially as they have been seized of the issue many times over over many years.

The bottom line is this, and the Archbishop in Madras, whose palace sits upon the ruins of the original Kapaleeswara Temple, may take note. The Church in India owes Hindus a full and unconditional apology for the vicious canard it has spread and repeated over the centuries accusing Hindus–a Hindu king and his Hindu priests–of the hateful murder of St. Thomas. It must apologise.

It must also apologise for the destruction of Hindu temples that started with the criminal Francis Xavier in the 16th Century and goes on till today in remote tribal areas, for the Inquisition in Goa that killed tens of thousands of innocents, for conversions made by force or inducement, and for the continued maligning of Hindu society and religion that takes place in churches outside of India by Indian Christian priests on tour. An eminent Hindu scholar no less than Arun Shourie has called for such an apology in his book Missionaries in India: Continuities, Changes, Dilemmas. He writes:

“By an accounting [of the calumnies heaped upon India and Hinduism] I do not mean some declaration saying, ‘Sorry’. By an accounting I mean that the calumnies would be listed, and the Church would declare whether, in the light of what is known now, the grounds were justified or not, and the motives which impelled those calumnies would be exhumed.”

Can the Roman Catholic Church hierarchy in India make such a public confession and ask forgiveness of Hindu society? Probably not. It would be suicidal from their point of view. The Church has money power and political power. It controls much of Indian education and has psychological power. It has the sympathy of India’s secular intellectuals and through them has propaganda power, as seen in the fact of the publication of the newspaper article under review. But the Church does not have moral power.

Hindus will never hear from Christian leaders a sincere confession of wrong doing. What Hindus will hear and see are more spurious histories of St. Thomas and charges of “deicide” by motivated faith writers like Ponnu Elizabeth Mathew and unscrupulous newspaper editors like Aditya Sinha and Manoj Kumar Sonthalia. It is a crying shame and a sad testimony to what India has not gained after sixty years of independence–that is, independence from an imperialist Roman Catholic Church and its soothsayers in the English-language media.

Notes & further reading:

This article was written in 2007 before the newspaper got a nose job and face lift.
For the Vatican letter go to www.hamsa.org/vatican.htm
For the Pope’s statement on St. Thomas go towww.hamsa.org/pope.htm
For the full text of Dr. Koenraad Elst’s article “Towards A Real Hindu-Christian Dialogue” go towww.hamsa.org/appendix2.htm

Guru · Guru

St. Thomas in the American Cyclopaedia – George Ripley & Charles A. Dana

February 4, 2010 · Leave a Comment

Saint Thomas, also called Didymus, one of the twelve apostles. Both names, the Hebrew Thomas (Th’om) and the Greek Didymus, denote a twin. Thomas is rarely mentioned in the New Testament, and little is known of him. The principal traits of his character are given in the Gospel of John. When Jesus after his crucifixionappeared to his disciples, Thomas was not present, and refused to believe until he himself saw and touched Jesus. As to the scene of his apostolical labors, the statements of the ecclesiastical writers of the first centuries do not agree; according to some it was Parthia, according to others Egypt and Ethiopia, and according to others India, where the Portuguese in the 16th century asserted that they had found his body. An ancient sect who early in the middle ages were numerous in Persia and still survive in India, claim St. Thomas as their founder; but many theologians consider the account of the labors of St. Thomas in India as having been invented by theManichaeans, and as early as the 5th century the Thomas of India was regarded by Theodoret as a disciple of Manes.To the apostle Thomas an Evangelium Infantioe Christi (also called Evangelium secundum Thomam) is ascribed, which pretends to fill up the gaps left by the canonical Gospels in the time from the infancy of Jesus until his public appearance; but it has always been regarded as apocryphal. (See Thilo, Acta Thomas Apostoli, Leipsic, 1823.) St. Thomas is commemorated in the Roman Catholic Church on Dec. 21; in theGreek Church on the first Sunday of her Church year, beginning with Easter (hence called Thomas Sunday.

From the American Cyclopaedia entry for Saint Thomas

Guru · Guru

Tsunami: St. Thomas abandons fishermen, saves himself – Ishwar Sharan

February 9, 2010 · Leave a Comment

“The English-language press in India is politically correct, opportunistic, and engaged in minority appeasement just like the politicians. It is a commercial commodity without ideals or ethics. It has no credibility among the informed public because it is wedded to a secularist fundamentalism that is at odds with the spiritual ethos of the Indian people. At the same time it is able to shape public opinion to some extent, and it benefits politically from its morally criminal position of untruth. But one day this will change, and one day the people of Mylapore will learn the true history of the holocaust that took place on their beaches in the 16th century in the name of a malevolent foreign god whose intolerant nature and imperial ambitions were first recorded in the Old Testament.” – IS

Tsunami India 2004 In an extraordinary example of superstitious and deceitful reporting, Susan Muthalaly wrote on 4 January 2005 in The New Indian Express, Chennai edition, an article called the “Santhome miracle”. It was a crass attempt by the lady scribe at Christian one-upmanship when the Tamil fisher coast was in crisis from the tsunami.

It is not clear why the newspaper gave her space to blow pious bubbles, though soft-soaping the religious minorities is the accepted practice in India’s English-language press. Even so, The New Indian Express, better known for plain speaking and bad English prose, caused some consternation among its trusting readers with the preposterous miracle story that unwittingly showed up St. Thomas as a selfish man interested only in saving his own skin while the fishermen’s huts below his church were washed away. Susan Muthalaly wrote:

Father Lawrence Raj, the parish priest of the Santhome Cathedral Basilica has been inundated with inquiries about the story of St. Thomas’ miraculous post, supposed to have kept the sea away on December 26. The 450-year-old church, located a few metres from the water, remained unaffected by the tsunamis even though buildings in line with it on either side were ravaged by the waves.

The belief, says Father Lawrence, is that when St. Thomas planted the post at the top of the steps leading to the cathedral, he said the sea would not pass that point.

“But that is the legend,” stresses the father, “nobody knows whether it is true.” The priest sounds wary of declaring it a miracle. Puzzling, considering his job and that he gives visitors what he jokingly calls “credit cards to heaven” – neat little plastic cards laminated with a pinch of soil from St. Thomas’ tomb that fit into your wallet. He offers logical explanations, like perhaps it is because the church is built on a higher level. “But then,” he reasons, “the lighthouse is on roughly the same plain, and the water reached it.”

Father Lawrence says that for the people who have faith, it would be a miracle. “I believe it is,” he adds. He takes you to the terrace from which he saw the sea in action, as it surged across the road and flooded the huts in front of St. Thomas’ post. It is an innocuous looking log of wood, mounted on a cement pedestal.

The story goes that a village in the Mylapore area was flooded when a huge tree trunk fell across the river. The local king brought a royal pachyderm to lug it away, but the task seemed impossible. Then St. Thomas came along, removed the girdle from waist and handed it to a bystander and asked him to yank the log with it. He did so and the log moved easily. There is a mural illustrating the episode in the cathedral museum.

Father Lawrence says the post is believed to be from that same log of wood. Though there is another story that the post comes from the chapel that St. Thomas built in 74 A.D.

“People have been asking about this story. It has always been around but it is difficult to confirm as fact something that occurred nearly 2,000 years ago. That is why I have been trying to verify the story with other people,” says the priest.

Father Lawrence is certainly not alone in believing the story about the safety of his church.

“Till December 31 we had about 2,000 people taking shelter over here. Partly because it is a church, it is a centre point for distributing relief material. I suppose it is also because people feel safe here.”

They are talking out of both sides of their mouths! Father Lawrence and his reporting scribe Susan Muthalaly are speaking out of both sides of their mouth. According to them, the story of St. Thomas and his miraculous log of wood is true and not true at the same time. Of course, it is not true as they both very well know but are unwilling to say as faithful Christians.

We have to help them tell the truth. We have scholarship on our side and are not tied to an unforgiving and infructuous religious faith. We wrote The New Indian Expresseditor on January 5th, with a copy of the letter to Father Lawrence Raj. We wrote:

Apropos the article “The Santhome miracle” (TNIE, Jan. 4), Santhome Cathedral and Bishop House stand on the site of the original Kapaleeswara Temple which was destroyed in 1566 by the Portuguese. This site is the highest point on the Mylapore beach and is naturally protected from sea surges, Dr, R. Nagaswami, former director of the Tamil Nadu Department of Archaeology, has written:

“The most important Kapaleeswara Temple lost all its ancient building during the Portuguese devastation and was originally located by the Santhome Cathedral. A few Chola records found in the Santhome Cathedral and Bishop’s House refer to Kapaleeswara Temple and Poompavai. A Chola record in fragment found on the east wall of the Santhome Cathedral refer to the image of Lord Nataraja of the Kapaleeswara Temple.” And, “A 12th century Chola record in the Santhome Cathedral region, refers to a Jain temple dedicated to Neminathaswami,”

Dr. Nagaswami and the Jesuit he worked with also recorded the finding of Buddhist images in the same area. There is no literary or archaeological evidence that a Christian church ever stood at this site prior to the Portuguese occupation of Mylapore.

The story of the wooden log which St. Thomas miraculously lifted was borrowed from the Jagannath Puristala purana and introduced into the Mylapore St. Thomas legend by the Portuguese. The wooden log now standing at the top of the steps leading from the church to the beach (which miraculously has not yet been stolen) can be dated by radiocarbon testing, as can the bones in the two alleged St. Thomas tombs. When the dates of these relics have been established by forensic science (as is done with relics in European churches), their true nature and identity can be more easily ascertained.

This letter was not published in The New Indian Express and when we realised that the newspaper was not going to allow a rejoinder to its outrageous miracle story, we sent a personal appeal to the Managing Editor M. K. Sonthalia. He had on past occasions shown himself to be a responsible editor of courage and integrity when dealing with the St. Thomas controversy. But this time he was silent.

A second appeal was sent to him on January 19th, expressing our dismay at his silence and refusal to accommodate a reply to Susan Muthalaly’s article. We accused him of cowardice and ofhiding behind the skirts of philosophy—Indian editors who have read a book or two take refuge in philosophy when they do not want to take responsible action. We also pointed out that Santhome Cathedral Basilica was a monument to religious bigotry not a house of miracles.

But the silence continued, and we learned it was the silence of recreance,not philosophy, The managing editor had allegedly come under pressure from his Christian editors and shareholders not to publish our rejoinder, and he had succumbed to their demands even as he had earlier succumbed to their dictate that the popular columnist Francois Gautier be dismissed for his pro-Hindu views.

This sad state of affairs at The New Indian Express leads to the larger question of journalistic ethics and integrity. The English-language press in India is politically correct and opportunistic. It is a commercial commodity without ideals. It has no credibility among the informed public because it is wedded to a secularist fundamentalism that is at odds with the spiritual ethos of the Indian people. At the same time it is able to shape public opinion to some extent, and it benefits politically from its morally criminal position of untruth. But one day this will change, and one day the people of Mylapore will learn the true history of the holocaust that took place on their beaches in the 16th century in the name of a malevolent foreign god whose intolerant nature and imperial ambitions were first recorded in the Old Testament.

___________________________________________________

The article “The Santhome miracle” by Susan Muthalaly appeared on 4 January 2005 in the Chennai edition of The New Indian Express. When our response to it was not published, we informed the managing editor of our intention to reproduce the article in full on this web site and asked him to inform us if he had any objection. We have not received any objection from him to date.

Guru · Guru

The Deccan Chronicle’s Pious Deceits – Ishwar Sharan

January 18, 2010 · Leave a Comment

Deccan Chronicle Holdings chairman T. Venkattaram Reddy. The Deccan Chronicle is South India's leading Christian newspaper.

The Deccan Chronicle is south India’s largest Christian newspaper and a willing mouthpiece for the Catholic Bishops Conference in India. It is the newest proponent of the St. Thomas fable as secular Indian history in Chennai (following The Hindu and The New Indian Express). It often but not always hides its pro-St. Thomas agenda behind a correspondent’s byline or the provocative statement of the Santhome Cathedral priest: “The existence of the Santhome Church is a proof by itself that Christianity in India is more than 2000 years old” (DC, Chennai, 8 April 2007).

The Deccan Chronicle editor in Chennai is cricket commentator R. Mohan.

For sucking up to the Roman Catholic clergy in India and in Rome, the Deccan Chronicle is the leader among Indian newspapers. Its current resident editor in Chennai, R. Mohan, being another self-righteous secularist of the Nehruvian school, assiduously follows the Christian practice of treating Hindu history as mythology and Christian mythology as history. In true Indian secularist fashion, he does not tolerate dissent, and letters to the editor concerning lies and distortions in DCarticles are neither acknowledged or published. Every effort is made by Mohan and his in-house minions to provoke and insult Hindu readers and letter writers. This is called “freedom of the press” in our secular socialist adharmic India that is Bharat.

For Chairman Reddy and his house boy Mohan, criticism of themselves or their “eminent” contributors is a manifestation of Hindu communalism and ignorance. Indeed, dissent can attract a very spiteful response from editor Mohan. Yet both men, whose decisions influence the opinions of half a million readers and more every day, will ignore facts and figures as extraneous irritants, except where the facts and figures can be employed in subtle Hindu-bashing exercises(2), or otherwise to whitewash the bigoted and violent history of Islam and Christianity in India and promote their pro-Catholic agenda in Hyderabad, Chennai, and Bangalore.

Anti-Brahminism and anti-Semitism are the same ethno-religious prejudice directed at an accomplished minority group who are perceived, wrongly, to be the cause of a nation’s social and economic ills, or, otherwise, to be controlling a nation’s cultural, political, or economic destiny from behind the scenes in their own interest. Koenraad Elst, in Indigenous Indians: Agastya to Ambedkar, writes, “In fact, apart from anti-Judaism, the anti-Brahmin campaign started by [Christian] missionaries is the biggest vilification campaign in world history.”
An example of an anti-Hindu exercise is the use of the term “idol” for Hindu images. Technically correct, the word is loaded with negative connotations and is part of the abusive rhetoric of Christian missionaries in India. The same newspaper on another page uses the neutral term “statues” for Christian images. Clearly, there is editorial bias at work here. In the forty years that I have lived in India, I have never met a Hindu who worships idols. Hindus worship God, and even a simple village woman knows that God is spirit not matter.

See Indian Media’s War on Hinduism http://hamsa.org/akbar.htm#1

___________________________________

Deccan Chronicle feature, Chennai, 1 September 2008

Town of Thomas

At the south end of Marina is San Thome, today a part of Mylapore. With its inspiring Basilica on a site where for 19 continuous centuries has stood some church or other. Just before the Basilica on this road is the former palace of the Maharaja of Mysore, now hidden behind formidable gates. Here live the representatives of Russia

Telling lies for Jesus: Catholic Writers Guild Seal of Approval for the Deccan Chronicle in Chennai.

THE REAL HISTORY

The article above is a continuation of theDeccan Chronicle’s policy of prostituting Indian history to further its pro-Catholic agenda. Telling lies for Jesus — or in this case for his brother Thomas — has never been a problem of ethics for newspaper chairmen or editors who are born with Hindu names but who willingly sell their Hindu mothers down the river for a few dinars. The Deccan Chronicle and Asian Age are said to be owned by a Saudi Arabian company. There is no contradiction here between an Arab-owned Indian newspaper and its pro-Catholic agenda, as both Muslims and Christians and their secular Indian front men are willing to work together for the total annihilation of Hindu religion and culture.

Eighteenth century shrine of St. Thomas in Meliapore. The first church was built by Christian Augustinian friars in 1523 after demolishing the Kapaleeswara Temple.

Historically, the first Christian church to appear on the Mylapore beach was built in 1523 by Augustinian friars beside the new tomb of “St. Thomas” that had been dug and seeded with bones and other material brought from Goa by Albuquerque’s attendant Diogo Fernandez.

Earlier, in 1521–22, the Portuguese had opened two tombs in the Shiva temple’s northern precincts. One tomb contained a “black” skeleton, which, according to its inscription, belonged to a Chola king. The Portuguese nevertheless “identified” him as being a disciple of St. Thomas (as today Catholic historians “identify” Tiruvalluvar as a disciple of St. Thomas). The second tomb revealed a “white” skeleton, which, naturally, “belonged” to the white Jew Thomas. This second skeleton was sent to Goa for verification—where it languishes till today, unsung and unrecognised.

Ortona Cathedral: This Italian church houses the bones of St. Thomas the Apostle, which arrived in Ortona on September 6, 1258, booty taken by Captain Leone degli Acciaioli when the island of Chios, Greece, was sacked. The Church-certified complete skeleton of St. Thomas was in Ortona when the Portuguese were "discovering" it in Mylapore in 1523.

As these diggings did not produce the required result, Diogo Fernandez was asked, in 1523, to excavate a third tomb which lay partly under the foundation of a dilapidated temple building that had been occupied by the Portuguese. He refused at first but was persuaded by the attending priest, Fr. Antonio Gil, who heard his confession and that of the two men, Braz Fernandez and Diogo Lourenco, who would assist him in the pious enterprise. They then began the excavation of a deep and elaborate, and very much empty, tomb. It was Saturday afternoon, and they continued the work into the late evening, when, on the suggestion of Diogo Fernandez, they abandoned their unproductive labours and retired for the night. The excavation was left open and unattended until the next morning, a Sunday, when the men began digging again. It was not long now before the grave disgorged bones that were “much worn out”, portions of skull and spine, and a clay pot of earth “bedewed with blood”, with a thigh bone in it, and hidden in the red earth an iron Malabar spearhead shaped like an olive leaf, which, after fifteen Christian centuries, still had a piece of wooden shaft miraculously preserved in its socket.

San Thome Cathedral: The empty tomb of St. Thomas. This is the tomb the Portuguese created in 1522 and seeded with bone brought from Goa.

This church, originally built in 1523 and called San Thome or San Thome de Meliapore, was subsequently enlarged and extended, and the encroachment on the Kapaleeswara Temple began in earnest. The Christians had done this before, building a church against a temple and then taking over the temple, and that the Shiva temple survived as long as it did, up to 1566 according to some authorities, is grand testimony to the patient and courageous resistance the Hindus of Mylapore had put up against this ruthless Catholic power.

Pope Pius XII : He raised the status of San Thome to that of a minor basilica. A basilica was a Roman public building until the architecture was christianized in the 4th century. There are over 1400 Catholic basilicas in the world, and the Cathedral Basilica of Bom Jesus in Goa has precedence over San Thome in Mylapore.

In 1606 the Pope, at the request of the King of Portugal, made San Thome de Meliapore into a diocese independent of Goa. The church was extended again and became the seat of a bishop, but, in 1893, this building was demolished by the bishop and the present Gothic cathedral put up in its place. It was completed and consecrated in 1896. In 1952 the archdiocese of Madras and Mylapore was constituted, and in 1956, after much lobbying by the Indian hierarchy, Pope Pius XII raised the status of San Thome to that of a minor basilica. This church dignity is of no consequence but it affords the archbishop some minor liturgical privileges.

Diogo Fernandez’s “St. Thomas” relics still remain in the church today. The iron spearhead and piece of skull are kept in a monstrance, along with the relics of St. Francis Xavier, St. Isabella, St. Vincentio and the Martyrs of Morocco. The first “St. Thomas” tomb, which contained the “white” skeleton that was sent to Goa, is empty and ignored, but the second “St. Thomas” tomb is pointed out to pilgrims and tourists. It contains the remainder of Diogo Fernandezs “findings”, the pieces of spine and thigh bone, and, presumably, the pot of “blood-bedewed” earth.

Repository of a St. Thomas arm bone in Kodungallur, Kerala. The right-arm bone was a gift to Indian Christians from the Cathedral of Ortona, Italy. San Thome only got a small piece of this relic.

Yet this is not the end of the bones at San Thome. The cathedral also has in its possession a piece of Church-certified Ortona bone, which it obtained from Cardinal Tisserant in 1953, after he had deposited the apostle’s right arm at Kodungallur. The pastor of San Thome can now say with some pride that he is the keeper of a real St. Thomas bone—keeping in mind that the acceptance of the Ortona gift is also an admission that the Portuguese relics in his care are not those of St. Thomas.

_______________________________

DECCAN CHRONICLE FEATURE, CHENNAI, 24 NOVEMBER 2008

Serene Mount beckons

BY GEORGE ADIMATHRA

Big Mount or St. Thomas Mount. Originally the seat of Rishi Brungi (Bhrigu), it was occupied by the Portuguese after 1523 and the Hindu temple on it demolished to make way for the Church of Our Lady of Expectation. - IS

Chennai and its suburbs are replete with heritage sites such as the Tiruneermalai Vishnu temple (6th century), Tiruvottriyur Adipureeswarar temple (8th century), Kovalam Thameemun Ansari Dargha (7th century) and the St. Thomas Mount near the Chennai airport.

It is believed that St. Thomas, one of the 12 apostles of Jesus Christ, died on the mount in AD 72 (first century), which makes it one of the oldest heritage sites in Chennai and also one of the oldest Christian sites in the world.

Believed to be one of the first Christians to reach India and preach Christianity in a country dominated by Hindus, St. Thomas was assassinated and the site where he was martyred came to be known as St. Thomas Mount.

People of various religions visit the holy shrine, negotiating the 160 steps built by Armenian merchant Choja Bedros Woskan leading to the top with 14 “stations of the cross” erected along the way. At the summit stands the church built by the Portuguese with its altar located at the very spot where St. Thomas breathed his last.

George Adimathra: Amateur photographer and Deccan Chronicle fiction writer.

There are relics too, among which is the “Bleeding Cross” chiseled by the Apostle himself. The cross, which is said to “bleed” periodically, is believed to have been in the hands of the Apostle while he lay dying.

The oil painting of the Madonna, believed to be one of the seven painted by St. Luke, the evangelist, and brought to India by St. Thomas is placed above the altar.

This is considered to be the oldest Christian painting in India.

The place is also ideal for picnics [and romantic encounters if the warning notices placed by the resident nuns are to be believed - IS].

The metropolis, spread all around the hillock, seems a distant dream land.

However the calm is shattered by the scream of the aircraft taking off or landing at the airport nearby.

Tamil saint and cultural icon Thiruvalluvar. He lived at an unknown date BC/AD in Mylapore and his samadhi shrine was destroyed by the Portuguese along with the Kapaleeswara Shiva Temple.

THE REAL HISTORY

The Deccan Chronicle in this article continues its St. Thomas deceits, this time with a byline to absolve the editor of the crime of knowingly misleading the reading public with communal propaganda. Some bits and pieces of Hindu archaeology are thrown in with the express purpose of making the alleged Christian site–St. Thomas Mount–the older-oldest place of pilgrimage. This is in accord with the current Catholic “inculturational” programme of making the great Tamil Shaivite saint Tiruvalluvar a disciple of St. Thomas. According to the Mylapore archbishop and his spin doctor Deivanayakam, Tamil Shaiva Siddhanta and the Tamil bhakti movement are a byproduct of the Christianity that St. Thomas brought to India and taught to Tiruvalluvar–Christianity being the “original” religion of the Tamils. It is all humbug of course, a wicked plan set in motion by wicked priests with the express purpose of undermining the cultural and religious integrity of Hindu society. If the Indian bishops succeed in destroying the Tamil Hindu identity and then appropriating the Tamil ethnic identity for Christianity, they will be well on the way of conquering India for Christ and of gaining recognition in Rome. Recognition by the Pope and Roman Curia is what the Indian bishops crave even more than the power and pelf they already enjoy in India with government support. The late Mylapore archbishop Arulappa admitted as much when his little scam to forge historical documents relating to St. Thomas in India was uncovered.[1] Forging religious artifacts and historical documents is a very old Christian pastime, and it is therefore not surprising to find Indian bishops and their “secular” minions at the Deccan Chronicle continuing the “pious” practice in 2008, by attempting to rewrite the religious history of the Tamil people.

Dr. R. Arulappa was the late Roman Catholic archbishop of Madras-Mylapore. He is the godfather of St. Thomas-Thiruvalluvar history fabrications and the paymaster of the infamous forger Ganesh Iyer.

The late archbishop of Mylapore, Dr. R. Arulappa, in Punitha Thomayar, asserts that Big Mount (St. Thomas Mount) was originally called Bhrigu Malai and was the seat of the Hindu sage Bhrigu Rishi until St. Thomas came and chased him away. This story, like the one above, is another piece of fiction that has at its core a little truth. The hill was not sacred to Bhrigu Rishi but to Perumal, as the Tamils call Lord Vishnu, and it is the Portuguese who chased the “rishi” away, not St. Thomas. The temple was destroyed around 1545, when they gained effective control of the hill, which was the highest in the area and the southern limit of their territory. Portuguese historians describe it as being crowded with ruins then, and broken temple stones can still be found on its slopes, on the south and west side.

Portuguese pirates were very pious and faithful to their jealous god and he rewarded them with the booty taken during the pillage of Goa and Mylapore.

The Portuguese had begun to settle around Big Mount as early as 1523—the same year they “discovered” the tomb of “St. Thomas”—and one of the first to take up residence there was Diogo Fernandez. He would succeed in erecting a small chapel on the hill before 1545, but the construction of the church, called Our Lady of Expectation, did not commence until 1547. It was built on the east–west alignment of the temple foundation—the ancient granite base of the flag pole is on the eastern side of the church—but the Portuguese reversed this order in keeping with established Christian practice when building on a Pagan site, and the church entrance is on the western side. In 1707, the building was extended by an Armenian merchant and the royal arms of Portugal were added to the facade of the main porch.

Eighth century Persian cross attributed to St. Thomas. The inscription around it is in Pahlavi (Persian) script and the artisan who carved the cross from a Hindu temple stone, has signed it as Afras.

It was when clearing the rubble for the church, in 1547, that the Portuguese “discovered” the famous Persian “St. Thomas” cross in the temple foundation. Diogo Fernandez is not implicated in this fraud, but the Vicar of San Thome, Fr. Gaspar Coelho, and the Captain of the Coromandel, Gabriel de Athaide, are, as the construction was under their direct supervision. What is known for certain is that St. Thomas did not carve this cross—it is dated to the eighth century, like its counterparts in Kerala—and as a cross it did not originate on Big Mount (see pages 47 and 48). It was kept inside the church behind the altar, and used to “bleed” at irregular intervals up to 1704. This phenomenon stopped as soon as the sensible and schismatic British began to move into the area and build a cantonment.[2]

Portuguese icon of Virgin Mary & Child attributed to the apostle St. Luke. There are seven of these icons in various parts of the world attributed to St. Luke. This one is probably of Portuguese manufacture. It is not dated as the Madras Archdiocese has not allowed any scientific investigation into the alleged St. Thomas artifacts.

The other “St. Thomas” relic in the church is a brightly coloured icon of Mary and the child Jesus. It is said to have been painted by St. Luke and brought to India by St. Thomas, who wore it on his breast as a scapular or badge of mission. In fact, it does not appear in Portuguese records until 1559, and the diverse stories that go with it were invented after this date.[3]

The church also has paintings of St. Thomas and his Hindu assassin. One of them, on the reredos of the altar, depicts an Iyengar Brahmin with namam, about to stab the praying apostle from behind. It defeats its purpose inasmuch as Vaishnavas did not wear namam, the U-shaped forehead mark, until after Ramanuja introduced it in the eleventh century. The other painting, very large and part of a series of the apostles and their various modes of death, shows St. Thomas with a book, a lance, and his sturdy Hindu assassin, who, this time, does not wear sectarian marks or orthodox dress.

[Excerpted from The Myth of Saint Thomas and the Mylapore Shiva Temple, Chapter 18]

NOTES:

1. See “Archbishop Arulappa MakesHistory”

2. Rev. C.E. Abraham, in an article in The Cultural Heritage of India, writes, “The Persian crosses–or so-called Thomas crosses—with inscriptions in Pahlavi, one found in St. Thomas Mount, Madras, and two in a church in Kottayam in Travancore, are evidence of the connection of the Malabar Church with the Church of Persia.”

The Pahlavi (Persian) inscription on the three stone crosses, two in Kerala and one on St. Thomas Mount, read (according to C.P.T. Winckworth whose translation is generally accepted): “My Lord Christ, have mercy upon Afras, son of Chaharbukht the Syrian, who cut this.”

These crosses are evidence of the connection of the Christian church in India with Persia, but they may also be evidence of temple destruction and the planting of Christian relics in temple foundations – at least the one on St. Thomas Mount may be so considered.

The motif on this black granite slab is cut in relief, and on each side of the cross, which is surmounted by a descending dove, are pillars crowned with supernatural composite animals, or yalis, from whose mouths issue an arch that joins together above the dove.

These yalis are Hindu symbols, not Christian, and Veda Prakash, Director of the Institute for the Study of Western Religions, Madras, asserts that the cross on St. Thomas Mount is an over-cut temple stone. He claims support for this view from the most unexpected quarter. Dr. R. Arulappa, the former Roman Catholic archbishop of Madras, in Punitha Thomaiyar, says that yantra stones in temple foundations were dug up by the Portuguese on three of the four sites in Madras that they associated with St. Thomas and where they built churches—Mylapore, Little Mount at Saidapet, and Big Mount at St. Thomas Mount.

The dove-and-cross motif of this stone has been described by one writer as Manichaean and by another as Nestorian. Fr. Herman D’Souza, in In the Steps of St. Thomas, quoting Francis Gouvea on the sixteenth century Portuguese “excavation” at St. Thomas Mount, identifies the motif with that used by the Knights of Aviz in Portugal.

The solution to this problem of the origin and identification of the Persian crosses and all other relics associated with St. Thomas is to have them examined by independent forensic experts. If the Bishop of Turin could surrender the famous Shroud of Turin, alleged burial cloth of Jesus, to scientists and accept their verdict that it is a mediaeval fake, then the Archbishop of Madras should be willing to do the same with the various St. Thomas relics in his possession.

3. There are seven of these icons by “St. Luke” scattered around the world. The most famous one hangs in the Basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore in Rome, which was built by Pope Sixtus III in 432 C.E. after he had demolished the Temple of Cybele on the Esquiline Hill.

Orpheus before Jesus: Orphic crucifixion scene dated 3rd century BC.

The cross as a symbol of Christianity did not come into popular use until the 3rd century. There are two reasons for this: first, early Christians were practicing Jews and the cross was an abhorant symbol of torture and death, and second, the cross was already used as a religious symbol by adherants of the Greek cult of Orpheus. It is from the Orphics that the Christians borrowed the cross in the 3-4th centuries. But in fact it did not gain popularity as a Christian symbol till some centuries later.

The original symbol for Christianity was a fish with or without the word “Jesus” drawn in Greek in its body. Nor was the Virgin Mary venerated until some centuries later. Historically, neither the cross nor the painting(s) of the Virgin Mary can be associated with the 1st century apostles Thomas and Luke. The association was made by pious Christian authors and artists long after Christianity was imposed on the Roman Empire by Emperor Constantine. The Indian Christian today naively believes that the Christianity of 1st century Jerusalem was a fully developed religious system, the same religion presented to Indians in the 16th century by the Portuguese.

For the first three centuries, Christians used the fish with or without the name of Jesus in Greek written in its body, as their identifying mark and symbol. They did not use the Orphic cross-crucifix as a symbol until much later. Even if Judas Thomas had come to Mylapore, he would not have made cross symbols as he was a practicing Jew and the Roman-Orphic cross was abhorrent to him. The cross was introduced into India by Christian immigrants from Persia after the 7th=8th century.

The Pagan origin of the Christian fish symbol

Guru · Guru

DECCAN CHRONICLE FEATURE, CHENNAI, 16 JULY 2008

Little Mount

It is also called Chinna Malai, and is a little before St. Thomas Mount. There are two churches here, which are associated with the legends of the Apostle of India — Our Lady of Health Church and Blessed Sacrament Chapel. The annual festival at Our Lady of Health is a noteworthy event in the Madras calendar.

St. Thomas was the Apostle of Brazil, Japan, Syria, Socotra, Ethiopia, Germany, Ceylon and Persia before he became the Apostle of India.

THE REAL HISTORY

The appellation “Apostle of India” for St. Thomas is a recent Roman Catholic invention. Prof. Leonardo Olschki, a world authority on Christianity, writes,“The Nestorians of India [Syrian Christians] … venerated St. Thomas as the patron of Asiatic Christianity — mark, not of Indian Christianity“.

There are four places in Madras and its environs, other than San Thome, that the Portuguese associated with St. Thomas. The first is a rocky hillock called Little Mount, four miles southwest of Mylapore, on the south bank of the Adyar at Saidapet. Fr. Herman D’Souza, in In the Steps of St. Thomas, writes, “Hoary tradition among Catholics and non-Catholics … proudly holds that this part of [Madras] extended shelter to the Apostle, when the ministers of the local king, Mahadevan, were out to murder him…. The favorite of the king, Thomas was ever in danger of losing his precious life — thanks to the scheming ministers whipped up by Hindu priests…. There is a version that the Apostle was actually handled brutally more than once in his apartment, in the absence of the king. In order to save his life for yet a little while for the greater glory of God, Thomas is reported to have sought refuge in the jungle of Little Mount.”

Portuguese church at Little Mount. This was a Hindu holy site with a cave sacred to Murugan until the Portuguese occupied the area in 1551 and dedicated it to St. Thomas.

This sly communal tale, invented by Jesuits and improved on by Fr. D’Souza, is peculiar to Madras [and still published by the Diocesan Press in San Thome]. He tries to establish Hindu support for the story, by quoting Hindu publications that repeat it. But Hindu traditions about Little Mount and other “St. Thomas” sites are quite different and much older than those of the Portuguese. They believe that the hillock, with its cave and spring and imprint of pea****’s feet in the rock, was sacred to Murugan, and Hindu women used to visit the site even after the Portuguese had cleared it of shrines. In 1551, a church was built by the cave, called Our Lady of Health, and the Jesuits built a second church by the spring. Nothing remains of these buildings today, and the archaeological evidence on the site was destroyed years ago when it was blasted to make way for the modern church that now stands there.

St. Thomas had to leave Little Mount when the king’s men found him in the cave. He fled to Big Mount [St. Thomas Mount], two miles further south, by a secret underground passage. But Big Mount did not offer refuge either. Fr. D’Souza writes, “His murderers sought him there and were on the point of seizing him. How long St. Thomas made his abode on top of the hill, one cannot say. Unbroken tradition maintains that while the Apostle was praying before a cross carved by him on a stone, an assassin suborned by King Mahadevan’s priest and ministers, crept up stealthily and pierced him with a lance from behind. Thereupon the Apostle is reported to have fallen on the stone cross and embraced it; his blood crimsoned the stone cross and the space around. Thus did he seal his Apostolate with his blood, even as the other Apostles, save St. John…. His disciples took his body to [Mylapore] … and interred it at his dear old place, about the year A.D. 68.”

"King" Mahadevan: He was the only ruler in Mylapore in 68 CE. There is no record that Judas Thomas ever visited him.

This rendition of the fable has no equivalent in Malabar and no relationship to the account in the Acts of Thomas, though it does have in it the priest and the lance found in the Portuguese De Miraculous Thomae. There is no record that Mylapore had a temporal king of any name in 68 CE — the date first appeared on a memorial plaque in San Thome Cathedral in the eighteenth century and was afterwards incorporated into the story. But as is the case with many historical fabrications, it contains an element of truth and this gives the fictional parts credibility. Mahadevan is a reference to Lord Shiva, who was of course the King of Mylapore in the first century C.E., even as He is today.

Guru · Guru

The Deccan Chronicle’s Pious Deceits – Ishwar Sharan

January 18, 2010 · Leave a Comment

Deccan Chronicle Holdings chairman T. Venkattaram Reddy. The Deccan Chronicle is South India's leading Christian newspaper.

The Deccan Chronicle is south India’s largest Christian newspaper and a willing mouthpiece for the Catholic Bishops Conference in India. It is the newest proponent of the St. Thomas fable as secular Indian history in Chennai (following The Hindu and The New Indian Express). It often but not always hides its pro-St. Thomas agenda behind a correspondent’s byline or the provocative statement of the Santhome Cathedral priest: “The existence of the Santhome Church is a proof by itself that Christianity in India is more than 2000 years old” (DC, Chennai, 8 April 2007).

The Deccan Chronicle editor in Chennai is cricket commentator R. Mohan.

For sucking up to the Roman Catholic clergy in India and in Rome, the Deccan Chronicle is the leader among Indian newspapers. Its current resident editor in Chennai, R. Mohan, being another self-righteous secularist of the Nehruvian school, assiduously follows the Christian practice of treating Hindu history as mythology and Christian mythology as history. In true Indian secularist fashion, he does not tolerate dissent, and letters to the editor concerning lies and distortions in DCarticles are neither acknowledged or published. Every effort is made by Mohan and his in-house minions to provoke and insult Hindu readers and letter writers. This is called “freedom of the press” in our secular socialist adharmic India that is Bharat.

For Chairman Reddy and his house boy Mohan, criticism of themselves or their “eminent” contributors is a manifestation of Hindu communalism and ignorance. Indeed, dissent can attract a very spiteful response from editor Mohan. Yet both men, whose decisions influence the opinions of half a million readers and more every day, will ignore facts and figures as extraneous irritants, except where the facts and figures can be employed in subtle Hindu-bashing exercises(2), or otherwise to whitewash the bigoted and violent history of Islam and Christianity in India and promote their pro-Catholic agenda in Hyderabad, Chennai, and Bangalore.

Anti-Brahminism and anti-Semitism are the same ethno-religious prejudice directed at an accomplished minority group who are perceived, wrongly, to be the cause of a nation’s social and economic ills, or, otherwise, to be controlling a nation’s cultural, political, or economic destiny from behind the scenes in their own interest. Koenraad Elst, in Indigenous Indians: Agastya to Ambedkar, writes, “In fact, apart from anti-Judaism, the anti-Brahmin campaign started by [Christian] missionaries is the biggest vilification campaign in world history.”
An example of an anti-Hindu exercise is the use of the term “idol” for Hindu images. Technically correct, the word is loaded with negative connotations and is part of the abusive rhetoric of Christian missionaries in India. The same newspaper on another page uses the neutral term “statues” for Christian images. Clearly, there is editorial bias at work here. In the forty years that I have lived in India, I have never met a Hindu who worships idols. Hindus worship God, and even a simple village woman knows that God is spirit not matter.

Guru · Guru

Pope denies St. Thomas came to South India

St. Thomas the Apostle, the look-alike twin brother of Jesus

Controversy is raging in the Christian community in Kerala following recent remarks by Pope Benedict XVI that St. Thomas had preached Christianity in “western” India, from where it spread to other parts of the country, fuelling a debate whether or not the apostle had come to southern India.

The community in Kerala believes that St. Thomas came to this part of the country in A.D. 52 and had established seven churches. The community considers St. Thomas as the “Father in Faith” of Christians in India.

The present Pope had in a recent pronouncement at St. Peter's Square at the Vatican spoken of St. Thomas the Apostle, seemingly taking away from him the traditional title of “Apostle of India”.

Though the Pope did not actually use the expression “apostle of Pakistan”, what he said might seem to imply it, says an article by George Nedungatt, a faculty member of the Oriental Pontifical Institute, Rome, in Satya Deepam, a mouthpiece of the Syro-Malabar church.

The article says the Pope's predecessors had on several occasions referred to St. Thomas as the “Apostle of India”. However, differing from this view, Pope Benedict feels the area St. Thomas evangelised was not South India, but what he called “western India”, corresponding roughly to today's Pakistan, says the article.

The Pope, addressing a vast crowd at St. Peter's Square, had said: “ ... Thomas first evangelised Syria and Persia and then penetrated as far as western India, from where Christianity reached also South India”.

According to the Pope, while northwestern India was evangelised by St. Thomas, South India was not evangelised by him. He does not specify who first preached the Gospel in South India: whether some disciple or disciples of the Apostle himself or others in the post-apostolic age or later, the article says. As the Pope sees it, South India was not evangelised by St. Thomas, but by Christians coming from northwestern India, seemingly at a later period.

“The Thomas Christians of South India, both Catholic and others, are not likely to be thankful for his papal statement. This is a clear departure from the pronouncements of his predecessors,” the article says.

Church sources say there is scholarly debate on the evidence on whether St. Thomas came to India and Kerala. Historical proofs are from the Gospel of St. Thomas and Act of Thomas, the sources said.

From these there (is) evidence that St. Thomas came to India. But it is not clear whether he had come to western India or southern India, the sources said.

In Chennai, meanwhile, Rev. Lawrence Pius Dorairaj, Bishop of Santhome Basilica Cathedral, which is built over the tomb of the apostle, said the controversy sparked by the Pope's remarks was nothing new. “Going by reports in a mouthpiece of the Syro-Malabar Church, the sentiments of the St. Thomas Christians have definitely been hurt,” he said.

NOTE: This article originally appeared in The Deccan Chronicle, Chennai, of 23 November 2006, under the title "Pope angers Christians in Kerala".

See The Times of India report and update of the Pope's statement.

Guru · Guru

Oct 22, 2009

"Thomas evangelized Syria and Persia," says Pope Benedict XVI

His reluctance to believe what fellow disciples said about Jesus Christ's resurrection earned him the name Doubting Thomas. Centuries later, St. Thomas — believed to be the man who brought Christianity to India — finds himself in the shadow of ‘doubt' with none other than the Pope contradicting his evangelical trek in the country, only to modify it a few days later. But far from dousing the fire, the Pope has rekindled a debate and given critics an issue on the platter.

Pope Benedict XVI made the statement at the Vatican on September 27, 2006. Addressing the faithful during the Wednesday catechizes, he recalled that St. Thomas first evangelized Syria and Persia, and went on to western India from where Christianity reached Southern India. The import of the statement was that St. Thomas never travelled to south India, but rather evangelized the western front, mostly comprising today's Pakistan.

Knowingly or unknowingly, he had in one stroke challenged the basis of Christianity in India and demolished long-held views of the Church here that St. Thomas landed in Kerala, where he spread the gospel among Hindus. The comments were especially a let down for the Syrian Christians of Kerala, who proudly trace their ancestry to upper-caste Hindus said to have been evangelised by St. Thomas upon his arrival in 52 AD. The comments went unnoticed until Sathya-Deepam, the official mouthpiece of the Syro-Malabar Church, picked it up. Writing in it, George Nedungat, a member of the Oriental Pontifical Institute of Rome, conveyed the community's anguish and claimed that previous Popes had recognized St. Thomas's work in South India.

G. Ananthakrishnan
Times of India, New Delhi, 26 December 2006

Guru · Guru

St. Thomas the Apostle of Brazil – Fr. Francis X. Clooney, SJ

March 3, 2010 · Leave a Comment

As for St Thomas, in my essay on the missionaries, I wrote:

If, as Xavier found, non-Christian peoples were not entirely bereft of God’s wisdom and inklings of revealed truth, the cause of this knowledge had to be explained, and later generations spent a good deal of time reflecting on the matter. There were numerous theories early on among the missionary scholars. For example, Antonio Ruiz de Montoya, writing in Peru in the mid-seventeenth century, thought that since God would not have overlooked the Americas for fifteen hundred years, and since among the twelve apostles St. Thomas was known for his mission to the “most abject people in the world, blacks and Indians,” it was only reasonable to conclude that St. Thomas had preached throughout the Americas: “He began in Brazil – either reaching it by natural means on Roman ships, which some maintain were in communication with America from the coast of Africa, or else, as may be thought closer to the truth, being transported there by God miraculously. He passed to Paraguay, and from there to the Peruvians.”

Ruiz de Montoya reported that St. Thomas even predicted the arrival of later missionaries, including the Jesuits themselves: “[Thomas] had prophesied in the eastern Indies that his preaching of the gospel would be revived, saying: “When the sea reaches this rock, by divine ordinance white men will come from far-off lands to preach the doctrine that I am now teaching you and to revive the memory of it.” Similarly, the saint prophesied in nearly identical words the coming of the Society’s members into the regions of Paraguay about which I speak: “You will forget what I preach to you, but when priests who are my successors come carrying crosses as I do, then you will hear once more the same doctrine that I am teaching you.”

Guru · Guru

Wikipedia & Encyclopedia Britannica: Their counterfeit St. Thomas entries exposed – Ishwar Sharan

March 18, 2010 · Leave a Comment

“WE HAVE CONCLUDED THAT THE PORTION OF THE ARTICLE THAT REFERS TO THOMAS’ LATER LIFE PLACES TOO MUCH EMPHASIS ON THE UNLIKELY SCENARIO OF HIS TRAVELING TO, AND BEING MARTYRED IN INDIA” - ANTHONY G. CRAINE, ENCYCLOPAEDIA BRITANNICA

The cult of St. Thomas originated in and was centered at Edessa at least up to the eighth century when the Muslims began to invade, and it is the considered opinion of many historians today that nobody in Asia was interested in this “second Jesus” – Judas Thomas was a look alike twin brother of Jesus according to some authorities – except Edessa from where his cult radiated outwards. Syrian Christian merchants carried it westward to Ethiopia, eastward to India, and northward to the bazaars of Constantinople. This view was anticipated by the “St. Thomas” Christian Dr. G. Milne Rae of the Madras Christian College at the end of the 19th century.

Dr. Milne Rae wrote a famous book in 1892, The Syrian Church in India, which provoked severe criticism from the Syrian Christian community. In it he denies the Indian apostolate of St. Thomas, and in another research paper asks, “In what literature is the name of St. Thomas first associated with India? It will appear I think the home of that literature, the original hotbed in which it was reared, was no other than the Church of Edessa. For there is no place within the area occupied, by the language in which those books were written, that had any such interest in the fortunes and destiny of the Apostle. The story of Thomas preaching and his martyrdom in India is first found in the apocryphal Acts of Thomasand it is curious to note that throughout the work the Apostle is generally called Judas Thomas, a name which he also received in that group of documents which Eusebius found among the archives at Edessa. It is palpably a Gnostic work and students of Gnosticism, judging from the stages of development at which they find the heresy in the Acts, assign it to the end of the second century. It may have been written by Bardesanes. But whoever the real author was, I think the details of this work are not only consistent with the belief that they were put together by a member of the Edessene Church, but also defy explanation on any other hypothesis.”

Donald At****er, in The Penguin Dictionary of Saints,with reference to L.W. Brown inThe Indian Christians of St. Thomas, writes, “There is endless discussion about St. Thomas’s subsequent life. In particular, did he take the gospel to India, where for many centuries the Christians of Kerala have called themselves ‘St. Thomas Christians’? That he did so, and was martyred there, is the theme of a long document of the third or fourth century, called the Acts of Thomas. This is one of the most readable and intrinsically interesting of early Christian apocryphal writings; but it is no more than a popular romance, written in the interest of false Gnostic teachings (e.g. the virtual necessity of celibacy for Christians). It is not impossible that St. Thomas should have reached southern India, but the historical reality of his mission there cannot be considered proved. It is also said that he evangelized Parthia, and in the fourth century his relics were claimed to be at Edessa in Mesopotamia.”

Bishop Stephen Neill studied the St. Thomas legend carefully during his years in India, and lamented its spread among Indian Christians. He regarded the story as spurious history, and in History of Christianity in India: The Beginnings to 1707 A.D., writes, “A number of scholars, among whom are to be mentioned with respect Bishop A.E. Medleycott, J.N. Farquhar and the Jesuit J. Dahlman, have built on slender foundations what can only be called Thomas romances, such as reflect the vividness of their imaginations rather than the prudence of rigid historical critics.”

Bishop Neill is being charitable to Bishop Medleycott when he calls hisIndia and the Apostle Thomasan imaginative romance built on slender foundations. Henry Love, in Vestiges of Old Madras, is even more forgiving when he writes, “Bishop Medleycott, who has sifted every shred of evidence on the subject, concludes that St. Thomas the Apostle preached and suffered on the Mount, but his arguments do not appear to be altogether convincing.”

Bishop Medleycott is the godfather of Thomas-in-India scholarship in India, and even in his day he was accused of working under religious, racial, regional, political, and linguistic influences. He was the Vicar Apostolic of Trichur from 1887 to 1896, the diocese in which the alleged landing place of St. Thomas, Kodungallur, is located, and was the first European missionary bishop to be appointed by Rome to rule over the local Syrian Christian community. This community existed in a forgotten Kerala backwater that was overshadowed by San Thome at Mylapore, and Bishop Medleycott had a mandate – or believed he had a mandate – to raise Kodungallur’s status and prepare the ideological ground for the apostle’s “return”.

Medleycott soon discovered that this was not very hard to do. The old tradition of St. Thomas was still alive in Malabar, in medieval Syrian wedding songs and “evidence” left behind by those pious forgers and pirates, the Portuguese, and he had local Syrian priests to advise him. There was also the Acts of Thomas, which nobody knew in the original and which no Christian priest would dare to teach to his congregation. All that was needed was inventive Catholic scholarship to turn a local Kerala Christian tradition into world history.

Bishop Medleycott won the day with his work, though he didn’t live to see it. St. Thomas was “returned” to Kodungallur in 1953, in the form of a piece of bone from the elbow of his right arm. The relic was a gift from the clergy of Ortona, Italy, where the apostle’s Church-authenticated remains had lain since 1258. They had been brought to Ortona from Edessa by way of Chios in Greece, and, according to one tradition that is repeated today as factual if unverified, had arrived in Edessa from “India” between 222 and 235 CE. In the Acts of Thomas the bones were transferred to Mesopotamia from “India” – the “desert country” of King Mazdai – in the lifetime of the Persian king.

Eugene Cardinal Tisserant, the other imaginative writer of oriental church history, led the “second coming” to Kodungallur, and he later proceeded to Mylapore with another bit of Ortona bone for the cathedral there. For the first time in history both sites in India associated with St. Thomas in legend and story could truly say that they possessed the apostle’s relics.

This event and the alleged first century coming of the apostle were commemorated by the Government of India with postage stamps that were issued in 1964 and 1973. The first stamp depicts the silver bust of St. Thomas that is in the cathedral at Ortona, which contains his complete skull, and the second shows the eighth century Persian “St. Thomas” cross on St. Thomas Mount near Madras. That neither these artifacts nor the relics, or, for that matter, the legendary event that they celebrate, are Indian, is one of the ironies that is part of the history of the story of St. Thomas in India.

But Bishop Medleycott’s victory went further. He got himself named as the St. Thomas authority in the prestigiousEncyclopaedia Britannica,Fifteenth Edition, 1984, along with Chevalier F.A. D’Cruz, editor of the old Mylapore Catholic Register and author of St. Thomas the Apostle in India.

The unsigned main entry for St. Thomas in the Encyclopaedia is muddled and dissembling and simply wrong in some places. After giving the New Testament references, it says,“Thomas’ subsequent history is uncertain. According to the 4th century Ecclesiastical History of Bishop Eusebius of Caesarea, he evangelized Parthia (modern Khorasan). Later Christian tradition says Thomas extended his apostolate into India, where he is recognized as the founder of the church of the Syrian Malabar Christians, or Christians of St. Thomas. In the apocryphal Acts of Thomas, originally composed in Syriac, his martyrdom is cited under the king of Mylapore at Madras ….”

The Acts does not “cite” this at all of course; it does not even remotely suggest it. There is no known record that Mylapore had a king in the first century and if it did, he was not a Zoroastrian with the name of Mazdai. The story in the Acts and the Mylapore legend have nothing in common, though the latter can be said to exist only because of the former. Further on the article says, “He allegedly visited the court of the Indo-Parthian king Gondophernes … though some of the Acts of Thomas is probable, evidence remains inconclusive.”

Now even if some of the Acts is accepted as probable, the composer of this entry still hasn’t got the story right. He uses the word “allegedly” for the visit of St. Thomas to the court of Gondophernes – assuming that Gondophernes is the same as Gundaphorus – when he could correctly cite the Acts for the reference.

These errors are deliberate and motivated, given their context and arrangement, and this St. Thomas entry in the Encyclopaedia has been written by a Catholic scholar who not only subscribes to the apostle’s alleged South Indian adventure, but wishes to place the Mylapore tale over that of the Malabar tradition. He does this by mixing the North Indian legend, represented by the Acts, with the South Indian fable that the Portuguese left in Mylapore, to promote his particular South Indian masala view. He gets away with the deception because nobody has read the Acts of Thomas and studied its references to the kings Gundaphorus and Misdaeus-Mazdai, and the execution of Judas Thomas on a mountain that contained an ancient royal tomb.

We decided to call the Encyclopaedia Britannica’s bluff and on 19 September 1996 sent a letter pointing out the errors in the St. Thomas entry, and a copy of this book (second revised edition) to the Encyclopaedia’s editor-in-chief in Chicago. The editorial division representative Anthony G. Craine replied to us on 18 October 1996. He wrote, “We have received your book, and we have subsequently reviewed our coverage of Saint Thomas. While the Saint Thomas article that appears in the current printing of the Encyclopaedia Britannica differs slightly from the 1984 article to which you refer in your book, the current article does convey the same basic information. We have concluded that the portion of the article that refers to Thomas’ later life places too much emphasis on the unlikely scenario of his traveling to, and being martyred in India [emphasis added]. We have referred this information to the appropriate editor so that the article can be revised in future printings of Britannica. We appreciate your bringing this matter to our attention.”

We did not pay any more attention to the matter until February 2010 when we began updating The Myth of Saint Thomas and the Mylapore Shiva Templeand had a look at the St. Thomas entry on theEncyclopaedia Britannica website. It says very little about St. Thomas and there is no article, only a link to a reference, but it begins like this, “… born, probably Galilee, died AD 53, Madras, India …” The entry for Kottayam, the centre of Syrian Christianity in India, says in part, “The town is a centre of the Syrian Christian community, which traces its origin to the apostle St. Thomas, who is believed to have visited Kerala in 53 CE and to have established seven churches on the Malabar Coast.” The entry for Christians of Saint Thomas reads, “The origins of the Christians of St. Thomas are uncertain, though they seem to have been in existence before the 6th century and probably derive from the missionary activity of the East Syrian (Nestorian) Church—which held that, in effect, the two natures of Christ were two persons, somehow joined in a moral union—centred at Ctesiphon.”

None of these entries are correct but the reference to Kottayam and Madras, giving the specific date of 53 CE for St. Thomas, is just a reworking of the Encyclopaedia’s 1984 entry. The various dates for St. Thomas’s arrival in India and death in Madras are inventions that were added to the legend in the nineteenth century. The editor has not kept his promise and has maintained the same information about St. Thomas and India in different wording. The charge that the Encyclopaedia Britannica is a Catholic encyclopedia intent on promoting a traditional Christian point of view remains. It has always been that way with the Encyclopaedia: Joseph McCabe the great linguist and historian of early Christianity, could not get it to correct and change its wrong entries for early Christian history either.

Bishop Medleycott with his papal mandate and imperial urges, totally discedited as a historian of Christianity in India, remains the last word on St. Thomas in India in all Catholic encyclopedias and, believe it or not, the Internet’s modern, up-to-date Wikipedia as well.

Sometime in May 2008 we looked at theThomas the Apostle page on Wikipedia. It did not have very much to say about St. Thomas in India except for the usual fabricated dates of arrival in Kerala and death by assassin’s hand in Madras. On the talk page we noted a demand by the rabid Hindu-hating Chennai-based missionary and co-conspirator of Catholic “free thinker” Deivanayagam, Alexander Harris of The Last Days Harvest Ministries and Appius Forum, that our website The Ishwar Sharan Archive link http://.hamsa.org be removed from reference. But the main article page included Pope Benedict’s categorical statement made at the Vatican on 26 September 2006, that St. Thomas did not come to South India,[1]and this encouraged us to try our hand at Wikipedia editing. We felt assured that Wikipedia was interested in facts that could be verified not just Indian Christian traditions – Indian Christians are not able to distinguish between their beliefs and historical evidence; they think beliefs and facts are the same thing – and decided to contribute to the Thomas the Apostle article. We adopted the user name Vena Varcas and introduced our self on the Thomas the Apostle talk page with the following statement:

Historicity of St. Thomas Controversial and Disputed
The editors of this article will have to consider the fact that all references to Thomas in Indian Christian tradition and folklore have been rejected as unhistorical by responsible Christian scholars and ecclesiastics (barring a few like Medleycott and Arulappa) for the past two centuries. The elaborate and confusing mythology of Thomas is not factual or verifiable and cannot ethically be represented as true history in an encyclopedia. These pious legends may have a role to play in religion but they do not have a place in Indian history writing unless they are identified and qualified for the general reader.
The reputed Christian historian A. Mingana has written in The Early Spread of Christianity in India that “What India gives us about Christianity in its midst is indeed nothing but pure fables”. This is true about the Thomas tradition in India and in the numerous other places it exists in Asia except perhaps Edessa where it originated. Any serious article about Thomas in India, or the various controversial and disputed places of pilgrimage associated with him, should be unambiguously declared as faith-based and historically unverified. To do otherwise in an encyclopedia article is intellectually dishonest and misleading and amounts to little more than religious propaganda created in the interests of a certain theological point of view.
The Trichur bishop Medleycott wrote his Thomas history with ulterior motive and is the favourite scholar of Thomas protagonists who quote him at length (including the EB which is a known RC-biased encyclopedia). He has been discredited by the renowned Christian historian Bishop Stephen Neill. Neill spent many years in India researching Indian Christian Thomas traditions and the Thomas legend and wrote in 1985, in History of Christianity in India: The Beginnings to 1707 A.D., that “A number of scholars, among whom are to be mentioned with respect Bishop A.E. Medleycott, J.N. Farquhar and the Jesuit J. Dahlman, have built on slender foundations what can only be called Thomas romances, such as reflect the vividness of their imaginations rather than the prudence of rigid historical critics.”
Bishop Neill goes on to say, “Millions of Christians in India are certain that the founder of their church is none other than the apostle Thomas himself. The historian cannot prove to them that they are mistaken in their belief. He may feel it right to warn them that historical research cannot pronounce on the matter with a confidence equal to that which they entertain by faith.”
The point is that this article Thomas the Apostle is a matter of Indian Christian faith, not Indian history, and it should not be presented in an encyclopedia as Indian history. Some parts of the article are neutral and other parts are just fiction propped up with facts and figures, names and dates, or some doubtful reference. In some cases the article assumes too much, and in others it shows extreme bias. In fact, the whole project shows bias in its declared intention, when it treats as proven a legend that most respected world historians declare is fiction and unprovable. What the article needs is review and revision by a neutral historical critic who has no Indian Christian axe to grind. Is this possible in the Wikipedia scenario? Would the article’s administrator and watchdog with his declared special interests ever permit it? -Vena Varcas (talk) 15:55, 15 May 2008 (UTC).

We then set to work on the WikipediaThomas the Apostle article adding verifiable references and short sections with citations. Every statement we made was supported with an authoritative reference from a recognized historian of Christianity. We were very careful not to delete any material already posted on the page or refer to the demolition of the Kapaleeswara Temple in Mylapore by the Portuguese. However, as our contribution progressed, Mylapore did come into the picture and we introduced it with a reference to Swami Tapasyananda of the Ramakrishna Math in Mylapore and the article he had written in Vedanta Kesaricalled “The Legend of a Slain Saint to Stain Hinduism.”

This single attributed reference to a Hindu scholar was too much for the Kerala Christian Wikipedia page administrator Tinucherian (Cherian Tinu Abraham). Within an hour of the post, he deleted our reference to Swami Tapsyananda and rolled back the other postings we had made that day. It was a real surprise to us. Where we had made an effort not to interfere with earlier postings, we discovered that the same courtesy was not extended to us and that we would not be informed when we had “offended” Tinucherian’s Christian enterprise. We abandoned Wikipedia as a waste of time and effort and our contributions were soon perverted or deleted altogether.

The concocted absurdities found in theWikipedia Thomas the Apostle article today, which lacks citations and references that stand up to scrutiny, can be exposed with a single example: the statement in the Thomas and India subsection of the article says that the king who executed Judas Thomas for sorcery and crimes against women, Mazdai (Misdaeus in Greek), was “the local king at Mylapore”. This is a preposterous statement. The name Mazdai (or Masdai) is Persian and specifically identifies a person who is Zoroastrian by religion. Mazdaism identifies a worshiper of Ahura Mazda and is a synonym for Zoroastrianism. Associating the Acts of Thomas and its Persian king Mazdai with Mylapore is motivated Christian scholarship – something Dr. M. Deivanayagam of the Madras-Mylapore Archdiocesewould produce – and the fact that the Wikipediaadministrator Tinucherian allows such unsupported statements to stand unchallenged shows that he is deeply involved in the crime of writing a deliberately false and perverted history of Christianity in Mylapore.

Wikipedia by its free-for-all constitution and arbitrary, secretive contribution and editorial oversight system lacks all credibility. Every fact checked with this Internet reference has to be checked someplace else if it is to be accepted as authoritative. Many of its articles on Christianity in India are propaganda projects set up to project a particular Christian world view. This is to be expected: the wiki editing system invites India’s cultural enemies, Christian missionaries and other western neo-colonialists, to propound their hostile, anti-Indian theories. Its administrators are not authorities on the subjects they oversee (Tinucherian is a Bangalore software engineer who knows nothing about St. Thomas and the history of Christianity in India except for what his pious mother may have taught him) and their personal prejudices soon become evident and interfere with factual and cited contributions. Wikipedia is the perfect platform for Christian propaganda in India and is being used for that purpose with great effect in its Christianity in India project. This Wikipedia series even employs the symbol of a cross superimposed on a light blue map of India, a symbol that is highly offensive to the majority Hindu population who identify India as their mother and civilizational homeland.

The fabulous and false “facts” about St. Thomas and India found in the Encyclopaedia Britannica and its Internet sister Wikipedia make the ancient Greek historian and geographer Strabo into a prophet (he was a contemporary of Jesus and Thomas). He said, “Generally speaking the men who have written on India were a set of liars.” And so it is with the contributors to the mainstream encyclopedias and dictionaries that reference Indian history today.

And closer to home, Sri Aurobindo, in The Foundations of Indian Culture, referred to “the intemperate … vomit of false witness, hatred, [and] uncharitableness … that are the mark of a certain type of Christian literature …”

Falsely accusing the native Hindus population of an ancient India that gave 4th century Syrian Christian refugees from Persia funds and land to build churches, with the murder of their patron saint Mar Thoma, certainly falls into the category of “intemperate vomit of false witness, hatred, and uncharitableness”. Christians are perceived to be an educated and modern secular community, but we see from their fabricated encyclopedic writings on St. Thomas (many of which have appeared after the publication of our 1991 essay) that they are the most superstitious of Indian communities with an obsessive allegiance to an authoritarian and very corrupt medieval Indian church.

But it is not only international English-language reference works that repeat the falsehood that St. Thomas came to South India and was murdered in Madras by hostile Hindus. Indian reference books repeat the St. Thomas tale because they are too lazy to do any original research of their own and simply copy existing sources which are usually Christian or western sources. For example, the Christian Internet reference Indianetzone in its long self-persuading entry for St. Thomas treats him as Kerala’s first Christian missionary. They wax eloquent about the old St. Thomas traditions in Kerala and how everybody believes them so they must be true. Fine for the Christian faithful, but this is story telling not India history writing. A lie does not become truth with old age and much repetition by Christian priests! We have twice contacted the editors and given them the known historical data on St. Thomas, but to no effect. They block our comments, delete our registration from their site, and refuse to acknowledge our mail. Like theEncyclopaedia Britannica and Wikipedia,Indianetzone is deeply attached to its fictitious and fabulous St. Thomas entry and will not let it go for a more prosaic and truthful account of Christianity’s origins in India.

If St. Thomas lived at all – and we have no positive evidence for this either – it was in Palestine and Syria, and it was in Syria and Persia, or Parthia, that he proselytised the inhabitants and established churches.[2] This is what the most ancient Alexandrian tradition maintains and what the seventh and eighth century Metropolitans of Fars, Mar Isho Yahb and Mar Thiomothy, testify to when they refuse to submit to the Patriarch of the East at Seleucia-Ctesiphon because their Persian church had been established by Thomas while his had not.[3] The later Edessene tradition is a case of Edessa glorifying an apostle they considered their own – Thomas had visited their city and they possessed his bones – at the expense of India – if of course the “India” of the Acts doesn’t simply mean Parthia or Persia.

Notes:

1. G. Ananthakrishnan in the Times of India, Mumbai, 26 Dec. 2006, reports: “Pope Benedict XVI made the statement [about St. Thomas] at the Vatican on September 27, [2006]. Addressing the faithful during the Wednesday catechises, he recalled that St. Thomas first evangelised Syria and Persia, and went on to western India from where Christianity reached Southern India. The import of the statement was that St. Thomas never travelled to south India, but rather evangelised the western front, mostly comprising today’s Pakistan.” Though the Pope is a declared enemy of Hindu India, he is a scholar and had reported the known facts about St. Thomas and his missionary journey to Syria and Parthia. He had said, ” … Thomas first evangelised Syria and Persia and then penetrated as far as western India, from where Christianity reached also South India” (It is another matter that his editors on the Vatican website changed this sentence the next day to read that Thomas himself had reached South India).

2. The churches that are traditionally said to have been established by apostles were known by the names of the cities or countries that they were established in. The famous four were the Churches of Alexandria by Mark, Jerusalem by James, Antioch by Peter and Paul, and Rome by Peter. The Church of Edessa was said to have been established by Addai the disciple of Thomas and the Church of Fars by Thomas himself. But there was no Church of Muziris (as Kodungallur was known to the Greeks and Romans) or Shingly (as it was known to the Jews) or Malabar or India in the first centuries CE.

3. The Church of Seleucia was said to have been established by Aggaeus the disciple of Addai of Edessa in the second century CE.

Guru · Guru

Ferdinand Lucas சொல்வதென்னவென்றால்:
7:10 மு.பகல் இல் April 21, 2010 | பதில்

I could see that the inscription mentions the so-called “doubting” Thomas came to india in 2nd century CE. I do not know what authority or evidence is there to prove, as the Christians claim that he came to Madras in the first century and was killed by a Brahmin!

Would you please clarify it?

Guru · Guru

Ferdinand Lucas சொல்வதென்னவென்றால்:
7:59 மு.பகல் இல் April 20, 2010 | பதில்

I have read and understood the issue through my Tamil knowing friend.

Really, it is unfortunate that Indian Catholics should stoop down to such fraudulent method.

The Vatican should advise the Indian Christians not indulge in such actitities, that too, in this modern age, as it would bring bad image to the Catholic religion.

The Indian high priests might try to get more converts, or bring heathens to their fold or even play dirty politics, but in the long run, only infamy remains gathering dust under their dress.

Guru · Guru

கார்தரு சோலைக் கபாலிச் சரம் அமர்ந்தான்

ஆர்திரைநாள் காணாதே போதியோ பூம்பாவாய்!

திருஞானசம்பந்த மூர்த்தி நாயனார், “கடற்கரையில் மயில்கள் ஆர்த்து நிறைந்திருக்கும் சோலையில்”, இருக்கும் கபாலீஸ்வரர் என்றார்!

அப்படியென்றால் எங்கே அந்த கோயில்?

மடலார்ந்த தெங்கின் மயிலையார் மாசிக்

கடலாட்டுக் கண்டான் கபாலீச் சரம்…………………

மயிலையின்கண்கடற்கரையிலுள்ள கோயிலில், மக்கள் மாசித்திங்களில், மக நாளில் நடத்தும் நீராட்டு விழாக் கண்டு…….

அப்படியென்றால் எங்கே அந்த கோயில்?

கயிலைப் பதிஅரன் முருகோனே

கடலக் கரை திரை அருகேசூழ்

மயிலைப் பதிதனில் உறைவோனே

Guru · Guru

தன்நெஞ்சறிவது பொய்யற்க…

அர்ஜுன் சம்பத்
http://hariinvalaipoo.blogspot.com/2008/07/blog-post_15.html
http://www.dinamani.com/NewsItems.asp?ID=DNE20080715120032&Title=Editorial+Page&lTitle=R%FBXVeLm&Topic=0&ndate=7/16/2008&dName=No+Title&Dist

கிறிஸ்தவ மதத்தைத் தோற்றுவித்த இயேசுகிறிஸ்துவின் பன்னிரண்டு நேரடிச் சீடர்களில் ஒருவரான புனித தோமையரின் வாழ்க்கை வரலாற்றைத் திரைப்படமாக எடுக்கப்போவதாக அறிவித்து அதற்குரிய தொடக்க விழாவை அண்மையில் சென்னை சாந்தோம் தேவாலயத்தில் நடத்தி உள்ளனர்.

இந்த திரைப்படம் பல கோடி ரூபாய் செலவில் கிறிஸ்தவ மத நிறுவனங்களே நேரடியாகத் தயாரிக்கின்ற திரைப்படம் ஆகும். இதில் ஹாலிவுட் நடிகர் ஒருவர் தோமையராக நடிப்பதாகவும், தமிழகத்தின் முன்னணி நடிகர்கள் ரஜினிகாந்த், அஜீத், விஜய் ஆகியோர் கௌரவத் தோற்றத்தில் நடிக்க இருப்பதாகவும் தகவல்கள் வந்துள்ளன. மேற்படி திரைப்படத்தின் தொடக்க விழாவில் சிறுபான்மை ஆணையத் தலைவர் வின்சென்ட் சின்னதுரை, மறைமாவட்டப் பேராயர்கள், மதபோதகர் பால் தினகரன் மற்றும் தமிழக முதலமைச்சர் மு. கருணாநிதி ஆகியோர் கலந்து கொண்டுள்ளனர்.

புனித தோமையர் 2000 வருடத்திற்கு முன்பாக இந்தியாவிற்கு வருகை புரிந்தார். அவர் கேரளக் கடற்கரையில் சில நாள்கள் தங்கியிருந்து கிறிஸ்துவின் மத போதனைகளைப் பரப்பினார். பிறகு அவர் சென்னைக்கு வருகை தந்து திருவள்ளுவரைச் சந்தித்து கருத்துப் பரிமாற்றம் செய்து கொண்டார். புனித தோமையரை சென்னை வாழ் மக்கள் அய்யர் என்று அன்புடன் அழைத்ததாகவும், சென்னையில் வசித்த பூர்வகுடித் தமிழர் ஒருவர் தோமையரை ஈட்டியால் குத்திக் கொன்றதாகவும், தோமையர் உடல் தற்போதுள்ள சாந்தோம் கிறிஸ்தவ சர்ச்சில் அடக்கம் செய்யப்பட்டதாகவும் திரைப்படத்தின் திரைக்கதையை அமைத்துள்ளனர்.
திருவள்ளுவர் வேடத்தில் நடிகர் ரஜினிகாந்த்தை நடிக்க வைக்க முயற்சிப்பதாகவும் தகவல் வந்துள்ளது. இது தமிழருடைய வரலாற்றில் பொய் வரலாற்றைத் திணிக்கும் சதிச்செயலாகும்.

இத்தகைய முயற்சிகளை தமிழகத்து கிறிஸ்தவ மிஷனரிகள் தொடர்ந்து செய்து வருகின்றனர். தோமையர் தமிழகத்திற்கு வருகை தந்தார் என்பதற்கு எந்த வரலாற்று ஆதாரமும் கிடையாது. இது தமிழர் வரலாற்றையும், பண்பாட்டையும் திரித்துக் கூறும் உள்நோக்கம் கொண்டதாகும். ஏற்கெனவே திருவள்ளுவர் ஒரு கிறிஸ்தவர் என்றும், திருக்குறள் ஒரு கிறிஸ்தவ மதச் சார்பான நூல் என்றும் பொய்யுரை கூறி, இட்டுக்கட்டி, சில கட்டுக்கதைகளைப் பரப்பி வருகின்றனர்.

இதற்காக சில போலி ஆவணங்களைத் தயாரித்து பொய்ச்சான்றுகளை உருவாக்க பாதிரியார் ஒருவர் முயற்சி செய்தார். இது தொடர்பான வழக்குகள் எல்லாம் நிலுவையில் உள்ளன. சாந்தோம் சர்ச்சில் கடந்த இருவருடங்களுக்கு முன்பாக மயிலை அன்னை சிலை அமைப்பு விழாவில் கிறிஸ்தவ மதம் தொடர்பான சான்றுபொருள் ஆவணங்களின் நிரந்தரக் கண்காட்சி ஒன்றையும் தொடங்கி உள்ளனர். அதில் தோமையர் பயன்படுத்திய பொருள்கள் என்றும், தோமையர் காலத்துப் பொருள்கள் என்றும் சில பொருள்களை காட்சிக்கும் வைத்துள்ளனர். நாம் அப்போதே இது சம்பந்தமாக எதிர்ப்புத் தெரிவித்தோம்.

தமிழகத்திற்கு கிறிஸ்தவர்கள் பதினைந்தாம் நூற்றாண்டில் வந்தார்கள் என்பதுதான் உண்மை வரலாறு ஆகும். வாணிபம் செய்வதற்காக வாஸ்கோடகாமா கடல் வழி கண்டுபிடித்து இந்தியாவுக்கு வருகை புரிந்தார். அதன்பிறகு கிறிஸ்தவ மத போதகர்கள் வருகை தந்தனர்.
தமிழகத்திற்கு ராபர்ட்டிநொபிலி எனும் பாதிரியார் கிறிஸ்தவ மதபோதனை செய்ய வந்தார். அவர் உயர்குடி மக்களை மதம் மாற்றினார். அவர் தன்னை ஒரு பிராமண சந்நியாசி என்று மதம் மாறிய கிறிஸ்தவ மக்களிடம் அடையாளப்படுத்திக் கொண்டார். பண்டார சுவாமிகள் என தன்னை அடையாளப்படுத்திக் கொண்டு புனித அருளானந்தர் (ஜான்தோ பிரிட்டோ) போன்றவர்கள் தாழ்த்தப்பட்ட மக்களை மதம் மாற்றினார்கள் என்பதுதான் கிறிஸ்தவ மதம் தமிழகத்தில் பரவிய வரலாறு.

கடந்த இரண்டு வருடங்களுக்கு முன்பாக கிறிஸ்தவ மதத்தின் தலைமைப் பீடமான வாடிகன் நகரில் புனித தோமையரின் கல்லறை, ரோமில் இருப்பதாக அதிகாரபூர்வமாக அறிவிப்பு செய்யப்பட்டது. கிறிஸ்தவ மதத்தின் தலைமை போதகர் கார்டினல் போப்பின் ஒப்புதலுடன் இந்த அறிவிப்பு வெளியானது.

போப்பின் தலைமையில் இயங்கும் தமிழக கிறிஸ்தவ மதத்தலைவர்களும், கிறிஸ்தவ மத அமைப்புகளும் இது சம்பந்தமாக அப்போது மறுப்பு அறிக்கை எதுவும் வெளியிடவில்லை. தாமஸின் கல்லறை தமிழகத்தில் சாந்தோமில் இருப்பதாகக் கூறவும் இல்லை.
இப்போது நமது தமிழ்நாட்டின் வரலாற்றைத் திருத்தி அமைக்கும் உள்நோக்கத்துடன் ஒரு பித்தலாட்ட வரலாற்றை நுழைக்க இவர்கள் முயற்சி செய்கின்றனர். சினிமா என்பது ஒரு வலிமையான தகவல் தொடர்பு சாதனம். சினிமா மூலம் தோமையர் தமிழகத்திற்கு வந்தார். திருவள்ளுவரோடு சமய விவாதங்களில் ஈடுபட்டார் என்பதெல்லாம் சாதாரண பாமர மக்களின் ஆழ்மனதில் பதிவு செய்யப்படும் அபாயம் உள்ளது.
திருவள்ளுவர் வாழ்ந்த காலம் என்று உத்தேசமாக தமிழக அறிஞர்களும், வரலாற்று ஆராய்ச்சியாளர்களும் கி.மு. 32-ம் வருடம் எனக் குறிப்பிட்டு திருவள்ளுவராண்டு நாள்காட்டி தமிழக அரசால் கடைப்பிடிக்கப்படுகிறது. காணும் பொங்கல் (தை 3) அன்று திருவள்ளுவர் தினம் கடைப்பிடிக்கப்படுகிறது. திருவள்ளுவர் உருவத்தை பலரை வரையச் செய்து தற்போதுள்ள தோற்றத்துடன் கூடிய உருவத்தைத் தேர்ந்தெடுத்து இப்படித்தான் திருவள்ளுவர் உருவம் இருந்திருக்கலாம் என முடிவு செய்து தற்போதுள்ள திருவள்ளுவர் படம் அனைவராலும் அங்கீகரிக்கப்பட்டுள்ளது.

திருவள்ளுவருடைய வாழ்க்கைக்குச் சான்று ஆதாரமாக அவர் எழுதிய திருக்குறள் மட்டுமே உள்ளது. திருவள்ளுவர் தொடர்பாக பல்வேறு விதமான நாட்டுப்புறக் கதைகள் உள்ளன. தமிழகத்தின் ஒவ்வொரு மாவட்டத்தைச் சார்ந்தவர்களும் திருவள்ளுவர் எங்கள் மாவட்டத்துக்காரர் என்று அவர் தொடர்புடைய செய்திகளைச் சொல்லி சொந்தம் கொண்டாடி வருகின்றனர்.
அவர் திருவல்லிக்கேணியில் வசித்தவர் என்றும், நெசவாளர் என்றும் சிலர் கூறுவார்கள். கன்னியாகுமரி மாவட்டத்துக்காரர் என்றும் சிலர் கூறுகிறார்கள். அவருக்கு வாசுகி என்கிற மனைவி இருந்ததாகவும், அவர் சிறந்த கற்புக்கரசி என்றும் தமிழக மக்கள் நம்பி வருகின்றனர். ஒளவையாரோடு திருவள்ளுவரை தொடர்புபடுத்தியும் பல சங்கதிகள் தமிழகம் முழுக்க நம்பப்படுகிறது.
பொதுவாக திருவள்ளுவர் காலம் என்பது 2000 ஆண்டுகளுக்கும் பழைமையானது என்று இறுதி செய்யப்படுகிறது.
இயேசு பிறந்து 2008 ஆண்டு ஆகிறது என்கிறது ஆங்கில நாள்காட்டி. தோமையர் இயேசுவின் நேரடிச் சீடர் ஆவார். இயேசு சிலுவையில் அறையப்பட்டபிறகு இந்தியாவிற்கு தோமையர் வந்ததாக கிறிஸ்தவ மத நூலான பைபிளின் பழைய ஏற்பாட்டிலும் இல்லை. புதிய ஏற்பாட்டிலும் இல்லை. அதிகாரபூர்வமான தலைமைபீடமோ, கிறிஸ்தவ மதத் தொடர்பான நூல்களோ, கிறிஸ்துவமத வரலாறுகளிலோ எதிலும் தோமையர் இந்தியாவிற்கு வந்ததாகக் குறிப்பிடவில்லை.

தற்போது தோமையர் வரலாறு தொடர்பாக சாந்தோம் தேவாலயத்தில் காட்சிக்கு வைத்துள்ள சான்று பொருள்களை நவீன விஞ்ஞான சோதனைக்கு உள்படுத்தி நிரூபித்துள்ளார்களா என்றால் அதுவும் இல்லை. சாந்தோம் தேவாலய வரலாறு என்பது 300 ஆண்டுகளுக்கு உட்பட்டதுதான். 300 ஆண்டுகளுக்கு முன்பாக மயிலாப்பூரில் ஞானசம்பந்தரால் பாடல் பெற்ற மயிலை கபாலீஸ்வரர் கோயில் இருந்ததாகத்தான் தமிழக இலக்கியங்களும், வரலாறுகளும் கூறுகின்றனவே தவிர, சரித்திரபூர்வமாகத் தோமையர் மயிலையில் வாழ்ந்ததற்கான எந்தவிதச் சான்றும் இல்லை.

தோமையர் குறித்து இவர்கள் சொல்லும் கட்டுக்கதைகளை எல்லாம் கிறிஸ்தவ மதத் தலைமைப் பீடங்களே ஒப்புக்கொள்ளவில்லை. இயேசுவின் போதனைகளை தோமையர் இந்தியாவுக்குக் கொண்டு வந்தார். அவர் மலையாளக் கடற்கரையில் சிறிது காலம் இருந்தார். பிறகு சென்னை வந்தார். மதப் பிரசாரம் செய்தார் என்பதெல்லாம் இதற்கு முந்தைய கிறிஸ்தவ அறிஞர்கள் எவராலும் சொல்லப்படவில்லை.
குறிப்பாக தமிழ் கற்று பைபிளை தமிழில் வெளியிட்ட வீரமா முனிவர் என்று அழைக்கப்படும் ஜி.யு. போப் போன்றவர்கள் கூட தோமையர் தமிழகத்தில் மதப் பிரசாரம் செய்துள்ளார் என்றெல்லாம் சொல்லவில்லை.
தமிழ் இலக்கியங்களிலும், தமிழக வரலாறுகளிலும் மயிலாப்பூர் வரலாற்றில் கூட தோமையர் கல்லறை இங்கு இருப்பதாகவோ அவர் தமிழகத்தில் மதப்பிரசாரம் செய்ததாகவோ எந்த ஆதாரமும் இல்லை. புவியியல் ஆதாரம், கல்வெட்டு ஆதாரம், ஓலைச்சுவடி ஆதாரம், பண்டைய புத்தகங்களில் ஆதாரம், பழைய கட்டடங்கள் ஆதாரம், தொல்லியல் ஆதாரம், விஞ்ஞான ஆதாரம் எதுவுமில்லை.
வந்தாரை வாழ வைக்கும் தமிழ் மண்ணில் தமிழர் ஒருவர் தோமையரை ஈட்டியால் குத்திக் கொலை செய்தார் என்பதெல்லாம் எப்படிப்பட்ட மோசடி வரலாறு என்பதை அனைவரும் புரிந்துகொள்ள வேண்டும்.

இதையெல்லாம் முத்தமிழ் அறிஞர் என்று அவரது தொண்டர்களால் பாராட்டப்படும் முதல்வர் கருணாநிதி ஒப்புக்கொள்கிறாரா? அல்லது கிறிஸ்தவ மக்களின் ஓட்டுக்காக தமிழக வரலாற்றை அடகு வைக்க முற்படுகிறாரா?

தமிழர் வரலாற்று கதை புனைவதில் வல்லவரான, தொல்காப்பிய பூங்கா, குறளோவியம் படைத்த தமிழக முதல்வர், இப்படி பொய்யான வரலாற்றுக்கு அங்கீகாரம் அளிக்கலாமா?

கிறிஸ்தவ நிறுவனங்கள் தங்கள் மதத்தைப் பரப்ப இத்தகைய கட்டுக்கதைகளைப் பயன்படுத்தலாம் என்பதே அநியாயமானது. கிறிஸ்தவ மத போதகர்கள் தங்களின் மதப்பிரசாரங்கள் மற்றும் பிரார்த்தனைக் கூட்டங்களுக்கு மக்களைச் சேர்ப்பதற்கு இப்போதெல்லாம் சினிமா கவர்ச்சி நடிகைகள், நடிகர்கள், பிரபலங்கள் ஆகியோரை வைத்துப் பிரசாரம் செய்யத் தொடங்கியுள்ளனர். ஏனென்றால் நடிகர், நடிகைகள் சொன்னால் பாமர மக்கள் ஏற்றுக்கொள்வார்கள். இதனை தமிழகத் தலைவர் எப்படி ஆதரிக்கிறார், அங்கீகரிக்கிறார் என்பது புரியவில்லை.
அரசியல் காரணங்களுக்காக, சிறுபான்மை வாக்குவங்கிக்கு ஆசைப்பட்டு பண்டைய தமிழர் பண்பாட்டையும், வரலாற்றையும் திருத்தலாமா? இது தமிழர் வரலாற்றுக்கும், பண்பாட்டிற்கும் செய்யும் துரோகம் அல்லவா? அய்யன் திருவள்ளுவருக்கு இழைக்கும் அநீதி அல்லவா? தமிழ் ஆர்வலர்களும், தமிழ் பண்பாட்டுக் காவலர்களும் இது குறித்து விழிப்புடன் இருக்க வேண்டாமா?

தமிழக முதல்வருக்கு திருவள்ளுவரின் தன்நெஞ்சறிவது பொய்யற்க என்னும் திருக்குறளை ஞாபகப்படுத்த விரும்புகிறோம்.

(கட்டுரையாளர்: இந்து மக்கள் கட்சித் தலைவர்)

0

Rate This

Guru · Guru

புனித தோமையர் ஓர் அறிமுகம் February 1, 2008 – 12:54 am
http://www.jeyamohan.in/?p=208

இயேசுவின் மாணாக்கர்களில் முக்கியமானவரான புனித தோமையர் [St.Thomas] பற்றி விவிலியம் போதுமான அளவுக்கு செய்திகளை அளிப்பதில்லை. கத்தோலிக்க கலைக்களஞ்சியத்தில் தேடினால் தாமையரைப்பற்றி மிகச்சில குறிப்புகளே காணப்படுகின்றன. தாமையரின் பெயர் திருச்சபை அங்கீகரித்த நான்கு இறைச்செய்திகளிலும் மீண்டும் மீண்டும் வருகிறது. அவரது தெளிவான சித்திரத்தை அளிப்பது நான்காவது இறைச்செய்தியாளரா யோவானில்தான். இவர் தாமஸ் யூதாஸ் திதியோன் என்று சொல்லப்படுகிறார். இரட்டையரில் ஒருவன் என்ற பொருளில் [ இது சம்ஸ்கிருதத்தில் இருந்து பெறப்பட்ட சொல் . துவம் என்றால் இரண்டு]

தோமையர் யோவானின் இறைச்செய்தியில் இயேசு மேல் அழுத்தமான பிடிப்பும் துணிவும் கொண்ட முதல் மாணாக்கராகச் சொல்லப்படுகிறார். இயேசு லாஸரசை காணும் பொருட்டு ஜுதேயாவுக்கு மீண்டும் செல்லும் நோக்கத்தை அறிவித்தபோது இவர்தான் மற்ற மாணவர்களிடம் ”நாமும் கூடவே செல்வோம். ஒருவேளை நாமனைவருமே கொல்லப்படலாம்”என்று சொன்னார்.[யோவான் எழுதிய இறைச்செய்தி 11-16] .மேலும் தோமையர் எளிதில் நம்பிவிடாதவராகவும் தருக்கம் சார்ந்து எதையும் ஆராய்பவராகவும் இருந்தார். இவரே ஏசுவின் இறுதி உணவின்போது அவர் மீது ஐயத்தை எழுப்பினார். ”தோமையர் ஏசுவிடம் சொன்னார். ”கர்த்தரே நீங்கள் ஆவியா அல்லவா என்று நாங்கள் அறியோம். அதை நாங்கள் எப்படி தெளிவுபடுத்திக் கொள்வது?” [யோவான் எழுதிய இறைச்செய்தி 14:5] .

ஆனாலும் தாமஸ் கிறிஸ்து உயிர்த்தெழுந்து வந்தபோது கேட்ட கேள்வியால்தான் வரலாற்றில் நிற்கிறார். ”அவரது கைகளில் ஆணி அறையப்பட்ட துளைகளை கண்ணால் கண்டு அவற்றில் என் விரல்களை விட்டாலொழிய நான் அதை நம்பமாட்டேன்” என்று அவர் அடம்பிடித்தார்.[யோவான் எழுதிய இறைச்செய்தி 20:25] ஆனால் எட்டு நாட்கள் கழித்து அவர் விசுவாசம் பெற்றார். அதற்காக ஏசு அவரைக் கடிந்துகொண்டார். ” நீ என்னைக் கண்டதனால் என்னை நம்பினாய் தாமஸ். ஆனால் காணாமலேயே நம்பியவர்கள் எவரோ அவர்களே அருள்கூரப்பட்டவர்கள்” [ யோவான் எழுதிய இறைச்செய்தி 20:29].இக்காரணத்தால் இவர் ஐயப்பட்ட தாமஸ் [ Doubting Thomas] என்று அழைக்கப்பட்டார். மேலைநாடுகளில் , குறிப்பாக புரட்டஸ்டண்ட் மதத்தில், தோமையர் ஒரு படி குறைந்தவராகவே இனம்காணப்படுகிறார்.

தாமஸ் என்ற பேர்குறித்தே ஏராளமான கிறித்தவ இறையியல் சார்ந்த ஊகங்கள் எழுதப்பட்டுள்ளன. அவற்றில் முதன்மையான ஆவணம் என்பது கிரேக்க மொழியிலும் சிரியக் மொழியிலும் சிற்சில பாடபேதங்களுடன் பேணப்பட்டுவரும் ‘தோமையரின் செயல்பாடுகள்’ [Acta Thomae] முக்கியமான ஆவணமாகும். அது பார்டசேன்ஸ் எழுதியதாக இருக்கலாம்[Bardesanes] கிபி 220க்கு முன்பாக எழுதப்பட்ட இவ்வாவணம் ஹரானக் [Harnack] ஆல் தன் குறிப்புகளில் [Chronologie, ii, 172] சான்றளிக்கப் பட்டுள்ளது. ஆனால் இதன் உண்மையான பிறப்பிடம் எடேசா ஆகும். [Edessa] அங்கு தாமஸ் கீழைநாட்டில் கொல்லப்பட்டபின் கொண்டுவரப்பட்ட எலும்புகள் வைக்கப்பட்டு வணங்கப்பட்டதாக தெரிகிறது. இது தோமையரின் எலும்புகள்தான் என்பதற்கான ஆதாரம் என்னவெனில் அவர் இரு இடங்களில் ஏசுவின் இரட்டைச் சகோதரர் ஆக குறிப்பிடப்படுகிறார் என்பதே. யூதாஸ் தாமஸ் என்று சிரியக் மொழியில் சொல்லப்படும் தாமஸ் கிரேக்க மொழியில் திதிமோஸ் [இரட்டையர்] என்று சொல்லடுகிறார். இவை ஒரே பொருள் கொண்டவை.

இறையியலாளாரான ரெண்டல் ஹாரிஸ் இந்த எலும்புவழிபாடானது இது எடெஸாவில் இருந்த ஏதோ புறச்சமய [pagan] வழிபாட்டு முறையானது கிறித்தவத்துக்குள் ஊடுருவியதன் விளைவு என்கிறார். அவர் எடெஸாவிற்கு தாமஸின் எலும்புகள் வந்தது குறித்து கூறும் கதை இது. கிறிஸ்துவின் இறப்புக்குப் பின்னர் அவரது மாணாக்கர்கள் உலகைப் பகுத்துக்கொண்டு சமயப்பரப்புநர்களாக [அப்போஸ்தலர்] கிளம்பிய போது தாமஸின் கணக்குக்கு வந்தது இந்தியா. தாமஸ் இந்தியா செல்ல விரும்பவில்லை. அப்போது ஆவி வடிவில் வந்த ஏசு அபான்[Abban] என்ற இந்தியக்கப்பலில் தோன்றி அதன் உரிமையாளரான குந்த·பார்[Gundafor] என்ற மன்னனுக்கு தாமஸை ஆசாரி வேலைசெய்யும் அடிமையாக விற்கச்செய்தார். அவ்வாறாக தாமஸ் அன்டிராபாலிஸ்[Andrapolis] என்ற இந்திய துறைமுகத்துக்கு வந்துசேர்ந்தார். அங்கு அவர் மன்னனுக்கு ஓர் அரண்மனைகட்டும் பணியில் அமர்த்தப்பட்டார். அப்பணத்தை தாமஸ் ஏழைகளுக்கு செலவழித்தார். மன்னன் அவரை சிறையிலடைக்க அவர் ஏசுவின் அருளால் தப்பினார்.அந்த அற்புதத்தை அறிந்த குந்த·பார் மதம் மாறி கிறித்தவர் ஆனார். அங்கே பலரை மதம் மாற்றியபின் தாமஸ் இன்னொரு நாட்டுக்குச் சென்றார். போகும் வழியில் பலவிதமான மாயமிருகங்களையும் பேய்களையும் அவர் சந்தித்தார்.

மிஸ்தாய் [Misdai சிரிய மொழியில் [Mazdai] என்ற மன்னனின் நாட்டுக்கு அவர் வந்து சேர்ந்தார். அவனது மனைவி டெரிஷியாவையும் மகன் வாஸனையும்[Tertia/ Vazan] அவர் மதம் மாற்றினார். ஆகவே அவர் சிறைப்பிடிக்கப்பட்டு மரண தண்டனைக்கு விதிக்கப்பட்டார். நகர் அருகே இருந்த குன்றுக்கு அவர் கொண்டுசெல்லபப்ட்டு கொல்லப்பட்டார்.அவரதுச் சடலம் புராதன மன்னர்களின் கோபுரத்தின்கீழ் அடக்கம் செய்யபபட்டது. பிற்பாடு அவரது ஆதரவாளர்களால் அவரது எலும்புகள் தோண்டி எடுக்கப்பட்டு எடெஸாவுக்குக் கொண்டுசெல்லப்பட்டது.

இங்கு குறிப்பிடப்படவேண்டிய விஷயம் என்னவென்றால் கிபி 46ல் இமைய மலைக்கு தெற்கே ஆ·ப்கானிஸ்தான், பலுசிஸ்தான், பஞ்சாப் மற்றும் சிந்த் பகுதியை ஆண்டிருந்த மன்னனின் பேர் கோண்டோ·பெர்னிஸ் என்று கிரேக்க மொழியிலும் குது·பாரன் என்று அம்மொழியிலும் சொல்லப்பட்டது. [Gondophernes/Gudupharan] நாணயங்கள் மூலமும் கிரேக்க தொன்மக்கதைகள் மூலமும் இது ஓரளவுக்கு உறுதிசெய்யப்பட்டுள்ளது. அந்த பகுதியின் மொழியான காரோஸ்தி [Kharoshthi ]யிலும் ஐதீகங்கள் காணப்படுகின்றன. இது ஏற்கனவே கண்ட மன்னந்தான் என்பதில் பெரிதும் விவாதமில்லை. தக்த்- இ- ·பாய் [Takht-i-Bahi] கல்வெட்டுகளின்படி அம்மன்னன் கிபி 20 முதல் கிபி 46 வரை ஆண்டான் என்பது நிபுணர்களால் ஒப்புக்கொள்ளப்பட்டுள்ளது. மிஸ்தாய் என்பது இந்து பேர் ஈரானிய மொழிக்கு மாறியதாக இருக்கலாம். அப்படியானால் அது மதுராவை ஆண்ட வாசுதேவன் ஆக இருக்கலாம். கனிஷ்கருக்கு அடுத்தபடியாக பட்டத்துக்கு வந்த மன்னர் அவர். சிலபெயர்கள் பொருளில்லாதபடி உருவாக்கப்பட்டவையாகவும் இருக்கலாம்

ஆனால் தோமையர் இந்தியாவின் தெற்கே மேற்குக்கடற்கரைக்கு வந்தார் என்றும் இங்கேயே கொல்லப்பட்டார் என்றும் மிக தீவிரமான நம்பிக்கை உள்ளது. 1955 டிசம்பர் 18 ல் இந்திய தலைநகர் டெல்லியில் தோமையர் தினம் கொண்டாடப்பட்டபோது அப்போதைய இந்திய ஜனாதிபதி டாக்டர் ராஜேந்திர பிரசாத் சொன்னார் ” புனித தோமையர் இன்று கிறித்தவ நாடுகளாக இருக்கும் பல நாடுகள் தோன்றுவதற்கு முன்னரே இந்தியக்கடற்கரைக்கு வந்தார். அவரிடமிருந்து தங்கள் கிறித்தவப் பாரம்பரியத்தை தொடங்கும் இந்திய கிறித்தவர்கள் ஐரோபிய நாட்டுக் கிறித்தவர்களைவிடவும் பழைமையானவர்கள் ”

தோமையர் இந்தியா வந்து பத்தொன்பது நூற்றாண்டு தொடங்குவதை ஒட்டிய கொண்டாட்டத்தின் பகுதியாக புனித பாப்பரசர் பன்னிரண்டாம் பயஸ் 1952 டிசம்பர் 31ல் அனுபிய ரேடியோ செய்தியில் இவ்வாறு சொன்னார். ” புனித தோமையர் இந்தியா வந்து 1900 வருடங்கள் தாண்டிவிட்டன. பிந்திய பல நூற்றாண்டுக்காலம் இந்தியா மேற்கிலிருந்து துண்டிக்கப்பட்டிருந்தது. ஆயினும் இந்தியா தன்னுடைய முதல் அப்போஸ்தலரின் பாரம்பரியத்தை பேணிக்கோண்டது . இந்த அப்போஸ்தலரின் வழித்தோன்றல்களாக இன்று இந்தியாவில் உள்ள தோமையர் கிறித்தவ மக்களுக்கு எங்கள் சபையின் வாழ்த்துக்கள் ”

ஆனால் தோமையர் இந்தியா வந்தது உண்மையா என்ற ஐயம் வலுவானதே. காரணம் ஒன்று தோமையரின் வருகை இன்றும் ஓர் ஐதீக கதையாகவே உள்ளது. தோமையரின் வருகைக்கு ஆதாரமாகக் காட்டப்படும் எல்லா அமைப்புகளும் காலத்தால் மிகவும் பிற்பட்டவை.

மரபான நம்பிக்கைகளின்படி ஏசுவின் 12 சீடர்களில் ஒருவரான புனித தாமையர் கிபி 52ல் இந்தியாவுக்கு வந்தார். கேரளத்தில் அன்றிருந்த முக்கிய துறைமுகமான கொடுங்கல்லூரில் இறங்கினார். இது கொடுங்கோளூர் என்றும் வஞ்சி என்றும் அழைக்கபப்ட்டிருந்த துறைமுகம். சேரர்களின் பண்டைய தலைந்நகரம். சேரன் செங்குட்டுவன் கண்ணகிக்கு கோயில் எடுத்த இடம் இதுவே என்று ஆதாரபூர்வமாக சொல்லப் படுகிறது. அந்த கண்ணகி ஆலயமே இன்றுள்ள கொடுங்கல்லூர் தேவி கோயில் என்று வரலாறு கூறுகிறது. தாமையர் கேரள பிராமணர்களுக்கு ஏசுவின் நற்செய்தியைச் சொன்னார் என்றும் அவர்களில் பலர் மதம் மாறினார்கள் என்றும் கூறப்படுகிறது. அவர் ஏழு திருச்சபைகளை கேரள மண்ணில் உருவாக்கினாராம். அவை முறையே கொடுங்கல்லூர், கோட்டக்காவு, பாலயூர், கொல்லம், கோக்கமங்கலம், நிரணம் சேறயில் ஆகியவை. அவர் மலயாற்றூர் குன்றுகளுக்கு வந்து ஜெபம் செய்யும் பழக்கம் கொண்டிருந்தார் என்றும் சொல்லபப்டுகிறது. அதன் பின் அவர் கிழக்கு கடற்கரைக்கு இடம் பெயர்ந்தார். கிபி 72ல் அவர் சென்னைக்கு அருகே உள்ள புனித தோமையர் குன்று என இன்று அழைக்கப்படும் குன்றில் வாழ்ந்த போது ஒரு மதவெறியனால் கொல்லப்பட்டார். அவரது உடல் மைலாப்பூருக்குக் கொண்டுவரப்பட்டது. அங்கே அவர் அடக்கம் செய்யபப்ட்டார். இன்றும் அவரது சமாதி அங்கே வழிபடப்படுகிறது.

உண்மையில் தோமையர் வந்திருக்க வாய்ப்புள்ளதா? உண்டு. அன்றைய கேரளக் கடற்கரைக்கும் மத்திய ஆசியாவுக்கும் இடையே நெருக்கமான உறவு இருந்தது. யவனர்களும் அராபியர்களும் தொடர்ந்து வணிக நோக்கத்துடன் கேரளத்துக்கு வந்தபடி இருந்தனர். இக்கடற்கரையில் இன்றும் குவியல் குவியலாக நாணயங்கள் கிடைத்தபடியுள்ளன. அதிகமும் ரோமாபுரி நாணயங்கள். அதற்கும் முன்பு கிமு 970 முதல் 930 வரை ஆண்ட இஸ்ரேலரின் சாலமோன் மன்னரின் மரக்கலங்கள் கேரளக் கடற்கரைக்கு வந்தபடி இருந்தன. அதற்கு புராதன பழைய ஏற்பாடு பைபிளிலேலேயே ஆதாரங்கள் உள்ளன. முசிரிஸ் என்று அப்போது குறிக்கப்பட்ட கொடுங்கல்லூரில் இருந்து முத்தும் மணிகளும் கோண்டுவரப்பட்டு மன்னருக்குப் படைக்கப்பட்டன. கேரளக்கடற்கரையிலிருந்து பெறப்பட்ட மிளகு முதலிய நறுமணப்பொருட்கள் அக்காலம் முதலே ஐரோப்பாவுக்கும் மத்திய ஆசிய நாடுகளுக்கும் மிகமிக பிரியமானவையாக இருந்தன. ரோமாபுரி பயணியும் வரலாற்றாசிரியருமான ப்ளினி [கிமு 23-79] ஒவ்வொரு வருடமும் பொன்னாகவும் மணியாகவும் பெருஞ்செல்வம் கேரளத்துக்குச் செல்வதைப்பற்றி வருந்தி எழுதியிருக்கிறார்.மலபார் பகுதிக் கப்பல்கள் பாரசீக வளைகுடா கடந்து சென்று வணிகம் செய்வதைப்பற்றியும் அவர் எழுதியுள்ளார். ப்ளினியைப்போலவே டாலமி [கிமு 100-160) மற்றும் பெரிப்ளூஸ் ஆகியோரும் சேரக்கடற்கரைக்கு மேலைநாடுகளுடன் இருந்த நெருக்கமான உறவைப்பற்றி எழுதியுள்ளனர். முதல் நூற்றாண்டுமுதலே கேரளத்தில் மட்டாஞ்சேரி என்ற இடத்தில் யூத குடியிருப்புகள் உருவாகிவிட்டன. சமீபகாலம் வரை யூதர்கள் ஒரு தனிச்சமூகமாக அங்கிருந்தனர்.அவர்களின் கோயிலும்[சினகாக்] அங்குள்ளது

இரண்டாம் நூற்றாண்டின் இறுதியில் எழுதப்பட்டிருக்க வாய்ப்புள்ள யூதாஸ்- தாமஸ் குறிப்புகளின் படி முதல் நூற்றாண்டின் இறுதியில் புனித தோமையர் தன் சுவிசேஷங்களை குண்டபேர்ஸ் என்ற பார்த்திய மன்னரின் ஆட்சிக்குட்பட்ட பகுதிகளில் செய்துகொண்டிருந்தார் .[Gundaphares,Parthian]. பாண்டிய மன்னரின் நிலமா இது என ஆராயலாம். இலக்கிய ஆதாரங்கள் தவிர இன்றும் எஞ்சும் தோமையர் மரபு கிறித்தவர்களின் [மார்த்தோமா கிறித்தவர்கள்] சமூகம் அவரது வருகைக்கான சிறந்த ஆதாரமாகும். இவர்கள் பாலையூர் , அர்த்தாடு, நிலம்பூர் ஆகிய பகுதிகளில் இருந்து கேரளம் முழுக்க பரவினார்கள். மயிலாப்பூரில் உள்ள தோமையரின் சமாதியும் பறங்கிமலை கோயிலும் இன்றும் உள்ளவை. இப்புனித அப்போஸ்தலரின் எலும்புகள் எடெஸ்ஸா என்ற என்ற ஊருக்குக் கொண்டுசெல்லப்பட்டதாக கூறப்படுகிறது.

பிற ஆதாரங்கள்

ஈஸி·பஸ் [ Eusebius, கிபி நாலாம் நூற்றாண்டு] புனித ஜெரோம் [St. Jerome, கிபி342-420] ஆகியோரின் குறிப்புகளில் பாண்டேனியஸின் [Pantaenus] பயணம் பற்றி சொல்லப்பட்டுள்ளது. இவர் அலக்ஸாண்டிரியாவின் பிஷப் டிமிட்றியஸ் மூலம் இந்தியாவின் பிராமணர்களுக்கு கிறித்தவ மதத்தை கற்பிக்கும்பொருட்டு அனுப்பபட்டவர் . கிபி 190ல் எழுதப்பட்ட இக்குறிப்புகளில் சில மேலதிக ஆதாரங்கள் கிடைக்கின்றன. மேலைக்கடற்கரையில் வாழ்ந்த தாமையர் மரபு கிறித்தவர்களைப்பற்றி இவற்றில் சொல்லப்பட்டுள்ளது. புனித எ·ப்ரம் [St. Ephrem கிபி306-373] புனித கிரிகோரி [St. Gregory of Nazianze கிபி 324-390 ] புநித அம்புரோஸ் [ St. Ambrose கிபி 333-397] புனித ஜெரோம் [St. Jerome ஆறாம் நூற்றாண்டு] புனித கிரிகோரி [St. Gregory of Tours ஆறாம் நூற்றாண்டு] ஆகியோரின் குறிப்புகளிலெல்லாம் இந்தியாவில் கிறித்த்வம் இருந்தமைக்கான சான்றுகளும் தோமையர் பற்றிய குறிப்புகளும் உள்ளன என்று சொல்லப்படுகிறது.

மறுப்புபுகள்

ஆனால் தாமஸ் இந்தியாவில் ஊழியம்செய்தார் என்பதற்கோ கணிசமான இந்தியக் கிறித்தவர்கள் நம்புவதுபோல அவர் மேற்குக் கடற்கரையில் இறங்கி கிழக்கு கடற்கரையில் இறந்தார் என்பதற்கோ அவரை சென்னை மைலாப்பூருடன் தொடர்புபடுத்துவதற்கோ உறுதியான சான்றுகள் ஏதுமில்லை என்று சொல்லும் ஆய்வாளர்களும் உள்ளனர். எ·ப்ரம் சிரியக் , புனித கிரிகோரி , புனித அம்புரோஸ்,புனித ஜெரோம், புனித கிரிகோரரி ஆகியோர் இதைப்பற்றிய மேலோட்டமான குறிப்புகளை விட்டுச்சென்றிருந்தபோதும்கூட அவை போதுமான ஆதாரங்களாக இல்லை. ஆனால் சென்னை பறங்கிமலை அல்லது புனித தோமையர் மலையில் கல்லாலன ஒரு சிலுவை உள்ளது. இதில் ·ப்லாவி [Pahlavi ] என்னும் தொன்மையான பெர்சியன் மொழியில் அமைந்த கல்வெட்டு உள்ளது. இது ஏழாம்நூற்றாண்டுக்கு முற்பட்டது. சிரியமொழிச்சடங்குகளையும் சிரிய வேர்களையும் கொண்ட ஒரு கிறித்தவ சமூகம் மேலைக்கடற்கரையில் காணப்படுவதும் உண்மையே. இவர்கள் சிரியன் கிறித்தவர்கள் எனப்படுகின்றனர். இந்த சர்ச் உண்மையிலேயே புனித தாமஸ் அவர்களால் உருவாக்கப்பட்டதா என்பது இன்னும் குழப்பமானதே.

கிபி 325ல் நடந்த நைஸியா கவுன்ஸிலில் [Council of Nicea ] சிரிய-கால்டியன் பிஷப் ஒருவர் இந்தியா மற்றும் பாரசீகத்துக்கான பிஷப்பாக கலந்துகொண்டமைக்கு சான்று உள்ளது. அப்போதே இந்தியாவில் கிறித்தவர்கள் இருந்திருக்கக் கூடும். ஆனால் அவர்கள் தாமஸ் அவர்களால் மதம் மாற்றப்பட்டவர்களா? கிபி 745ல் தாமஸ் கானா [Thomas Cana] என்னும் போதகரின் தலைமியில் ஒரு சிரிய மதமாற்றக்குழு கேரளக்கடற்கரையில் பணியாற்றியுள்ளது. அவர் பேரைத்தான் புனித தோமையர் என்றுஙிங்குள்ள கிறித்தவர்கள் சொல்லிக் கொள்கிறார்கள். அவர் கேரள மரபில் க்னாயி தொம்மன் என்று சொல்லபப்டுகிறார். இவ்வாறு இவ்விவாதம் தொடர்ந்து நடைபெறுகிறது. வரலாற்றாதாரங்களை விடவும் நம்பிக்கைகளுக்கே இங்கு அதிக முக்கியத்துவம் உள்ளது.

கத்தோலிக்க சபையால் உறுதியாகச் சொல்லப்பட சாத்தியமான தகவல் என்னவென்றால் ஆறாம் நூற்றாண்டு அளவில் காஸ்மோஸ் இண்டிகோப்லெய்ஸ்டஸ் [Cosmas Indicopleustes] மலபார் கடற்கரையில் [Male] கிறித்தவர்கள் இருந்தனர் அவர்களின் பிஷப் பாரசீகத்தில் பட்டமேற்றார் என்று குறிப்பிடுவதாகும். தோமையரின் எலும்புகள் நாலாம் நூற்றாண்டுவரை எடெஸ்ஸாவில் இருந்தன என்பதற்கு சான்று உள்ளன. அவை அங்கிருந்து சியோஸ் [Chios]க்கு 1258ல் கொண்டுசெல்லபப்ட்டு அங்கிருந்து ஒர்டொனா [Ortona]வுக்கு கொண்டுசெல்லபப்ட்டதாக ஆதாரபூர்வமாகச் சொல்ல முடியும். ஒரு தவறான புரிதலின் அடிப்படையில் தாமஸ் அமெரிக்காவுக்குச் சென்றதாக சிலர் நம்புகிறார்கள்.

ஆக்டா தோமா [Acta Thomae] வின் சுருக்கமான வடிவம் எதியோப்பிய மொழியிலும் லத்தீனும் உள்ளது. தோமையரின் சுவிசேஷம் என்ற வடிவில் எகிப்தில் காப்டிக் மொழி வடிவில் கிடைத்துள்ள நூலை கத்தோலிக்க திருச்சபை அங்கீகரிக்கவில்லை. தோமையரின் வெளிப்பாடுகள் [Revelatio Thomae] என்ற பேரில் கிடைக்கும் நூல் பாப்பரசர் கெலசியஸ்[ Pope Gelasius]அவர்களா இறைமறுப்பு என்று விலக்கப்பட்டது. அதன் பல சிதைந்த வடிவங்கள் இப்போது பல இடங்களில் கிடைக்கின்றன.

ஆய்வாளர்களைப் பொறுத்தவரை புனித தாமையர் யார், அவர் இந்தியாவுக்கு வந்தாரா, இல்லையென்றால் கிழக்கே வந்த அவர் உண்மையில் எங்கு கிறித்தவச் செய்தியை பரப்பினார் என்பதெல்லாம் இன்றும் மர்மங்களே. அவரது இறைச்செய்தி பிற்பாடு கிறித்தவ தேவாலய அதிகார அமைப்பால் அங்கீகரிக்கபபட்ட இறைச்செய்திகளிலிருந்து தத்துவார்த்தமாக மாறுபட்டிருந்தது என்று இப்போது தெரிகிறது. அதனால்தான் அவர் வரலாற்றில் இருந்து மறைந்து போனாரா என்ன?

[கலைக்களஞ்சியங்களில் இருந்து

Guru · Guru

தாமஸைக் கொன்றது யார்?
ஜி. சாமிநாதன் (ஆய்வாளர், தென்னிந்தியச் சமூக வரலாற்று ஆய்வு நிறுவனம்)
http://www.sishri.org/thomas.html

தாமஸ் தமிழ்நாட்டிற்கு வந்தாரா என்பதே பிரச்சினைக்குரியதாக இருக்கையில், அவர் அந்தணர்களால் கொல்லப்பட்டார் என்ற வழக்கு ஒன்றை ஜோடனை செய்து தீர்ப்புக் கூறுகின்ற அளவுக்கு வரலாற்றுப் ‘புள்ளி விவரங்களில்’ வல்லவர்களாகச் சிலர் தம்மைக் காட்டிக் கொள்கின்றனர்.

இது ஜாதி சமயக் காழ்ப்புடன்கூடிய தவறான குற்றச்சாட்டாகும். 13ஆம் நூற்றாண்டின் இறுதியில் தமிழ்நாட்டிற்கு வந்த மார்க்கோ போலோ, தம்முடைய பயணக் குறிப்புகளில் தமிழ்நாடு, கேரளம் இணைந்த பகுதியை மாபார் என்று குறிப்பிடுகிறார். “மாபாரில்தான் புனித தாமஸ், கோவி என்ற இனத்தவரால் (Govis) கொல்லப்பட்டதாக நம்பப்படுகிறது” என்று அவர் எழுதியுள்ளார்.

கோவி என்ற இனம் இலங்கையில் இன்றும் உள்ளது. எனவே, தாமஸ் இந்தியாவிற்கு வந்தார் என்ற நம்பிக்கை சுமார் 1000 வருடங்களாக நிலவுவது போலவே, கோவி என்ற இனத்தவரால் கொல்லப்பட்டார் என்றும் நம்பப்படுகிறது. 16ஆம் நூற்றாண்டில் போர்ச்சுக்கீசியர்கள் கொங்கணக் கடற்கரையிலும், சென்னை சாந்தோமிலும் குடியேறியபோது இந்துக் கோயில்களை இடித்துத் தரைமட்டமாக்கியதோடு பல அந்தணர்களையும் மதம் மாற்ற முயற்சித்தனர். கொங்கணத்தில் அவர்கள் முயற்சி வெற்றி பெற்றது. தமிழ்நாட்டில் வெற்றிபெறவில்லை.

அந்த ஆத்திரத்திலும், ஆதங்கத்திலுமே தாமஸைக் கொன்ற பழியைக் கோவிகளிடமிருந்து மாற்றி அந்தணர்கள் தலையில் சுமத்தினர். எப்போதோ நடந்ததாகச் சொல்லப்பட்ட ஒரு சம்பவத்துக்குச் சம்பந்தமே இல்லாதவர்கள் குற்றவாளிகள் ஆக்கப்பட்ட கதை இதுதான். இது குறித்த விவரங்களுக்கு Travels of Marco Polo, அத்தியாயம் 17ஐப் பார்க்கவும்.

(நன்றி: தினமணி 24/07/2008, பக்கம் 6)

Guru · Guru

Klaus Karttunen , born12 February 1951, Is an expert in Civilization Indo-European and 's South Asia .

He is a professor of anthropology and Indology at the University of Helsinki in Finland.

His research focuses on the links between the cultures of India and classical culture ( Indo-Aryan and Greco-Roman )

http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Klaus_Karttunen

http://listserv.liv.ac.uk/cgi-bin/wa?A2=ind9906&L=INDOLOGY&P=R5273
Date: Tue, 8 Jun 1999 13:32:54 +0300
Reply-To: Indology
Sender: Indology
From: Klaus Karttunen
Subject: Apostle Thomas again
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=”iso-8859-1″
Dear Colleagues
Sorry that I am rather late wit h my reply. I had to switch my e-mail to a
new machine, and it took some time to have it running again.
As to the question of Ganesan, Cosmas mentions twice, in 3, 65 and 11, 14, Christian communities in South India and Sri Lanka, with a Persian bishop, but he does not mention Thomas’ death. In fact he does not mention Thomas at all, in this I made a mistake. Sorry!
Of course the legend of Thomas’ death near Madras is not true, as I think I made clear in my first message, but it was wise that Bal Prasad did not
vouch for the veracity of his “paraphrase”. Even the names of scholars were wrong: instead of C-J De la Vallee-Poussin and Robert Garbe, Louis de La Vallee-Poussin and Richard Garbe.
As to the Acts of Thomas, it is an apocryphal work, and no more history
than other such legends. This kind of literature is common in many
religions. As far as I know, no serious scholar is taking it as part of the
Bible or as a historical source, although it may contains some points
originating in history (such as the name of Gondophares-Gudhaphar). The
point is that it is a genuine work of the fourth century and can be used as
a source for ideas then current among Christians in the West. It is thus
among the earliest sources locating Thomas’ mission and its end in India.
But as I said, nothing here points to South India, rather to the Indus
country.
I do agree with Bal Prasad that there is no evidence of Thomas having
travelled to India (only the spurious tradition nevertheless much earlier
than the Portuguese), but I wonder, whether he visited Ethiopia and Arabia either. The earliest tradition seems to restrict his travels to Edessa (now Urfa in southeastern Turkey, then a principality under Parthian suzerainty).
Stephens quotes a few “Greek” (mostly Latin) Christian sources on India.
His second extract, Jerome (in Latin) about Pantaenus and Bartholomew hails from the (Greek) Ecclesiastical History of Eusebius (early 4th century).
Many more passages can be found in the old collection by W. R. Phillipps in
Indian Antiquary 32, 1903, 1-15 and 145-160. It shows that it was common
belief in the West since the 4th century (but not earlier) that Thomas went
to India (though not to the South).
As to Mylapore, attempts to identify it with Calamina, the traditional
place given as Thomas’ burial “in India”, do not seem convincing. The first to mention Thomas’ grave in Mylapore is thus Marco Polo (3, 18 in Yule – Cordier) in the 13th century. John of Montecorvino visited a church of Thomas on way to China in 1292, this probably was in the South. In 1345 John of Marignolli, another Catholic envoy to China, also visited Mylapore. Thus the Mylapore tradition was earlier than the Portuguese, although they certainly made much of it.
Michael Rabe asked about the stone cross found near Mylapore. See A. C.
Burnell, Indian Antiquary 3, 1874, 308-316. If anybody knows a more recent source, please inform.
I was afraid that somebody will take up the story of Jesus visiting India.
There are two traditions, both quite recent. One is propagated by the
Ahmadiyyas, another by the Russian charlatan Notovich about hundred years ago. I do not know the German book still defending it, but I think Günter Grönbold, Jesus in Indien. Das Ende einer Legende (Munich 1985) has said everything that is necessary.
There are at least 10 books and some 50-60 articles about Thomas
traditions, but I think my answer is long enough without listing them. I am not theologian and not much interested in history of Christian missions, so I would like to drop the subject now.
Regards
Klaus
Klaus Karttunen
Institute for Asian and African Studies
Box 59, 00014 Helsinki, Finland
tel. +358-9-191-22224, fax. +358-9-191-22094

Guru · Guru

மயிலை கபாலீஸ்வரர் கோயில் எங்களுடையது – கிறித்தவர்-நக்கீரன்

April 20, 2010 by devapriyaji

இந்த வார நக்கீரனில், இப்படியொரு செய்தி!

மயிலை கபாலீஸ்வரர் கோயில் எங்களுடையது…

290px-kapaleeswarar1.jpg?w=290&h=218 சைவ மதத்தினர் போற்றிப் புகழும் திருத்தலம் மயிலை கபாலீஸ்வரர் கோயில். ஆனால் இந்தக் கோயில் புனித தோமையர் வழி வந்த தமிழ் கிறிஸ்துவர்களுக்கே சொந்தமானது. அதனால் கபாலீஸ்வரர் கோயில் கருவறையிலிருந்து பிராமணர்கள்……………]

128px-kapalikarpagambal.jpg?w=128&h=192

“இயேசு” என ஒருவர் வாழ்ந்தார் என்பதே கட்டுக்கதையா என்னும் கேள்வி உள்ள போது கருணாநிதியின் தோழர்கள் தமிழ் மய்யம் உரிமையாளர்களான மயிலாப்பூர் சாந்தோம் சர்ச் கட்டும் கதைக்கு நக்கீரன் தரும் உதவியோ.

தாமஸ் எனப்படும் தோமோ இந்தியா வந்தார் என்பதற்கு எவ்வித ஆதாரமும் கிடையாது. இதற்கு மிகப் பழைய ஆதாரம் எனப்படுவது 3ம் நூற்றாண்டிலெ செவிவழிக் கதைகள் துணை கொண்டு சிரிய மொழியில் புனையப்பட்ட புத்தகமான ” தோமோவின் நடபடிகள்” என்பது ஆகும்.

apostle-thomas1a1.jpg?w=450&h=392

ரோமன் போப்பரசரின் பதிப்பாளர் பர்ன் ஓட்ச் பர்பொர்னெ London: Burns Oates & Washbourne Ltd. Publishers to the Holy See.)) இவர்கள் முக்கிய பதிப்பு- தூய பட்லரின் புனிதமானவர்கள் வரலாறு எனப்படும்- பட்லர்ஸ் லைவ் ஆப் செயின்ட்ஸ் (Butlers lives of Saints)என்னும் 12 தொகுப்பு, மாதமொன்றிற்கு- அம்மாதத்தின் புனிதர்களை நினைவு படுத்தும்படியாக 12 தொகுப்பு கொண்டது.

தோமோ பற்றிக் கூறும்போது தெளிவாக கூறுவது 12 ஏசு சீடர்களில் யாரைப்பற்றியும் நம்பகத்தன்மை கொண்ட உண்மைகள் கிடையாது என்பது போலே தோமோ பற்றியும் தெரியவில்லை என ஆரம்பிக்கிறார். அவர் “தோமோ நடபடிகளை விமர்சிக்கையில்இந்தக் கட்டுக்கதாசிரியர் கப்பல் பிரயாணிகளைக் கேட்டு சில விபரங்கள் எழுதியிருக்கிறார், ஆனல் தோமோ நடபடிகள் கதையில் சற்றும் உண்மையில்லை என்கிறார்.

What Chruch says about ACTA THOMAE?- in St. Thomas Christian Encyclopaedia, ed. George Menachery in which Article -The Acts of Thomas- by Rev.Anthony Poathoor.

- “The Acts of Thomas in its present form contains many Doctrinal Errors. Some Historians conclude that The Acts of Thomas is the work of an unknown heretic who made use of the Authority to support his own Theological Opinions. Some Other Authors have suggested that the present work is the corrupted form of an older Orthodox version. In the view of former, We can hardly call the text interpolated, because the additions increase nearly Ten-fold to the Original Text. There is no doubt that the present Acts of Thomas is unacceptable from the Doctrinal point of View”. Page- 24

Holy see’s Publisher “Burn Oates & Wash BouRne Ltd” has Published Multi Volume “Butler’s Lives of Saints” Edited by Rev.Alban Butler (with Nihil Obstat & Imprimatur from Two Archbishop for its Doctrinal Acceptance) says-

“.. the Syrian Greek who was probably the fabricator of the Storywould have been able to learn from Traders and Travelers such details as the name Gondophorus with Tropical details.”. Pages 213-218, in Volume December.

The Authors have gone through all the major works of the claims of St.Thomas Indian visit claims and one of the highly acclaimed work of ‘The Early Spread of Christianity in India’- Alfred Mingana connected this with Apostle Thomas visit claims and clearly affirms-

“It is likely enough that the Malabar Coast was Evangelized from Edessa at a Later date, and in the course of time a confused tradition connected this with Apostle Thomas himself.”

Holy See’s publisher says that Indian Christianity has mostly the Origins from Edessa, which is in present Turkey- But did Edessa was the area where Thomas Worked?- let us see, how a detailed study by a Secular Historian says-
“Edessa-the modern Urfa in North West Mesopotamia is a city with an immensely long history going back to the Babylonian & Assyrian age. About 132BC it has became a seat of local dynasty, one of whose king raised the pillar. CHRISTIANITY Was Introduced in the Jewish Colony in the 2nd Century CE, and the church developed a national spirit using the Syriac Language and becoming the First Seat of Christianity in the Syriac speaking Community.”- Page-2176, World History; Editor J.A.Hanmeston.

தாமஸ் எனப்படும் தோமோ இந்தியா வந்தார் என்பதற்கு எவ்வித ஆதாரமும் கிடையாது. இதற்கு மிகப் பழைய ஆதாரம் எனப்படுவது 3ம் நூற்றாண்டிலெ செவிவழிக் கதைகள் துணை கொண்டு சிரிய மொழியில் புனையப்பட்ட புத்தகமான ” தோமோவின் நடபடிகள்” என்பது ஆகும். இந்தியாவின் எந்தவொரு மொழியுலும் தோமோ- ஏசு என்னும் பெயர் கூட 16ம் நூற்றாண்டிற்கு முன்பானது ஏதும் இல்லை. கேரளத்தின் மலையாள மொழியில் ரம்பன் பாட்டு என்னும் பாடல்-இதன் மொழி நடை இது 19ம் நுற்றாண்டின் பிற்பகுதியுடையதுஎன்பது தெளிவாகத் தெரிவிக்கிறது. இத்தொகுப்பு இரண்டு கத்தோலிக்கப் பேராயர்களல் முத்திரை ஒப்புமை நிகில் ஒப்ஸ்டட் இம்ப்ரிமெடுர் பெற்று வெளிவந்தது.

http://ankaraikrishnan.wordpress.com/2010/01/02/kapaleeshwarkapaleeshwar/திருமயிலைத் திருத்தலம்- இலக்கிய, வரலாற்றுப் பார்வை,
பேராசிரியர். Dr.சு.ராஜசேகரன்.,1989,
Doctral Thesis done in 1986, on the Same name at Madras University, the Author was then working as Tamil Professor at Nandanam Govt. Arts College, Chennai.

The Author Analyses various Stone Inscriptions and Archeological findings from Kapalishwarar Temple and Santhome and gives his views.

இப்போதுள்ள கபாலிசுவரர் கோயில், நாயன்மார்களால் பாடப் பெற்ற பழைய கபாலிசுவரர் கோயில் என்ற பொதுவான நம்பிக்கை மக்களிடையே நிலவி வருகிறது. ஆனால், தொல்பொருள் ஆராய்ச்சியாளர்கள் சாந்தோமில் கண்டெடுத்த புதைபொருள்களிலிருந்து பழைய கோயில் வேறு இடத்தில் இருந்திருக்க வேண்டும் என்றும், பெரும்பாலும் சாந்தோம் கடற்கரையாக இருக்கலாம் என்றும் எண்ண வேண்டியிருக்கிறது.. ..பழைய கபாலிசுவரர் கோயிலலின் இடிபாடுகள் இப்போதுள்ள கோயிலுக்குச் சிறிது தொலைவில் கிழக்கு திசையில் சாந்தோம் கடற்கரையருகே கண்டு எடுக்கப்பட்டதே இதற்குக் காரணமாகும்.

1923இல் தொல்பொருள் ஆய்வுத் துறையினர் சாந்தோம் கதிட்ரலில் நிகழ்த்திய அகழ்வாராய்ச்சிகளால்கல்வெட்டுகளும், தூண்களும், சிலைகளும் கண்டெடுக்கப்பட்டன. கல்வெட்டுகள் சிவன் கோயிலைக் குறிக்கின்றன. கற்றூண்களிலும் கல்வெட்டுகள் காணப்பெறுகின்றன. மயிலோடு கூடிய முருகர் சிலையும் கண்டெடுக்கப்பட்டது. 1921இல் மறைத்திரு ஹோஸ்டன், சாந்தோம் கதிட்ரலில் கண்டெடுத்த வடமொழிக் கல்வெட்டு “கருவறை உட்பட எல்லாக் கட்டிடங்களும் மயிலாப்பூரிலுள்ள புகழ்பெற்ற சிவனுக்கும் பார்வதிக்கும் உரியவையாகும்” என்று குறிப்பிடுபகிறது. மற்றொரு தானக் கல்வெட்டில், “திருமயிலாப்பில் பூம்பாவை” என்று குறிப்பிடுப்படுவதாலும், பழைய கபாலிசுவரர் கோயில் கடற்கரையருகே இருந்திருக்க வேண்டும் என்பது புலனாகிறது.

அருணகிரிநாதர் திருப்புகளில் கபாலிசுவரர் கோயில் கடற்கரை அருகே இருந்தது என்று குறிப்பிடுப்படுவதால், பழைய கோயில் கடற்கரையருகே இருந்திருக்க வேண்டும் என்று கே.வி..இராமன் கருதிகிறார். பக்கம்287,288

இந்திய மக்கள் தொகைக் கணக்கெடுப்புத்துறைவெளியிட்டசென்னை மாநிலக் கோயில்கள் (Temples of Madas State) என்னும் நூலில் காணப்படும் கருத்துக்கள் :
கி.பி. 16ஆம் நூற்றாண்டின் தொடக்கத்தில் சாந்தோம் கடற்கரையிலிருந்த கோயில் போர்த்துக்கீசியர்களால் அழிக்கப் பட்டிருக்க வேண்டும் என்று கூறுகிறது. இந்நூல் கூறும் புதிய செய்தி,இப்போதுள்ள கபாலிசுவரர் கோயிலும் குளமும் முந்நூறு ஆண்டுகளுக்கு முன், மயிலை நாட்டு முத்தையப்ப முதலியாராலும் அவருடைய வாரிசுகளிலாலும் கட்டப்பட்டது என்பதேயாகும். (பக்-289 – Quotes Census of India-1961; Temples of Madras State, 1 Chingleput District and Madras City, P.204)

100_17241.jpg?w=225&h=300 The Present Temple very clearly shows for Schoalrs that it was constructed only in 17th Cen. CE, few Tamil Schloars maintained that the Old Temple was in same place, and the Present Temple was constructed above it. Another Set of Scholars maintained that the Older Temple was in Sea Shore(Mostly the Present Santhome Cathedral) and the Author analyses various books on Mylapur Temple and comes to the Conclusion as below, and he before concluding quotes the Historic fact-
போர்த்துக்கீசியர்கள் இந்துக் கோயில்களை அழித்த செய்தியைக் கேள்விப்பட்டு இராமராயர் கி.பி. 1558இல், சாந்தோம் மீது படை எடுத்துப் போர்த்துக்கீசியரைப் பணிய வைத்துப் பின்னர்ப் பழுதுபட்ட கோயில்களைப் பழுதுபார்க்க ஆணையில்ட்ட செய்தியாலும் பழைய கபாலிசுவரர் கோயில் போர்த்துக்கீசியர்களால் .(Quotes from S.Kalyanasundaram-A Short History of Mylapore page-8) அழிக்கப் பட்டது என்ற முடிவுக்கு வரலாம்.
ஆகவே, முடிபாக, பழைய கபாலிசுவரர் கோயில், கடற்கரையருகே இருந்ததென்பதையும், கி.பி. பதினைந்தாம் நூற்றாண்டின் இறுதியில் போர்த்துக்கீசியரால் அழிக்கப் பட்டதென்பதையும், கி.பி. பதினாறாம் நுற்றாண்டில் இப்போதுள்ள இடத்தில் புதிய கோயில், மயிலை நாட்டு நயினியப்ப முத்தையப்ப முதலியார் மகன் முதலியாரால் கட்டப் பெற்றது என்பதையும் தெற்றென உணரலாம். -பக்கம் 291 திருமயிலைத் திருத்தலம்- இலக்கிய, வரலாற்றுப் பார்வை, பேராசிரியர்.Dr.சு.ராஜசேகரன்.,1989,

தோமோ நடபடிகள் என்னும் 3ம் நூற்றாண்டு நூல் தோமோ கொண்டோபரஸ் என்னும் மன்னன் நாட்டுக்கும் பின் மச்டய் என்னும் மன்னன் நாட்டில் ராணியையும் இளவரசனையும் சூன்யம் செய்து மதமாற்றம் செய்ததால் மரணதண்டனையில் கொன்றான் என வருகிறது.
மச்டய் நாடு பற்றி தோமோ நடபடிகள் கூறுவது: மச்டய் நாடு ஒரு பாலைவன நாடு, பாலைவனப் பகுதி.
The Ninth Act: of the Wife of Charisius.
87 And when the apostle had said these things in the hearing of all the multitude, they trode and pressed upon one another: and the wife of Charisius the king’s kinsman Ieapt out of her chair and cast herself on the earth before the apostle, and caught his feet and besought and said: O disciple of the living God, Thou Art Come Into A Desert Country,For We Live In The Desert;

DETAILS OF JEWS

எபிரேயர்கள் அந்த சிறிய பாலைவன நாட்டை தங்கள் புராணக் கதையில் புனையப்பட்ட தேர்ந்தெடுக்கப்பட்ட நாடு, மக்கள் என்பதை அப்படியே ஏற்று அந்த சிறு பகுதியில் வாழ்ந்தனர்.

கடல் வாணிகம் செய்யவில்லை.

ஜெருசலேம் என்பது ஒரு கால்பந்து மைதான அளவு தான்.

சாலைகள் தெருக்கள் என்பதெல்லாம் ஜெருசசேமில் கிடையாது.
Bible As Literature, Oxford University Press,
written by 3 Professors John.A.Gabel, Charles B.Wheelr and Antony.D.York.
How was Hebrews living during OT times.
The small Corner of the Eastern Mediterranean, we have to keep reminding ourselves that it take up only Lower Third of that coast- particularly speaking was the Whole World to them.
Page-77
With Just a Few Exceptions, No Canaanite Or Israelite City before the Roman Period occupied more area than that of an American University Football Stadium, most Villages were hardly bigger than the Playing Field itself. King’ David’s Jerusalem is estimated to have measured about 300 x 1300 foot. Inside the City-walls houses would be crammed together according to no particular pattern, leaving room for Passages bu not for Streets. Before the Greek Period there were no Public Building of the Kind that we take for granted, provided by the Municipal Government.
Pages- 87,88
Foreign Countries appear in the OT only as Military Allies or Enemies of the Israelites or as the Habitat of Alien Gods; otherwise, not a Slightest interest is shown in them.
Page-77
The Best Opportunity for Economic Development, it might seem was One they never took; Commerce by Sea with Mediterranean always at their door, the Israelites stubbornly remained a Land Locked People. They were effectively Shut off from the Coast at first by the Philistines, but the warfare between the two, more had to do with the Philistines attempt to expand toward the east than with any desire of the Israelite to gain access to Sea. Although the Palestinian Coast has no natural Harbors south of Carmel, this need not have been a Permanent Obstacle.
The Israelites were Content to Let others – Phoenicians and Egyptians conduct their Merchant Shipping for them, almost as though they Believed the Covenant Language in its Narrowest Sense as a Promise of Land and Nothing Further.
It is clear from their writings in the OT THAT THE SEA WAS ALWAYS to them, had no significant part to Play in their Thought.
Pages 86-87.

இந்தியர்கள் உலகிற்கு நாகரிகம் தந்தவர்கள்.
தோமோ தந்தார் என்பது பேரன் பாட்டியைப் பெற்றவன் என்று கூறுவது போல ஆகும்.

For Further

http://thomasmyth.wordpress.com/2010/04/19/%e0%ae%95%e0%ae%aa%e0%ae%be%e0%ae%b2%e0%af%80%e0%ae%b8%e0%af%8d%e0%ae%b5%e0%ae%b0%e0%ae%b0%e0%af%8d-%e0%ae%95%e0%af%8b%e0%ae%af%e0%ae%bf%e0%ae%b2%e0%af%88-%e0%ae%87%e0%ae%9f%e0%ae%bf%e0%ae%a4%e0%af%8d/

Posted in தமிழ்கிறுஸ்டியன் குருட்டு நம்பிக்கயாளர் | Edit | 2

Guru · Guru

சாந்தோம் சர்ச்சை இடித்து கபாலீஸ்வரர் கோயிலைக் கட்டித்தருவார்களா கிருத்துவர்கள்?

April 20, 2010 by vedaprakash

சாந்தோம் சர்ச்சை இடித்து கபாலீஸ்வரர் கோயிலைக் கட்டித்தருவார்களா கிருத்துவர்கள்?முன்பு கடற்கரையில் இருந்த புனிதமான கபாலீஸ்வரர் கோயிலை கத்தோலிக்க மதவெறியோடு 16ம் நூற்றாண்டில் இடித்துத் தள்ளி அங்கு சாந்தோம் சர்ச் மற்றும் பிஷப் இல்லம் என்றெல்லாம் கட்டிக் கொண்டு பிழைப்பு நடத்தும் கிருத்துவக் கூட்டங்களுக்கு சில கேள்விகள்:1. சாந்தோம் சர்ச்சை இடித்து கபாலீஸ்வரர் கோயிலைக் கட்டித்தருவார்களா கிருத்துவர்கள்?2. பிஷப் இல்லத்தை இடித்துவிட்டு வெளியேறுவார்களா?3. மறைத்து வைக்கப் பட்டுள்ள சிற்பங்களைத் திருப்பித் தருவார்களா?4. சாந்தோம் சர்ச்சின் வராண்டாவில் இருந்த, கல்வெட்டுத்துறையினரால், 12ன் நூற்றாண்டு கல்வெட்டு என்ற்ய் படுத்துக் காட்டப்பட்ட, நடராஜர்க்கு இரவ்ல் விளக்கெரிக்க வரியில்லாமல் கொடுக்கப் பட்ட நில மானியத்தைக் குறிக்கின்ற அந்த கல்வெட்டு எங்கே?.5. 12ம் நூற்றாண்டைச் சேர்ந்த கிரந்த எழுத்திலுள்ள சமஸ்கிருத கல்வெட்டு, சர்ச்சின் மேற்கு திசையில் 100 முழ தூரத்தில் கிடைத்தது. அது எங்கே போயிற்று?8. 12ம் நூற்றாண்டைச் சேர்ந்த மற்றொரு கல்வேட்டு, சாந்தோம் செமினரியின் பிரதான கதவிற்கு செல்லும் கடைசி படிகட்டின் வலது புறத்தில் காணப்பட்டது. இப்பொழுது சாந்தோ உயர்நிலைப் பள்ளி வளாகத்தில் இருப்பதாகக் கிருத்துவர்கள் கூறுகிறார்கள். அது எங்கே?9. இதைத் தவிர, தாமரைப்பூ உருவம் பொத்தித்த சிற்பங்கள் சர்ச்சின் வலப்புற வெளியில் நேர்பகுதியில் இரண்டும், பிஷப் இல்லத்திற்கு செல்லும் வாயிலின் இருபுறபும் இரண்டு 1990 வரை இருந்தன. ஆனால், இன்று எல்லாமே மறைந்து விட்டன! அவையெல்லாம் எங்கே போயிற்று?10. தொல்பொருட்துறை / அகழ்வாய்வுத் துறைகளுக்குத் தெரியாமல், அறிவிக்காமல் எப்படி அவை அப்புறப்படுத்தப் பட்டிருக்க முடியும் அல்லது மறைக்கப் பட்டிருக்கக்கூடும்?கோயிலைப் பற்றிய உண்மைகளை, ஆதாரங்களை மறைக்க வேண்டிய அவசியம் என்ன? பின்னணி என்ன?சரித்திரத்தையே மறைக்கும் செயலாகிறது. பிறகு எப்படி பொறுப்புள்ள சரித்திர ஆசிரியர்கள், பழங்கால கட்டிடங்களைப் போற்றவேண்டும் என்று வக்காலத்து வாங்கிக் கொண்டிருக்கும் ஆர். முத்தையா போன்ற ஆட்கள் மௌனமாக இருக்கிறார்கள்?

-- Edited by devapriyaji on Sunday 11th of July 2010 03:11:50 PM

New Indian-Chennai News + more

Peter"s Bones and Rome"s Truth

St Peter was not the first Pope and never went to Rome, claims Channel 4

Chennai prelate accused of supporting Syrians

Archbishop Arulappa Makes History 1

By K.P. Sunil

Archbishop of Madras-STOP 45 YEARS CONTINUING SCANDAL.

Demolish This and build

Seeman – you say you are a Pure Tamilan – prove it by demolishing Santhome Basilca.

Did a Hindu king kill St. Thomas? – Ishwar Sharan

January 29, 2010 · 4 Comments

St. Thomas in the American Cyclopaedia – George Ripley & Charles A. Dana

February 4, 2010 · Leave a Comment

Tsunami: St. Thomas abandons fishermen, saves himself – Ishwar Sharan

February 9, 2010 · Leave a Comment

The Deccan Chronicle’s Pious Deceits – Ishwar Sharan

January 18, 2010 · Leave a Comment

See Indian Media’s War on Hinduism http://hamsa.org/akbar.htm#1

___________________________________

Town of Thomas

THE REAL HISTORY

_______________________________

DECCAN CHRONICLE FEATURE, CHENNAI, 24 NOVEMBER 2008

Serene Mount beckons

BY GEORGE ADIMATHRA

THE REAL HISTORY

NOTES:

DECCAN CHRONICLE FEATURE, CHENNAI, 16 JULY 2008

Little Mount

THE REAL HISTORY

The Deccan Chronicle’s Pious Deceits – Ishwar Sharan

January 18, 2010 · Leave a Comment

Oct 22, 2009

St. Thomas the Apostle of Brazil – Fr. Francis X. Clooney, SJ

March 3, 2010 · Leave a Comment

Wikipedia & Encyclopedia Britannica: Their counterfeit St. Thomas entries exposed – Ishwar Sharan

March 18, 2010 · Leave a Comment

“WE HAVE CONCLUDED THAT THE PORTION OF THE ARTICLE THAT REFERS TO THOMAS’ LATER LIFE PLACES TOO MUCH EMPHASIS ON THE UNLIKELY SCENARIO OF HIS TRAVELING TO, AND BEING MARTYRED IN INDIA” - ANTHONY G. CRAINE, ENCYCLOPAEDIA BRITANNICA