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http://www.malankaraworld.com/library/History/History_st-thomas-christians-52-1687AD.htm

The Saint Thomas Christians in India from 52 to 1687 AD

by István Perczel

1. On the St Thomas Christians

The Saint Thomas Christians refer to themselves in this way because their tradition holds that their ancestors, who all came from the high castes of Hindu society, were converted by the Apostle Saint Thomas, who landed in India in the year 52 AD. At present there is no way to scientifically prove or disprove this tradition. One thing is certain: ever since the discovery of the monsoon winds in 45 AD by Hippalos, an Alexandrian ship-captain, the land and sea routes were open from the Mediterranean via the Persian Gulf to India, and there were indeed intense contacts between these areas. One after the other, Roman coins of the first century AD are being unearthed in southern India.

Be that as it may, the tradition of Christ’s Apostle doing missionary work in India is the principal formative element of the identity of a large and flourishing (at present seven million-strong) community. At a certain stage of its history, this community entered into intense contacts with the Syrian Christian world. Tradition also tells us that this happened in 345 AD, when Thomas of Kana, a rich Syrian merchant from Persia, also landed in Cranganore, accompanied by seventy families. Their descendants, the endogamous Knanaya community, boast of having preserved pure Syrian blood. Thomas of Kana and the bishops who accompanied him established a permanent contact with the Syrian Church. So, if we are to believe tradition, ever since Thomas of Kana the Malabar Church, consisting of an Indian and a Syrian component, has ecclesiastically and culturally belonged to the Syrian Christian world. Thus the St Thomas Christians constitute an unique community, whose native tongue is Malayalam, whose everyday culture and customs are typically Indian and whose language of worship and of high culture has been Syriac for many centuries.

In fact, for this high-caste Indian Christian community Syriac had the same social function as Sanskrit had for the neighbouring Hindu high-caste society.


2. Traditions about St Thomas the Apostle

According to tradition, Christianity in Kerala was founded by Saint Thomas the Apostle, who landed on the Malabar Coast, at Maliankara near Cranganore (Kodungallur), in 52 AD. Why precisely in 52 is difficult to say, but this date is firmly held in the present traditio communis of the St Thomas Christians. For how long the date has been established is an interesting question in itself. The modern Malayalam ballad Thomas Ramban Pattu (“The Song of the Lord Thomas”), which gives absolutely precise data about the details of the Apostle’s activity, dates his arrival to 50 AD, in the month of Dhanu (December), and his death in Mylapore (Mailapuram) to 72 AD, on the 3rd day of the month of Karkadakam (July), corresponding to the traditional memorial day of the Apostle in the Syrian Churches, at 4:50 p.m. However, this apparently reflects a later tradition. Recently we found an earlier tradition in a palm-leaf manuscript belonging to the collection of the Syro-Malabar Major Archbishop's House in Ernakulam, which, among eighteen Malayalam apocrypha, also contains the Malayalam version of the Acts of Thomas. The seventeenth-century redactor's note to this apocryphon dates the death of Saint Thomas to December 21 and says that on that very day the Apostle's memorial day (Dukhrana) was universally celebrated in the Malankara Church.

On his arrival - so tradition holds - the Apostle converted several Brahmin families, from whom a good part of the present-day Nazranies descend, and founded seven churches: Maliankara (Kodungallur or Cranganore), Palayur, Kottakavu (North Parur), Kokamangalam (Pallipuram), Niranam, Chayal and Kollam (Quilon). There is a beautiful story vividly recounted among the local Christians and invoked in many books about the foundation of the Palayur church, not far from Cranganore where Saint Thomas is believed to have landed, and close to Guruvayur, the famous centre of Krishna worship. According to this tradition, the Apostle arrived there and found several nambudhiri (or namputhiri) Brahmins (that is, Kerala Brahmins) bathing in a tank and throwing up handfuls of water as an offering to their sun-god. He asked them whether they were able to throw the water up so that it could stay suspended in the air without falling back down, as a proof that their god had accepted it. The Brahmins replied this was impossible; the Apostle performed a miracle and the water remained in the air, proving that Christ had accepted the offering. This convinced the Brahmins, who accepted baptism from the Apostle in the same tank. Their temple was transformed into a Christian church, while those who stuck to their Hindu faith fled from the place. They cursed the land and called it Chapakatt (Chowghat in the Anglicised version, now Chavakkad), “the Cursed Forest.”

Some sixteenth-century Portuguese sources, partly edited but for the most part unedited, studied by the very learned Fr. Mathias Mundadan, the doyen of Indian Church history, speak about converted kings, from whom another name of the community, Tarijanel, which tradition interprets as “sons of kings,” derives. Later the Apostle went to the eastern Coromandel Coast, where he also converted people, and finally died on the Little Mount in Mylapore, nowadays a suburb of Chennai (Madras). There are several versions of the details of the Apostle’s death, the most fantastic of which states that one day a hunter out hunting pea****s saw a group of them seated on a flat stone. He shot an arrow at the leader of the group, which was transformed into a man and fell down dead. This was the Apostle. Other accounts, emphasising the point that Saint Thomas died a martyr’s death, speak about furious Brahmins who pierced the Apostle with a lance, either when he was praying in rapture in a cave or when he destroyed, by means of his cross, a temple dedicated to the goddess Kali. His tomb is venerated in Mylapore up to the present day, and pilgrimage to the tomb has always been an important element in the religious life of the St Thomas Christian community.

The tradition that locates the Apostle’s activity in two places, Kerala on the western and Coromandel on the eastern coast of southern India, corresponds to the historical existence of two communities. However, some calamities have destroyed the eastern community, which at some time (differently specified in the different sources) had to migrate westward and to unite with the one in Kerala. A version of the tradition transmitted by Francisco Roz, the first Latin bishop (residing in Angamaly) of the St Thomas Christians, does not know about the preaching of the Apostle on the Malabar Coast, but holds that all the St Thomas Christians emigrated there from the east. An interesting element of the local traditions is that – at least in Portuguese times – the same stories were told on the western and on the eastern coast, but connected to different localities. At present there is no autochthonous Christian community on the Coromandel Coast.

In Kerala almost every village has its local Saint Thomas tradition, full of miraculous elements. Just to collect them would be a very important task of anthropological research.

Most of the literature on the question treats the historicity of the Apostle’s presence and activities in India, trying to combine the different western and eastern testimonies with elements of local tradition and archaeological findings. The general outcome of these investigations is that the question of the historicity of the tradition is unsolvable by means of the scholarly methods that we have at our disposal. The strongest argument in favour of the historicity remains nothing other than the tradition itself, an unanimous tradition held not only in India, but also in the whole Christian Orient. Here we also face something quite extraordinary, which deserves a different approach. In fact, the very existence of the traditions concerning the Apostle, divergent in their details but unanimous in their core message, and the role of these traditions shaping the self-identity of the community, is a matter of objective fact. Setting aside the question of how true historically the tradition is, we should recognise the St Thomas traditions as constituting an important, if not the most important, factor in the formation of the Nazranies’ communal identity. The tradition of Saint Thomas preaching and converting in India and apparently converting nobody but members of the higher castes expresses both the Nazranies’ embeddedness in the surrounding majority Hindu society and their separation. It explains why they find themselves integrated into the Indian culture, speaking the same language – Malayalam – as their neighbours. But it also explains why they are separate, professing a different faith, Christianity. It also explains their ambiguous but traditionally well-established position in the society. Being Christians, they believe in the absolute truth and the sole saving power of their religion. At the same time, they live in a society that has been able to accept them as one among its organic strata, while also accepting Christ and the saints as belonging to the community of the many divinities legitimately worshipped by the different segments of the Hindu society. It considered the Christians as one element belonging to the same society, and permitted them to practise their professions (mainly trade and agriculture and, to a lesser extent, military service), which were highly regarded by others. The Hindus also venerated the Christian holy places, and they still hold the priests of the St Thomas Christians in high esteem, considering them as holy men. This might not have always been the case, and the remembrances in the tradition about earlier persecutions may point to less tolerant periods and neighbourhoods. All this and much more is admirably expressed in the founding traditions of the community, connected to Saint Thomas.

 

3. Traditions of Thomas of Kana and the Earliest Syrian Connections

The identity of the St Thomas Christians is not exhausted by their being Indian and Christian. They are also Syrian. As Placid Podipara says in an emblematic writing of his, “they are Hindu or Indian in culture, Christian in religion and Syro-Oriental in worship.” How they came under Syrian influence is again told by stories preserved by the oral tradition. This speaks about the arrival of another Thomas, Thomas of Kana (Knayi Thomman in Malayalam), a rich Syrian merchant from Persia according to one version, but a Christian Jew originating from Kana in Palestine, a relative of Jesus himself, according to others. The Kerala tradition, which connects its events to absolutely precise dates, knows that this happened in 345 AD. Normally this date is taken for granted both in oral conversation and in writing. However, the early Portuguese witnesses give a wide range of datings. According to some, this Thomas of Kana came even earlier, so that he could still meet a servant of Saint Thomas, while others hold that he came later, namely in 752 AD, some 700 years after the Apostle. The date 345 seems to come from or at least to be documented by a Syriac text written by a certain Father Matthew, in Malabar, in 1730. With Thomas came seventy or seventy-two families (this number representing the totality of a people, as in the case of the translators of the Septuagint or in that of the greater circle of the apostles). It is said that Thomas found the St Thomas Christians in great spiritual need, and so he reorganised them and put them under the jurisdiction of the Persian Church. In this way the jurisdictional link of the Malabar Coast with the Syrian Churches would originate from this time.

An important element of the tradition is the famous copper plates that Thomas of Kana is said to have received from the King of Malabar, the Cheruman Perumal. In Kerala in the Middle Ages royal charters on privileges were written on copper plates, generally in Grandha or Vattezhuttu (literally, “round script”) characters. Communities belonging to different religions possess their own copper plates – so also the Jews, the Christians and the Muslims. At present some of the Christian copper plates are kept at some important ecclesiastical centres, such as the Metropolitanate of the Mar Thoma Church in Tiruvalla and the Syrian Orthodox Catholicosate in Kottayam. The copper plates are not shown to visitors. Several mutually contradictory decipherings of them have been published. In Portuguese times there seem to have existed the very copper plates that were claimed to contain the privileges that the Cheruman Perumal king gave to Thomas of Kana. In the middle of the sixteenth century the Portuguese acquired them, but by the end of the same century they were lost. According to a tradition noted by the Portuguese, these plates briefly related the story of Thomas of Kana arriving in Cranganore and receiving royal privileges from the king. These privileges were the following: he gave his own name, Coquarangon, to Thomas, and he also gave him the “City of the Great Idol,” Magoderpattanam or Mahadevarpatnam, and a great forest for possession forever, then seven kinds of musical instruments and together with them all honours for the Christians to speak and behave as kings do, so that their brides may whistle during their wedding ceremony, just as the women of the kingly families do, to spread carpets on the grounds, to wear sandals, and to ride elephants. Besides this he gave Thomas and his people the right to five different taxes that they could collect.

Be that as it may, these traditions are also important formative elements of the Kerala Christians’ identity and have an explicative value for their social reality. In fact, it is these traditions that explain not only the Syrian affiliation, but also a division between the Indian Christians, that is, the division between two endogamous groups, the “Southists” (thekkumbhagar) and the “Northists” (vadakkumbhagar). Both groups claim legitimate descent from Thomas of Kana and the families that accompanied him, but only the Southists say that they have conserved pure Syrian blood. The names are believed to come from the fact that once the two groups inhabited respectively the northern and the southern part of the Christian quarter of Cranganore.

Thus, it is to the time of Thomas of Kana that the tight jurisdictional and cultural relationship between the Church of Malabar and the Persian Church is traced back. According to some historians, this relationship meant purely and simply an allegiance to the Church of the East; according to others, the Malabar Christians were under the impression that the whole Orient belonged to the Patriarchate of Antioch, so that the Catholicos of Seleucia-Ctesiphon would be a representative of the Patriarch of Antioch. This debate is theoretically unsolvable, but concrete research into the extant documents will surely decide about the merits of each opinion.

4. Church Governance before the Portuguese Period

According to the traditional structure, the Indian diocese of the Church of the East was governed by a Metropolitan sent by the Catholicos Patriarch, from Seleucia-Ctesiphon. At the same time, on the local level, in India Church affairs were governed by the Malabar yogam, that is, Assembly. There was also an indigenous head of the Church of Malabar, called in Malayalam Jatikku Karthavian, which, according to Jacob Kollaparambil, means “the head of the caste," that is, the head of the St Thomas Christians, but also the "Archdeacon of All India." Apparently, in his person an indigenous function, characteristic of the St Thomas Christian community, was combined with an existing function of the Church of the East. According to the canons of the latter Church, the Archdeacon is the highest priestly rank: he is the head of all the clerics belonging to a bishopric; he is responsible for the whole worship of the cathedral church and represents the will of the bishop in his absence. One clearly understands how the appointment of an indigenous Archdeacon of All India served the needs of the ecclesiastical organisation of the Church of the East. While the Catholicos Patriarch of Seleucia-Ctesiphon reserved for himself the right to send his own prelates originating from Iraq to the Indian diocese, the continuous governance of his Indian flock was secured by the indigenous Archdeacon serving as the head of all the priests in Malabar and representing the bishop’s will.

However, from the local point of view, the rank of the Archdeacon was more important than this; not only was he the most important priest of the community, but he also fulfilled the role of an Ethnarch. He was “the prince and head of the Christians of Saint Thomas” and had such titles as “Archdeacon and Gate of All India, Governor of India.” The origin and the meaning of the term “Gate” is mysterious. One might suppose that it is a Christological title: “I am the Gate of the sheep” (Jn 10:7). While originally the Archdeacon in the Church of the East was elected by the bishop according to merit, the office of the Archdeacon of India seems to have been hereditary. It was the privilege of the Pakalomattam family, at least from the sixteenth century onwards. Indeed, we know about a number of Pakalomattam Archdeacons, beginning with 1502, when Metropolitan John of India appointed George Pakalomattam. The name of the family varies, and the family seems to be identical with the Parambil family, translated into Portuguese as De Campo. The Archdeacon had all the attributes of a secular leader and was normally escorted by a number, sometimes several thousands, of soldiers. It is important to note that while there could be several bishops appointed for the Malabar Diocese, there was always only one Archdeacon, a custom contrary to the canons of the Church of the East. This situation is best explained by the fact that from the point of view of the East Syrian Church structure the Archdeacon was an ecclesiastical function, but from that of the St Thomas Christian community it was also a socio-political, princely function, representing the unity of the Christian nation, or caste(s), of Hendo (India).

5. The Early Portuguese Period

For any element whatsoever, such as the ones mentioned before, of the history of the St Thomas Christian community before the arrival of the Portuguese colonisers, one has barely any sources other than local traditions and traditions. Documented history seems to begin with the arrival of the Portuguese. The European documentation beginning with this period already permits a fairly detailed picture of the social status, the life and the customs of the Christians whom they found upon their arrival in southern India, and in principle all the following, colonial, history of the community can be traced. However, here as well, although to a lesser extent, history is inextricably interwoven with oral tradition.

At the moment when the Portuguese arrived on the Malabar Coast, the Christian communities that they found there had had longstanding traditional links with the East Syrian Christians in Mesopotamia. During the subsequent period, in 1552, a split occurred within the Church of the East. Part of it joined Rome, so that besides the “Nestorian” Catholicosate of the East another, “Chaldaean,” Patriarchate was founded, headed by the Patriarch Mar John Sulaqa (1553-1555), claiming to be the rightful heir to the East Syrian tradition. It is very difficult to see the precise influence of this schism on the Church of Malabar. Apparently, both parties sent bishops to India. Over against earlier, somewhat romantic views, which took it for granted that there was a continuous line of Chaldaean bishops, without any Nestorian interference, by now it has become clear that the real situation was the following. The last pre-schism East Syrian Metropolitan, Mar Jacob (1504-1552), died just when the schism occurred. Apparently the first among the two Patriarchs to send a prelate to India was the Nestorian Catholicos, Simeon VII Denkha. The person whom he sent was Mar Abraham, who, later, was to be the last Syrian Metropolitan of Malabar, after having gone over to the Chaldaean side. When he arrived in Malabar is not known, but he must have been there already in 1556. Approximately at the same time, Abdisho IV (1555-1567), the successor of John Sulaqa (murdered in 1555), sent the brother of John, Mar Joseph, to Malabar as a Chaldaean bishop; although consecrated in 1555 or 1556, Mar Joseph could not reach India before the end of 1556, nor Malabar before 1558, when the Portuguese were finally alerted by the presence of Mar Abraham and allowed Mar Joseph, accompanied by another Chaldaean bishop, Mar Eliah, to – very briefly – occupy his see, before the Inquisition also sent him to Lisbon in 1562. In this way, nominally there were two rival Syrian Metropolitans in Kerala until 1558, when Mar Abraham was captured, forced to confess the Catholic faith in Cochin and sent back to Mesopotamia, to the Chaldaean Patriarch Abdisho, who (re-)consecrated him Metropolitan and sent him to Rome. There Mar Abraham was ordained Metropolitan a third time in 1565 by Pope Pius IV. The Pope wanted Mar Abraham to reign jointly with Mar Joseph, who in the meantime had returned to Malabar in 1564, only to be deported a second time in 1567 and die in Rome in 1569. From Rome, Mar Abraham returned to Mesopotamia and reached the Malabar Coast for the second time in 1568. Although he was once again detained in Goa, in 1570 he managed to escape, and governed the Malabar Christians until his death in 1597.

Taking into account the fact that Mar Abraham had gone over to the Chaldaeans, the Nestorian Catholicos Patriarch, Mar Eliah VIII (1576-1591), sent another bishop, Mar Simeon, to Kerala. Mar Simeon probably arrived there in 1576. He stayed there until 1584, when he was captured and sent to Rome, where it was discovered that he was a Nestorian and, on account of this fact, his ordination as priest and bishop was declared invalid. He was confined to a Franciscan friary in Lisbon, where he died in 1599.

It is reported that before leaving Malabar, Mar Simeon appointed a priest as his “vicar general,” Jacob by name, who, according to the Portuguese testimonies, resisted all the Latin innovations introduced under Mar Abraham and was finally excommunicated by Archbishop Menezes of Goa before he died in 1596. However, as this priest is also called Archdeacon, I would suggest that his role should be reconsidered. The Chaldaean Archdeacon during the first part of the reign of Mar Abraham was George of Christ, who was on friendly terms with the Latin missionaries and was to be appointed the successor of Mar Abraham as Metropolitan of India. Thus he should have become, according to the plans of Mar Abraham, supported by the Jesuits, the first indigenous Chaldaean Metropolitan of the St Thomas Christians. However, the last letter of Mar Abraham, where he requests the Pope to confirm George’s ordination as Bishop of Palur and his coadjutor, is dated January 13, 1584, while from another letter of the same Mar Abraham we learn that the consecration of George failed because of the latter’s death. After this, we hear about an Archdeacon with Roman allegiance, perhaps John, the brother of George of Christ, appointed in 1591. As Archdeacon Jacob appears on the scene as a leader of the Church of Malabar in 1584, I would suggest that he was the one who inherited the office of the Archdeacon from George. Rather than being appointed by Mar Simeon, the Nestorian Metropolitan, he inherited the office by family right and sided with Mar Simeon against Mar Abraham, which resulted in a very tense situation. The Roman side seems to have tried to solve this problem by appointing a rival Archdeacon, the first one in 1591 and the second, George of the Cross, in 1593. In this way, although from 1552 rival Metropolitans sent by the two East Syrian Patriarchs contended for the allegiance of the St Thomas Christians, still, until 1656, the date of the consecration of Kunju Mathai (Matthew) as Archdeacon of the Latin allegiance against Mar Thoma, the former Archdeacon now in revolt, there was only a very brief period (between 1591 and 1596) when two rival Archdeacons contended against each other.


6. The Synod of Diamper and the Syrian Orthodox Mission in India

Alexis de Menezes, Archbishop of Goa from 1595 until his death in 1617, together with his Jesuit advisers, decided to bring the Kerala Christians to obedience, an obedience that they conceived as complete conformity to the Roman or ‘Latin’ customs. This meant separating the Nazranies not only from the Nestorian Catholicosate of Seleucia-Ctesiphon, but also from the Chaldaean Patriarchate of Babylon, and subjecting them directly to the Latin Archbishopric of Goa. The most important stage of their activity was the famous Synod of Diamper (Udayamperur) in 1599, when the local Christians’ customs were officially anathematised as heretical and their manuscripts were condemned to be either corrected or burnt. The oppressive rule of the Portuguese padroado (’patronage’) provoked a violent reaction on the part of the indigenous Christian community. This was the Kunan Kurishu Satyam (Bent Cross Oath) in Matancherry, Cochin, in 1653, when the rebels, headed by their Archdeacon, made a vow not to accept any allegiance unless to a Syrian Church. In the same year, Archdeacon Thomas was ordained, by the laying on of hands of twelve priests, as the first indigenous Metropolitan of Kerala, under the name Mar Thoma I. Later, in 1665, on the arrival of Mor Grigorios Abd al-Jalil, a bishop sent by the Antiochian Syrian Orthodox Patriarch, this movement resulted in the Mar Thoma party’s joining the Antiochian Patriarchate and in the gradual introduction of the West Syrian liturgy, customs and script on the Malabar Coast.

7. The Background and the Aftermath of These Events

During the entire period beginning with the intervention of Archbishop Menezes of Goa in the affairs of the Church of Malabar in 1598, up to the consecration of Archdeacon Thomas as Mar Thoma I in 1653 and his joining the Antiochian (Syrian Orthodox) Patriarchate in 1665, events were dominated by a constant tension between the Latin Archbishops designated by the Portuguese and the Archdeacons leading the St Thomas Christian community. In 1597, Mar Abraham, the last Chaldaean Metropolitan of India, died. Mar Abraham, although originally a Nestorian and accused by the Jesuit Francisco Roz of holding ‘Nestorian’ views, seems to have remained a faithful Chaldaean bishop, that is, in sincere community with Rome, as attested by his copy of the Nomocanon of Abdisho bar Brikha of Nisibis, which he carried to Malabar and which is still preserved in the Library of the Major Catholic Archbishop’s House in Ernakulam. Already the scribe who copied the Nomocanon for Mar Abraham included the Nicaeo-Constantinopolitan Creed in its Latin form, with the Filioque, and on the first folio of the book one can read a anathema by Mar Abraham on Nestorius.

Thus, if there was strife between the Portuguese missionaries and the indigenous Christians and their Iraqi prelates, it was not of a truly doctrinal, but of an ecclesiological and jurisdictional character. However, something else was also involved: the identity of the St Thomas Christians. In their striving to preserve their identity, after the death of Mar Abraham in 1597, the most important role was given to Archdeacon George of the Cross, appointed by Mar Abraham in 1593. Archbishop Alexis de Menezes, who was both an ambitious and indeed violent person and a very able Church politician, succeeded in bringing the Archdeacon to obedience and in abolishing the Chaldaean jurisdiction on the Malabar Coast. How perfectly he succeeded is another question, where legends once again begin to play their role. Be that as it may, under his immediate successors this apparent success proved to be more ephemeral and less complete than it appeared after the Synod of Diamper in 1599.

The strife between the Latin Archbishops and the Archdeacons – first George of the Cross and then his nephew, Thomas Parambil (de Campo) – continued and resulted in several revolts of the latter against the former, whenever the Archbishop tried to curtail the traditional rights of the Archdeacon. In this way George of the Cross revolted against Francisco Roz, Archbishop of Angamali (1601-1624), first in 1609, when the latter excommunicated him, and also in 1618. Although George had more friendly relations with Roz’s successor, Stephen Britto (1624-1641), he also revolted against the latter in 1632. The rule of the next Archbishop, Francis Garcia (1641-1659), was again dominated by constant tension between him and the Archdeacon, Thomas Parambil, until the latter apparently decided definitively to break away from Roman jurisdiction. In 1648-1649 he sent a number of letters to several Oriental Patriarchs and thus to the Coptic Patriarch of Alexandria, to the Syrian Jacobite Patriarch of Antioch and most probably also to the Chaldaean Patriarch of Babylon, requesting them to send bishops to Malabar.

As an answer to these letters, a certain Mar A'tallah, a bishop who called himself Mor Ignatius, Patriarch of India and China, arrived in India, but the Portuguese detained him in Mylapore and the rumour spread that he had been drowned in the sea. His detention so enraged the Archdeacon and his party that they revolted against the Jesuits. On January 3, 1653, a mass of people gathered in Matancherry in Cochin, and swore an oath not to obey the Franks, that is, the Portuguese, but only the Archdeacon, who on May 22 of the same year was ordained bishop, under the name Mar Thoma, twelve priests laying their hands on him. This was the famous Bent Cross Oath, during which almost the entire St Thomas Christian community seceded from Rome. From the history preceding this event, it is rather clear that this secession cannot be explained by its immediate pretext, that is, the detention of Mar A'tallah, but was the fulfilment of a long-nurtured wish of the Archdeacon, who could not accept his subjugation, and of the local Christians, who wanted to preserve their traditions and autonomy.

This event was followed by a rather troubled period, further complicated by the fact that the Dutch gradually conquered the Malabar Coast. In 1663 they conquered Cochin and expelled all the Portuguese and other European missionaries, with the exception of some Franciscans. At this moment the Apostolic Commissary, Bishop Joseph Sebastiani, had no other choice than to consecrate an indigenous prelate for the remaining party that did not obey Mar Thoma, the former Archdeacon and current bishop. For this purpose he could not but choose another member of the same Parambil family, considered as the leader of the community: Alexander de Campo, or Mar Chandy Parambil, who was the cousin of Mar Thoma and originally one of his main four helpers or advisers during the Bent Cross Oath. He made Mar Chandy Parambil a Vicar Apostolic and a titular bishop only, but Mar Chandy Parambil considered himself a Metropolitan and signed his documents as “Metropolitan of All India.” Moreover, in 1678, he also appointed an Archdeacon, who happened to be his own nephew, Mathew Parambil (or De Campo). Thus, at this point, due to the binding force of the events and the strategic thought of Bishop Sebastiani, there were to be found two bishops of the St Thomas Christian community, who were close relatives of each other, both from the traditional leading family of the Nazarenes.

See Also:

History of Church Cases at a Glance, Litigation Among the Members of Syrian Christians in Malankara - An Overview

Brief History of The Jacobite Syrian Orthodox Church of Antioch in India



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Susan Visvanathan: Legends of St Thomas of Kerala

2706.jpg

St. Thomas and the brahmins. Credit - kavilaiveettizachariahfamily.com


http://www.museindia.com/viewarticle.asp?myr=2011&issid=38&id=2706

 

Kerala is always green, edged by sea and mountains. The rains come to Kerala for long months at a time. One can sometimes sense the rain forest planning its return. In this nad or country, there live a people who believe that St Thomas, the apostle of Jesus came and baptised their ancestors. They like to believe that they are really the descendants of those early Christians, who according to legend, were once Brahmins. The legend allows them to retain upper caste status; it explains to them in socially legitimate ways why they are elite.


The oral tradition of Kerala is a living tradition unlike the apocryphal Acts of Thomas.1 The sources of this oral tradition in Kerala include written and unwritten songs and stories. The most famous of these are ceremonial songs performed at marriages and feast days. The Thomas Ramban Pattu is claimed to have been originally composed by the first disciple of the Apostle in Malabar. In its present design, it is possibly a 16th century reinterpretation by one Thomas Ramban Mallikal, the 48th in a hereditary line of priests. Today, these verses are known as the Mar Thoma Geetham.

According to these songs Thomas came to Kodungalu in 52 A.D., and founded seven churches in Kerala. There is a very explicit listing of the many miracles that Thomas wrought in Malabar. Another song which describes St Thomas' visit to Kerala is the Margam Kalli Pattu, which means the 'Song of the Way'. It describes the introduction of theMarga, or the (Christian) path or way of worship in Kerala. The academic historian (unlike official church historians) would say that there is no conclusive proof that Thomas came to Malabar; but the Syrian Christians have preferred to rely on the traditions handed down from generation to generation which have now crystallised into the collective memory of a community. The cultural experience of time varies as we know, and the St Thomas Christians notate time from the coming of St Thomas to Muziris (Kodungalu) in the first century of the Christian era.2 

One is not looking for a `historical' Thomas. Legends do sometimes take on the form and function of history. More characteristically, they fuse time and space together and become mythopoeic. Legends more importantly tell us to listen.

The possibility of St Thomas visiting India from the Middle East after the death of Christ is affirmed by the strong commercial links that existed whereby gold and pepper changed hands. This trade, which included precious stones, pearls, spices, perfumes and pea****s was mostly in the hands of Egyptians and Syrians. By 47 A.D. the West was making use of knowledge about the monsoon winds and the Romans could accomplish in a year the voyage to India and back.3 The pepper trade as Pliny noted was the central focus of activity for these ships. Muziris, the other name for Kodungalur, was so important to the Romans that they built a temple of Augustus in that city.

There is no early literary evidence that St Thomas did come to Kerala, but scholars have argued substantially on the prevalence and strength of oral traditions. In the apocryphal Acts of St Thomas it only says that Thomas went to `another kingdom' after his apostolate in the North-West kingdoms of the subcontinent, but it chronicles his work and death in Mylapore. Most of the `legendary' history about Thomas is written in the form of `perhaps' and `probably'.4 

It is said that the first disciple of Thomas the Apostle, in Kerala, was a young Brahmin boy from the village of Niranam. He was returning home in the early morning having worshipped at the temple, when he met the Apostle Thomas who asked him if the gods ever heard his prayers. The boy replied that they were carved from stone but he worshipped them because his father did so, and his grandfather before him.

"It is the custom of the country. And if I did not go every morning my mother would give me no food."

Thomas instructed him in the ways of the Christian faith and the boy returned to him often. When he was baptised by Thomas, his father drove him out of his house. The boy was ordained as priest and named Thomas, by the Apostle.

According to legend the majority of the conversions made by the Apostle were of Brahmins. The Raja of Kodungalu gave Thomas permission to preach the gospel and gave him gifts of money. The Apostle is said to have built seven churches--at Kodungalu, Quilon, Chayal, Niranam, Kokamanglam, Parur and Palayur. The King also became a Christian. The legends say that the Brahmins were infuriated at seeing their Rajah a Christian. But Thomas performed many miracles and the conversions continued. Here is a version of a legend recorded by Zaleski.

"Then in July, on the day of the full moon, he went to the Brahmin quarter. He was passing by a pond which was sacred and many Brahmins were bathing. They took water in their hands and threw it into the air. Thomas asked them why they did so and the Brahmin replied `We are offering it to the Gods'.

"Thomas said "Do not the Gods reject your offering? See the waters fall back into the pond?"

"The Brahmins said "Such is the nature of the water, it was made so, that it falls always down."

The Apostle then took some water into his hand, and threw it into the air. And the drops remained suspended shining like so many gems, then fell at Thomas' feet in a shower of beautiful flowers whose fragrance filled the whole place. Many of the Brahmins then followed the Apostle who instructed and baptised them."5 

This happened according to tradition at Palayur. Those Brahmins who remained attached to their traditional faith left the place, cursing it and swearing that they would never return or eat or drink from that place--it was cursed. Fr. Hambye S.J. writes that a Brahmin family called Kalathu Mana keeps a document, Nagargarandhavaryola, where it is written, "Kali Year 3153 (A.D. 52) the foreigner Thomas Sanyasi came to our village (gramam) preached there, causing pollution. We therefore came away from that village."6 This village is called Chavakatt or Chapakatt: the cursed forest.

Another legend describes a procession in Parur--a multitude following an elephant with an idol carried ceremoniously on its back, and accompanied by drummers and musicians. Several in the procession recognised Thomas as `the magician who, corrupted the people of Palayur' and they crowded around him threateningly. But then the sky darkened, according to the legends, thunder came from the clouds and the people were frightened.

When the time came for St Thomas to leave for Mylapore, where the legends say he died, the people wept and could not reconcile themselves to the fact that their Muttapen (old father) was leaving them. His departure is described by these legends in very ceremonial terms. The people followed him as he rode in a cart driven by two white bullocks. They were disconsolate because the Apostle had foretold his martyrdom and they knew he would never return to them again.7 He would `return' however, in memory and ritual, in the miracle cures and the liturgies, and sometimes people would even `see' him. Elsewhere I have chronicled in detail the present day cult of St Thomas in Kerala where he is believed to be patron saint of specific parishes.

One of the central problems that the story of Thomas raises is that of the stranger. Nowhere does Thomas the renouncer really stay, nowhere does he belong. The commands he obeys are never temporal, but always purely of the Spirit ... "and he who does not take his cross and follow me is not worthy of me."8 The Gospel of Luke records "And he said to them, Take nothing for your journey, no staff, nor bag, nor bread, nor money and do not have two tunics. And whatever house you enter, stay there and from there depart."9 The stranger is the potential wanderer who is tied down for a time with a particular group in a specific bounded space. The stranger -and the sanyasi is specifically that - is essentially quasi-social for he can never overcome the possibility of having to move on, never settling. This threshold identity gives him a certain freedom of action, speech and thought. It is his difference from the group that makes him powerful, that creates tension, which allows him to leave on his wandering.

Some of the legends express the ambiguity of Thomas' identity. Hostility, curiosity, respect, awe and love are some of the emotions recorded in the legends. Perhaps these can be understood in terms of the relationship and the distinction between magic and religion, sorcerer and priest.

The appellation sorcerer sounds hostile when looked at from the perspective of a stable association of believers centring around a transcendent God. Was Thomas seen as a magician?10 

The legends emphasise the use made of discourse and instruction, of teaching the ethic of peace, gentleness and humility, which embodied the Christ's life. Thomas was directly in the tradition of the Christ, and as with Jesus, miracles were part of the spiritual mission rather than proof of it. According to the legends, the people loved Thomas, they crowded to hear him and followed him wherever he went, for he worked great miracles.

But the legends of Malabar also describe certain acts of Thomas which do not seem merciful or beneficent or expressive of Christian humility. When a Brahmin gave him a cruel blow, St Thomas predicted `Thou will soon lose the hand that has struck me'. A few days later a mad dog (in some versions a tiger) bit off the hand of the Brahmin. When the latter repented the hand healed, showing not even a scar. Not surprisingly, in A.J. Klijn's edition of the legends, the Rajah of Mylapore locks up his wife in order to keep her safe from the magical rituals of St Thomas who bewitches with oil, wine and water.11 

The legends represent the fact that Thomas' acts are considered by some to be the authentic works of the God of Thomas. Therefore the multitudes who follow him believe in his teachings and treat him as a priest. To describe him as magician or priest thus seems to be offered in the legends as value judgements.

Further Thomas as the renouncer threatens the conceptual order of Hinduism, and it is not surprising that the legends continually emphasise the roles of Kings and Brahmins. This, Veena Das has shown to be central to the idiom of Hinduism in its relationship to the formation of sects.12 Susan Bayly in her classic work analyses the relationship between Hindu Kings and Christian subjects.13 

Even if we accept the oral traditions and the legends of Thomas' visit to Kerala as a curiosity, there is evidence of Christian presence here as early as 345 A.D. This refers to the coming of immigrant Christians of Middle Eastern origins. They were led according to tradition, by one Thomas of Cana who brought with him seventy families from Jerusalem, Baghdad and Nineveh. These immigrant Syrians according to the Kerala legends did not inter-marry with the indigenous St Thomas Christians, but merely supported them in their religious life. The copper plate grants which were given to Thomas of Cana are available only in vicarious versions (records of the Record). The King gave, it is said, to Thomas of Cana, an area of jungle land and built there for him church and houses; also "seven kinds of musical instruments and all the honours, and to travel in a palanquin and that at weddings the women should whistle with the finger in the mouth as do the women of kings, and he conferred the privilege of spreading carpets on the ground and to use sandals and to erect a pandal and to ride on elephants."14 Many of these were seen to be high caste privileges.15 This link with the immigrant Christians was reinforced by the arrival of Syrian prelates through the centuries and had a variety of ecclesiastical consequences. As the Church of Persia also claimed to have been founded by Thomas the Apostle, this led to an allegiance between the Indian and Persian churches. The Indian Church of St Thomas was drawn by this association into a number of controversies not of its own making which were to affect its existence and identity. Every schism affecting the Persian Church was to have its effect upon the Syrian Christian Church in Kerala. By the 9th century, India was under the control of the See of Seleucia Ctesiphon, and the most important prelates who visited Kerala (Quilon) were Mar Sapor and Mar Prodh. Tradition states that the Christians of Kerala were reinforced once again by immigrants from Persia at this time.16Copper plates record the privileges given by the King (Ayyan of Venat) to the Christians.17 

There were other travellers too who came to Kerala in search of ancient Christians and spices.

Marco Polo, who came probably in 1293 A.D. to Quilon was one of them, and he found both Christians and Jews. John of Monte Corvino (1291) was another such traveller. Then there was Jordanus, who in 1328 was consecrated by the Pope as Bishop of Quilon and sent to the `Nascarene'. (The St Thomas Christians were called Nazranis, followers of Jesus of Nazareth.) In 1328 Odoric of Undine came to Quilon and Mylapore. John de Marignolli came in 1348. Leslie Brown cites him,

"On Palm Sunday 1348 we arrived at a very noble city of India called Quilon where the whole world's pepper is produced. Now this pepper is grown on a kind of vines which are planted just as in our vineyards ... nor does it grow in forests but in regular gardens, nor are the Saracens the proprietors but the St Thomas Christians. And these latter are the masters of the public weighing office ..."18

The `discovery' of a sea route to India marks the beginning of the Portuguese period in Syrian Christian history.19Portugal had an elaborate political, ecclesiastical and trade machinery.

From this moment on, the identity of the St Thomas Christians would undergo a change. In its meeting with imperialism, commerce and a Great Tradition of Western Christianity its autonomy would be continually threatened. There would be allegations of heresy against it, attempts to ritual unification, then bifurcation and schism. In the second part of this paper I will discuss the implication of ritual homogenisation upon the St Thomas Christians. The Christians would also encounter the `other' Great Tradition of Christianity in the West through the British and Protestantism, and more splits would occur. One of the greatest ironies would be the questioning of the authenticity of the legend of St Thomas in Kerala.20 

As long as the Christians in Kerala remained in their local enclaves, participating in a plural culture, which was both ranked and separate, visited by peripatetic Middle Eastern bishops, they remained autonomous. Certainly they were part of the fabulous imagery of what it was to be Oriental. They were sought out because they were `Other'.21 This notion of "otherness" allowed them their unique ceremonies, liturgical language and cultural self-definition. It was an autonomy that came from maintaining separation, difference, autonomy, reciprocity and dialogue. But when they were assimilated into the Great Traditions (ritual globalisation of both Catholicism and Protestantism in the Portuguese and British records respectively) they began to segmentalise.22 The last four hundred years have been a period of staying alive as a unique cultural expression of India's theory of pluralism and difference. We cannot lose it to the new metaphors of homogeneity or alienation. It is after all a political discourse of great depth having survived almost two thousand years of being one of the oldest Christian communities in the world.

This is a time when legends have become of great political significance in our country, and pluralism becomes threatened by the mythic force of Hindutva. The Christian legend of St Thomas becomes in this context doubly interesting. It asserts that Christianity in India is not a `Western' religion, but has come to our country directly from its source in the Middle East. India has sheltered a major world religion (in Weberian terms) for almost all the two thousand years that it has been in existence.

It is true that the legend is not history, but what Emile Durkheim has called general opinion.23 It may take some of the forms of history but these are often self contradictory or opaque. It is susceptible thus to frequent changes and interpolations, depending upon the functions of memory for the community and the manner in which the stories are passed down from generation to generation.

Legends invite people to enter a narrative frame that is immediately exciting, entertaining and credible. In the recounting of the story, one is expected to believe that there really was a hero, and the fabulousness of actions and events are surely possible. In listening we discover voices, words, tones, nuances, cadences, timbres, patterns and reasons. When we listen to the `Other', in the dialogical sense that Martin Buber offered, we hear stories that are strange, but not alien. Every listener is capable of both empathy and diagnosis, is both subjectively attuned and yet distanced. Legends call out.

Roland Barthes writes that hearing is psychological, but listening is psychological. It is ofcourse social, because it involves the deciphering of signs and symbols. Interestingly, Barthes says that "Listening is intimacy, the heart's secret. Sin." This curious linkage is made by his intuitive understanding of the religious attitude. "A history and a phenomenology of interiority (which we perhaps lack) should here form a history and a phenomenology of listening for at the very heart of a civilisation of sin, interiority has developed steadily."24 Can we really understand what he calls "transgression as engendered by God's graze'? A Sociology of Religion must attempt both these: Understanding the voice of the `other' and diagnosing the sources of religious anger.

In this paper I assert that at a time when religious myths are becoming political and homogenising, we must as social scientists continue to look at the alternative myths which abound in our society. This recovery of pluralist traditions is necessary to create the framework for conversationfor monologues lead to silence. Secondly dialogicity can never be value neutral. It affirms our own subject position, and the position of the other. Thirdly, and more problematically, from this perspective, secularism becomes a bias. It is a political position, and fortunately for us in India, a constitutional one.

Thus this paper is not merely about the legends of St Thomas and the early Christian presence in India. It is about recording the plural voices that exist in our subcontinent.

By plural I mean parallel social organisations with their peculiar symbolic representations co-existing in a bounded community of space and time, aware of their separations and differences, yet accepting the commonality of many of their life situations. At every level, there is a gathering together, and at the same time, a shutting out; exclusion and inclusion as social principles.25 It is this act of `marking' which creates the inner boundaries, the nature of social identity being carved out by these processes at their most sensitive and significant points. Take for example the life affirming rituals of marriage and birth. The Syrian Christians share many of the custom of Hindus--the use of areca-nut, rice, lemons, sandalwood paste, flowers, milk--but the death rituals express the severity of Christian canonical rhythms. The life after death is perceived as different for the Christian--the last judgement awaits.26

The blurring of the lines between groups (as in the rituals of house building or astrology or use of Ayurvedic medicine) is not arbitrary but a reflection of highly regulated, clearly articulated behaviour, and at no point do the marking lines completely disappear. Each group maintains its individuality aware of similarities with other groups, yet conscious of the points of difference which separate them. The interaction between communities highlight the idiom of plurality. Living together in a common bounded space, and a shared moment of history, these groups co-operate at some cultural level though not at others. A dominant group exists (in this case Hindu) which may exercise a great deal of influence upon the other, but assimilation is not the result.

One reason why Kerala was so plural may lie in the curious composition of its caste structure. The early pre-Dravidian people were the Pullayas. They were subjugated by the Dravidians, who themselves had been conquered and pushed southwards by the Aryans. The Nairs are believed to be of this stock. The Namputhri Brahmins are believed to have trickled from the North bringing about a slow wave of Aryanisation. Their migration which occurred towards the end of the 1st millennium B.C. was a consequence of Buddhist expansion. The Ezhavas came to Malabar only after the beginning of the Christian era from Polynesia via Ceylon bringing with them the coconut and the open-rigged canoe.27 

Certain key occupational groups such as the merchant and the warrior were missing. The Nair played the role of the latter and achieved a concomitant status. The Christians developed into a prosperous trading community and were patronised by their rulers.

Added to this was the cosmopolitanism of the Arabian Sea. The Jews and Muslims would also create important cultural enclaves in Kerala. As Stephen Neill wrote about the impetus of trade in the understanding of colonialism. "The history of Europe can almost be written in terms of pepper."28 This encounter with the `West' has been of great significance to the Keralite as we saw.

Accepting the independence and recognising the identity of each of these communities or religions meant allowing it a certain exclusive character. At the same time there was an essential awareness that interaction between the separate entities brought it into a symbiotic and organic relationship with each other. The balance between the `public' and the `private' aspects of living are in full play here. Edward Shils in his `Torment of Secrecy' while pleading for pluralism in the context of modern American politics has shown the necessity for the harmony of interests between different institutions and groups. Rather than having a monolithic and dictatorial organisation, where one sphere has preponderant influence over the others, there should be an "approximate balance among the spheres." Shils had argued that pluralism is `a system of many centres of power, many areas of privacy and a strong internal impulse towards the mutual adaptation of the spheres rather than of the dominance or the submission of any one to the others.29 

In Kerala, there existed, according to tradition, such a society. The balance between what Shils called the `private' (the world which marked community identity) and `public' (the wider universe) is the pointer to the nature of pluralism.30 The private world of Christianity related to its ethic and worldview, its ritual and ecclesiastical life, the norms of endogamy which determined the level of contact and intimacy between individuals. Its `public' life related to its political affiliation to the Hindu kings, its acquiescence to Hindu norms of purity and pollution, its own status and rank consciousness, its acceptance of hierarchy rules of commensality and endogamy. Its private world was canonical, liturgically defined, and structured around the life of Yeshu Christu.

The plurality ingrained in Malabar society was evident in the reaction of the Thomas Christians to the coming of the Portuguese in 1492, and the ritual colonisation that followed. At first these indigenous Christians were enthusiastic. Later, they expressed surprise and resentment that the Portuguese would not respect their liturgical practices, but were constantly trying to mould them into one uniform pattern. Like much of Hindu society, the religious beliefs of the Thomas Christians had a certain vitality arising from daily practice and ritual. It was fluid insomuch that they never developed any really stringent theology. They had for centuries been in the care of peripatetic bishops from the Middle East.

In fact, from the writings of the 16th century Portuguese, it would seem that though the Thomas Christians were identified with Nestorian interpretations, in practice it remained a faith of simple conviction with no real involvement in theological issues. Even today, in Kerala, Christianity seems very much a way of life, rather than a rigid set of theological principles.

True, the Chaldean prayer books that the medieval Thomas Christians used (a symbol of their close relation with the Persian Sea) did contain a number of `unsound phrases' but these in no way negated the consistency of their faith. It is the encounter with the great and magisterial and inquisitionary voice of medieval Latin Christianity that I am going to discuss here as a symbol of the Thomas Christians' resistance to ritual homogeneity desired by the Portuguese colonialists. My sources are ecclesiastical histories.31

The Portuguese had clearly begun to feel that the Thomas Christians were `imperfect' Christians and needed rigorous instruction and close supervision. The Portuguese attitude was marked by a sense of superiority about their interpretation of Christianity. The form that had developed in Malabar through the intermingling of three codes--the Hindu social norms, the Chaldean liturgical paraphernalia, and the Christian religious convictions--was repugnant, heretical and an abuse to the medieval Portuguese. They were committed to a unified Latin mode of worship.

The Christians of St Thomas had perhaps not expected this intolerance in matters of religious practice, living as they did in peaceful co-existence with peoples amongst whom the concept of plurality had a guaranteed place. They were attached to their customs and usages, their rituals and practices, and just as they did not expect to impose these upon the Portuguese, they had presumed they would be treated in the same way. Their traditions had been handed down from generation to generation and were sacred to them. On no account were they ready to accept Latin priests in the time honoured place that they gave to prelates from the Middle East and their own hereditary families of priests.

The Thomas Christians wanted to keep their identity unimpaired, to co-operate fully with the Portuguese for the good of both, to exchange ideas to incorporate without assimilation. The Portuguese colonists on the other hand wanted absorption: subjugation not only of ritual and doctrinal matters but also of cultural elements. As the commercial situation grew more complex, so did the hold of the ritual colonists.

As time went on, the Thomas Christians were no longer able to appeal to their local Rajas, who felt powerless before the tyrannical methods that the Portuguese used, for the latter had `squadrons active on the sea' and broke up cities with abandon. L.W. Brown writes that in February 1599 Archbishop Menezes landed in Cochin and demanded to see the leader of the Thomas Christians their archdeacon. The latter was keen to express the autonomy and status of his community and came with a following of 3000 armed men. Believing that the only way to allay the Thomas Christians' suspicion was to go to them, Menezes went into the interior. His rituals and symbolic acts were read by the Christians of Kerala as being the outward signs that the Portuguese had taken Indian subjects under their jurisdiction and had made them their slaves.

The Archbishop Menezes had great zeal and moved everywhere preaching the unification of all churches in the model laid by Rome. Since most of the Thomas Christians' churches remained closed to him, he had to force them open. The King, fearing the impact of Portuguese reprisals insisted that his Christian subjects submit to their demands. The opposition to Menezes increased, and often his life was threatened by both Hindus and Christians in various places. But, according to ecclesiastical historians, there was a dignity and fearlessness about him, and ofcourse a Roman pomp and splendour which slowly won him adherents. Further he was a man of rigid principles who took no money or gifts for his services, unlike the Syrian bishops and priests who were dependent on fees at ceremonies marking rites of passage and festivals for their livelihood.

During the celebration on Good Friday 1599 the people at Kaduthurithi were impressed with the celebration of the Mass, the fine robes and choir brought all the way from Cochin. They were won over much to the delight of the Portuguese. On an earlier occasion, the Jesuit, Fr Roz, had shown them an image of Mary, and they had turned away saying `Take it away. We are Christians and do not worship idols or temple.'

In June 1599 the Synod of Diamper began its proceedings. It laid down strict rules regarding the practices of the faith among the Thomas Christians, forced them to abjure the Patriarch of the East, and compelled their promise never to receive any Bishop from any Church other than the Roman. The Archdeacon and all other representatives of the Thomas Christians had to sign a profession of their belief in the one law of Jesus Christ as decreed by Rome, abjuring all others.

The Synod elaborated Christian dogma very clearly--the nature of the Holy Trinity, the place of Mary as mother of God, ideas regarding reincarnation and original sin, heaven, hell, and purgatory, the last judgement, the veneration of angels and saints, the honour due to relics of saints and images of the holy.

Two kinds of "errors" were carefully weeded out by the Latins. The first was connected with Nestorianism, which believed that Jesus had two natures, one divine and one mortal; and Mary was both mother of God and mother of Man. The second taboo was upon Hindu ideas which had remained as a substratum among the Syrian Christians, a survival of their past. It negated the concepts of transmigration, the determination of men's lives by fate or future (presumably faith in horoscopes which continues to exist among some Syrian Christians even today) and the belief that everyone had to follow his own dharma which would then lead to his salvation. All books which did not meet the prescription of the Portuguese ecclesiastics were burnt. The traditional archives of the Thomas Christians suffered great losses.

Archbishop Menezes found that the canons of conduct imposed by his group were not taking effect directly. The Thomas Christian would not even approach the archbishop and his party for fear that they would become polluted and this would hinder their day-to-day relations with caste Hindus. Obtaining the formal submission of the Thomas Christians to Rome by the Synod of 1599 did not obviously render them pliant from that event onwards. In fact in 1653, one section of the St Thomas Christians had revolted. The story is told well by church historians, but I shall use the narrative of a Christian from Kottayam, who spoke to me in 1981. It is a voice charged with emotion, for history is not taken lightly by the Christians of Kerala. They weave their past into their contemporary life in many ways, and questions of myth, allegiance and autonomy are central to their lives.

In 1653, the St Thomas Christians broke free from Portuguese ecclesiastical domination with the Koonen Kurisu Revolt. The Christians gathered at Mattancherry and, tying a rope to the cross, each touched the rope, and hence indirectly the cross swearing to break free from Portuguese ecclesiastical oppression. There were yet many who had grown attached to the rites and celebrations of Rome. In 1664 with the arrival of the Jacobite bishop Mar Gregorious, the West Syrian Church became established in Kerala, and the relationship continues today in a tempestuous way. Here is the account of that time by Mathaichen of Varrikat, Kottayam.

"The problem for our people began with the coming of the Portuguese. In 1599 the rulings of the Synod of Udeymperoor were imposed on us. One hundred and eight churches in Malabar were summoned and forced to sign an agreement in which the most distressing clauses were, firstly, the introduction of the Latin Rite, and, secondly, the allegiance to the Pope. For 165 years the Papists ruled us, but we were allowed to keep the liturgical language as Chaldean Syriac. In 1656 (sic) the Koonen Kurisu episode occurred where, at Mattancheri, the Thomas Christians gathered and vowed not to be oppressed by the Romans. From Antioch came Gregorious, and Pakalomattam Thoma was ordained as Mar Thoma I. The old genealogy of the priestly lines was remembered which the Latinkar (literally those who use the Latin liturgy) sought to destroy. However, Gregorious of Antioch, insisted on changing the liturgical language from Chaldean Syriac to Maronite saying that this was the language in which Christ spoke. Out of the 108 churches, thirty-six under the leadership of Itti Thomas Kattanar complied with Gregorious in the change of ritual language. Seventy-two churches objected to the change and retained Chaldean. The thirty-six churches which came to Mar Gregorious were called the Puthencoor (new people) by local people and the seventy-two who remained with the Chaldean languages, into which the Roman liturgy had been translated, were called the Pazhecoor and are what we call the Romo-Syrian denomination."32 

This narrative is important because it articulates the need for difference, and the possibility of protest against homogeneity. Most of all it seems to assert the necessity to have command over the archives of our past, what we may platitvoinously term as `learning from history'. The work of Mikhail Bakhtin has centrally argued that many different voices are the symbol of freedom and creativity.33 His beautiful book on the Carnival in Medieval Europe became a treatise on laughter and rebellion, and we understand the correctness of that work at a time when the Soviet State was congealing in tyranny and solemnitude.

Our own positions on secularism, which grow out of the distinction between public and personal spaces in religion and politics has come under threat from the homogeneity of a different and dominating consciousness, namely religious fundamentalism as a political ideology. The difference from the past lies in this--that we, today, are secular and democratic and plural: it is our legacy from the National movement, and the dialogues and defeats of that period have to be studied over and over again faced as we are with our own potent fear and anger. The Constitution is the symbol of our unity and faith in order and in difference, and our political responsibilities lie in the preservation of the secular and plural imagination in India.

________________________________

  1. A.M. Mundadan, Sixteenth Century Traditions of the Christians (1970:60). According to the song, St Thomas organised the Church, ordained priests and consecrated a bishop, who was a member of the royal family of Kodungalur. The song places Thomas's death anniversary on the 3rd July (Mundadan, 1970: 63). Some historians say that the Ramban Pattu is closely influenced by the Acts of Thomas. These songs are ceremonial and performed at weddings, feasts and other important rituals. Some of these are traditionally sung by Hindus, in honour of and for Christians since very early times (ibid, 61).
    The Acts of Thomas (ed. A.F.J. Klijn, 1961) is an apocryphal work, believed to have been written around the 3rd century A.D. in Syriac. It is a legendary work, but with a credited nucleus of truth, having its source in the oral traditions of the time. It does not mention the apostolate in Kerala, but mentions Sindh and Mylapore. As a piece of writing the Acts are believed to have been written when memories were still fresh, and there is a distinct Indian colouring in the narrative.

  2. Susan Visvanathan, The Christians of Kerala, 1993.

  3. L. Zaleski, The Apostle St Thomas in India, 1912. G.M. Moraes, A History of Christianity in India (1964: 37).

  4. According to F.A. D'Cruz, Thomas first refuses Jesus bidding that he go to India. Then Jesus sells him as a slave to Habban (Appan?). "And he went to Habban the merchant, carrying nothing with him; except that price of his for our Lord had given it to him." On the ship, Thomas told Habban that he was skilled in "carpentering and architecture." F.A. D'Cruz, St Thomas the Apostle in India, 1929: 44). The cross of Thomas in Kerala is often represented in the shape of a carpenter's hand-rule. 

  5. L. Zaleski, The Apostle St Thomas in India (1912: 132).

  6. Perumallil and Hambye (eds.), Christianity in India (1972: 370-71).

  7. L. Zaleski (1912: 139-40).

  8. Gospel of St Mathew (10: 38).

  9. Luke (9: 3-4).

  10. Zaleski (1912: 130). Marcel Mauss, A General Theory of Magic, 1972.

  11. Klijn (ed.), The Acts of St Thomas (1962: 146).

  12. Veena Das, Structure and Cognition, 1977.

  13. Susan Bayly, Saints, Goddesses and Kings, 1992.

  14. L.W. Brown, The Indian Christians of St Thomas, 1982. H. Hosten, S.J., Antiquities from San Thome andMylapore, 1936.

  15. Susan Visvanathan, 1993.

  16. P.J. Podipara, The St Thomas Christians, 1970.

  17. L.W. Brown (1982: 83).

  18. Brown (1982: 83).

  19. K.M. Panikkar, Asia and Western Dominance (1959: 30).

  20. Susan Visvanathan (1993: 14).

  21. Portuguese ritual colonialism had an overpowering impact in Kerala. See Edward Said on the `typical encapsulations' of colonialism, "...the journey, the history, the fable, the stereotype, the polemical confrontation. These are the lenses through which the Orient is experienced." Said, Orientalism (1985: 58). See also Stephen Neil, Missions and Colonialism (1966: 35).

  22. Susan Visvanathan, 1993. Here I discuss the impact of colonialism on The Christians of St Thomas.

  23. Emile Durkheim, Sociology and Philosophy, 1974.

  24. Roland Barthes, The Responsibility of Forms, 1986.

  25. D.F. Po****, `Inclusion and Exclusion', South Western Journal of Anthropology, Vol.13, No.1, 1957, 19-31.

  26. Susan Visvanathan, 1993. See pgs. 1-12 for preliminary discussions on time, space, number and the body.

  27. L.K. Ananta Krishna Ayyar, Anthropology of the Syrian Christians, 1926; George Wood****, Kerala (1967: 68); K.M. Panikkar, 1959.

  28. Stephen Neill (1966: 35).

  29. Edward Shils, Torment of Secrecy, 1956.

  30. Ibid (1956: 154).

  31. I have benefitted greatly from the writings of Fr Placid Podipara, Fr Mundadan and Bishop L.W. Brown. This section collages their work, to provide the framework for my analyses.

  32. Susan Visvanathan, 1993.

  33. Mikhail Bakhtin, Rebelais and his world



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Brief History of The Jacobite Syrian Orthodox Church of Antioch in India

by Father Theodosius, St. Mary the Protectress Orthodox Church, Plymouth, Indiana -http://www.malankaraworld.com/library/History/Resources_history-jacobite-church.htm

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Kerala (Indian) tradition is that Apostle St. Thomas established Christianity in Malankara in AD 52, and it get organized and prospered with the arrival of Knai Thoma from Syria in AD 345, which happens to be the first known colonization of Syrian Christians and as a result, the Christians of Malankara (Kerala) came to be known as Syrian Christians, as they received the Apostolic benediction from the Syrian Patriarchate and thus started to use the liturgy of the Holy Syrian Church of Antioch. The Church in Malankara continued to be under the jurisdiction of the Patriarch of Antioch, and his subordinate 'Maferyono'/'Catholicose' of the East then residing in Mesopotamian region, till the arrival of Nestorian bishops in 1490. Later with the Portuguese aggression of the 16th & 17th century, the Syrian Christians of Malankara came under the influence of Roman Catholics and when they tried to forcibly introduce their faith, the Malankara Syrian Christians revolted and finally re-organized once again under the guidance of the delegate of the Holy See of Antioch and thereby retained the ancient true Apostolic faith of Syrian Orthodox Church of Antioch. After that in the 19th century, a split occurred in the Church with the introduction of European protestant faith by the British colonists and after that in early 20th century, once again a group of people defied the Holy Church to form an independent faction after much harassment. Even in the midst of such aggressions, the ancient Syrian Orthodox Church, which in India (Malankara) also referred to as Jacobite Syrian Christian Church, still follows the true faith taught by Our Lord Jesus Christ and the Apostles; and our Holy fathers who sacrificed for the cause of Christianity.

In this page the history of the Malankara Church from its beginning is reproduced, the brief history is complied from the articles written by the famous historian and Syriac Scholar 'Very Rev. Dr. Kurien Corepiscopa Kaniamparambil', E M Philip Edavazhikkal, Dn. P T Geevarghese (later Mar Ivanious of Syro-Malankara Church), 'Very Rev. Dr. Adai Jacob Corepiscopa' (the principal of Syrian Orthodox theological Seminary at Udayagiri), Dr. D Babu Paul (Book-'Veni Vidi Vici'), and late Prof. Pankkal E John ('Way to Peace').

I. Establishment of Christianity in India

Like all the Christians sects of Kerala, the Syrian/Syriac Orthodox Church too strongly believes that St. Thomas, one of the twelve disciples of Jesus, had established the Church in India. There exists a strong tradition in Malankara about the arrival of St. Thomas, his mission, death, burial and about the relics of his mortal body. No other country or people make such claim about St. Thomas. The widely accepted belief is that St. Thomas visited various places and baptized many Jews and Hindus and thus began the process of establishing the Church. Middle East countries and Kerala had trade relations during the early centuries and all the evidences, acknowledged by all the historians’ points to the fact that the Jewish settlers existed in Cragnanore even before the Christian era. So it is very clear that there was a sea route to Kerala coast in those days and St. Thomas traveled to Cragnanore through this.

There is a general presumption that St. Thomas, a Jew himself by birth, may have visited India in search of Jews settled here. As mentioned earlier, there was a flourishing colony of Jews in Muziris (Cragnanore, Kerala). These Jews are said to have arrived with King Solomon's first fleet.

Anyhow as a result of the Apostle's mission, many, other than the Jews also accepted Christianity. Most of the local converts were said to be from higher castes and this helped St. Thomas to preach the Holy Gospel without much opposition, in a later stage. The high caste Brahmin families that adorned Christianity were mainly from Pakaloomattom, Shankarapuri, Kalli and Kaliangala and members from these houses were ordained as priests or chieftains for the community. Besides, he is believed to have founded Christian congregations (churches) at Maliankara, Paloor, Kottaikkavu (North Paravur), Chayal (Nilakkal), Niranam, Kollam and Gokamangalam and celebrated Holy Qurbono. He later went to China to spread Holy Gospel and returned to India and during his mission, he was killed by fanatics, and was buried at Mylapore, in the state of present Chennai (Madras), South India, it is believed. However his relics were taken to Edessa in the 4th century at the instance of the then Patriarch of Antioch.

Christianity in Kerala in the first 3 centuries

Both the Jewish as well as the local converts were in the beginning mentioned as St. Thomas Christians or Nazarenes (being followers of Jesus who was a native of Nazareth). One of the earliest references to Christianity in India mentions the visit of Alexandria’s leading Theologian, PANTENUS to the Indian Christians at their invitation in AD 190. However this visit is contradicted by Eusebius, a 3rd century Christian Historian, who says Pantenus visited the Arabian regions, which were part of greater India (India Magnum). Any how the general belief is that the Christians existed in Kerala from the second half of the 1st century itself and it was St. Thomas the Apostle who established the Christian faith in India.

In the course of time the infant Church established by St. Thomas is supposed to have been weakened. The community had to pass through many an obstruction and so many oppositions, main reason being the “lack of ecclesiastical assistance”. During the 1st, 2nd and 3rd centuries, there were no priests here and the Christian population had been like a fold without a Shepherd. There had been none to succeed for those who were appointed by St. Thomas.
World Christianity up to 4th century

The Christianity that was gaining considerable influence in the 1st three centuries among the Jews and others in the Middle East had to face the continuous wrath of Romans, probably out of fear of it loosing the powers to control the whole Empire. The Roman Officials persecuted many of the Christian fathers. This continued for about three centuries. By the beginning of the 4th century, with the conversion of the then Roman Emperor 'Constantine', Christianity becomes the official religion of the Empire.

In AD 325 on the request of the Church fathers, the Emperor convened a Synod of the entire Christian community at ‘Nicea’ and a general norm for the administration of the whole of Christianity was formulated. Accordingly, the entire Christian Community all over the world formed as three distinct groups and each group came under the authority of the three Patriarchates then in existence, namely Rome, Alexandria and Antioch. (Constantinople Patriarchate was established only in AD 381, as per the decision of the 2nd Universal Holy Synod convened by the Empire). As per the decision of the Synod, the Eastern hemisphere, which included Indian Sub-continent, continued to be under the jurisdiction of the Patriarchate of Antioch.

A Persian bishop by name Yuhannun is said to have represented India in that Synod, the veracity of which is evident from his signature in the Nicea Synod. But some believe that the India mentioned here was actually Greater India that extended up to the boundaries of the present North India and Malankara (Kerala) was not part of it, and none represented Kerala Christians, as the Christianity then existed here was very weak and not known to many.

Establishment of the Catholicate of the East

Though the Christian Church in Persian Empire was under the jurisdiction of the Patriarchate of Antioch from its beginning, in due course it become impossible for the Church members to go to Antioch and receive ordination due to geographical & political reasons. Under the circumstance, the Patriarch of Antioch used to appoint a Archbishop entitled CATHOLICOSE to administer the Eastern Dioceses (parts of Persian Empire) beyond the boundaries of the Roman Empire. The second universal Holy Synod held at Constantinople in AD 381 (Canon 2), reconfirmed the authority of the Patriarch of Antioch over the Archbishop (Catholicose) of Selucia (later in Tigris).

In due course, the Catholicose of Tigris adopted Nestorian faith and defied the authority of Patriarch and declared independence. Yet, there were Maferyono's under the Syrian (Jacobite) Patriarch of Antioch, who as eastern Catholicose used to administer the Church in the Persian Empire. Later at the instance of the Patriarch of Antioch, the Indian Church was administered by these Maferyono's of the East and Metropolitans.

II. Syrian Colonization of Malankara in AD 325

Meanwhile the Church at Malabar (Kerala) established in the 1st century, weakened during the period of about 300 years succeeding the Apostle’s death, mainly because there had been none to succeed the priests ordained by St. Thomas. It was while the Christians of Malabar remained in this unsatisfactory condition that Mor Joseph the Bishop of Edessa (a place in the eastern border of the Roman Empire), had a dream regarding the sad situation of the Church at Malabar. He informed this to the Bishop-Patriarch of Jerusalem who consulted the other Bishops as to what should be done in this matter. (It was in consideration of the importance of the Holy City of Jerusalem, the Metropolitan of Jerusalem came to be known as the 'fifth Patriarch of Christendom', who was a subordinate to the Patriarch of Antioch as mentioned in the Universal Synods). The Jerusalem Metropolitan deputed one Thomas a native of Cana, a respectable merchant then living at Jerusalem to ascertain the condition of the Christians of Malabar. This Thomas on reaching the Malabar Coast found a good number of Christians wearing the badges of their religion and from them he ascertained about their condition. On his return he explained about the Christians at Malabar and all what he saw, to the Bishop of Jerusalem.

Consequent to this, the Church Synod held under the Patriarch of Antioch & all the East, immediately decided to send a delegation to Malabar (Kerala) and accordingly in AD 345, around 400 odd persons from 72 families comprising men, women and children, reached Cragananore (Kodungalloore) under the leadership of the merchant, Thomas of Cana. The group consisted of the Bishop Mor Joseph of Edessa as well as some priests and deacons. (Edessa was in the eastern boundary of Roman Empire and not in Persia as claimed by some people. More about the authenticity of ancient narrations such as 'Anecdote Syria' etc, that was originally came into existence only in the 16th century and which wrongly states that it was Catholicose of the Persia who sent the delegation and they fled to India fearing the persecution of Persians, and such, will be published soon).

This Syrian Christian delegation from Edessa was from a sect of Jewish Christians from different places of then Canaan land (later called Palestine, now Israel). They settled as a Colony on the southern side of the Kodungalloor Palace street, with the permission of Perumals, the then rulers of the region.

Meanwhile the native Christians converted by St. Thomas, who were called Mar Thoma (St. Thomas) Christians, lived on the northern part of the street. While the descendants of the former were called as ‘Southists’ or Knanaites, after their leader Knai Thoma (Thoma of Cana), the ‘Mar Thoma Christians’ lived on the northern part were, from then onwards started to be mentioned as ‘Northists’. The name Malankara Church, is also supposed to be mentioned as such, for the entire Christian Church of Kerala, from this period.

It was as a consequence of this Syrian migration of Knanaites, the entire Christians in Kerala, came to be called SYRIAN CHRISTIANS, as they came under the Syrian Patriarch of Antioch who had jurisdiction over all the East and thus began using the rituals and liturgies of the Syrian Church of Antioch.

Relics of St. Thomas transferred to Edessa

History tells that in AD 394, the relics of St. Thomas were taken to Edessa, a place that was under the authority of the Patriarch of Antioch. There it was entombed in a church built in his venerated memory. July 3 is celebrated as St. Thomas day by the Eastern Churches commemorating this hallowed event.

The Persian Crosses

There is a controversy about the existence or influence of the Assyrian Church of East (Nestorians) in Malabar (Kerala) before the 15th century. Some argue that this Church (Nestorian) had been in India, as early as 4th century itself. But the Nestorian heresy had its influence in the Assyrian Church of East, only by the end of the 5th century and it was only in the subsequent years, the Christology of this Assyrian Church of East spread beyond the Persian Empire. So it is very clear that the Syrian faith that was in Malankara, before the 5th century was not Nestorian.

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Again those who tries to establish the 'Nestorian influence in Malabar' in the middle ages, mentions about the existence of the 'Persian' crosses of the 7th century, found in the 'Knanaya Valiappalli' at Kottayam and in two other Churches in Kerala. But the facts prove opposite. The inscriptions in 'Extrangela Syriac' and 'Phalvi' on them revealed their workmanship was Persian and at the same time, the Phalvi inscriptions hints that they were made by the Syrian Jacobites. The interpretation of the inscriptions in Pahalavi by Dr. Burnnel (former Archaeological Director of India) reads as follows-

"In punishment by the cross (was) the suffering on this one; He who is true God and God above, and Guide ever Pure."

These inscriptions are against the basic faith of Nestorians, who believed that the God was never crucified (punished) in the Cross and only the Jesus the man was crucified. Moreover Phalvi was never, the language of Persian Nestorians. Further these crosses could not be taken as evidences of an ecclesiastical relationship with Nestorian Church only. There are nearly two dozen crosses. St. Andrew’s cross was 'X'. Different nations used different types. The Persian type was not a monopoly of the Nestorians. It had been used by the Nestorians as well as the Syrian (Jacobite) Church. Estrangeloyo Syriac too was used by both Churches. The oldest dated manuscript (AD 464) and another of the 5th century are in the British museum -nos.14425 & 14451. Another of the 7th century (from the Septuagint by Paul, bishop of Tella - no.14442) and yet another 'Isaiah' identified with that of Philoxenos of Mabug (AD 485-519, no. 17106) are also preserved there. All these are in Estrangeloyo Characters and written by Syrian Jacobites.

III. The 2nd Syrian Colonization of AD 825

In early 9th century the Syrian fathers Mor Sabor and Mor Aphrohot reached Malankara with a group of immigrants, at the then famous trade center in South Kerala, Kollam. On arrival they were accorded certain privileges and rights by the local Ruler. That they were saintly persons amply proven by the fact that there were many churches in their names which is corroborated by the records of the decisions of the 'Synod of Diamper (Udayamperoor)'.

There is a view that these fathers were Nestorians. This is only because, the Holy fathers were mentioned as Nestorian heretics at the Synod of Diamper convened by the Romans in 1599. But the fact is that Nestorians too, don't recognize them as one among them. The names of these fathers do not figure in the list of Nestorian bishops sent abroad during the period, given by historian Assemani. Also Fr. Placid, the Roman Catholic historian and M. V. Paul who attempted a history of the Church of the East, do not include the names of these two Bishops in the list of Nestorian bishops who visited Malabar. Till now, their venerated memory of these Holy fathers is being celebrated by the Jacobite Syrian Christians only. While Roman Catholics disowned them and the Nestorians disclaim them, the Malankara Syrian Church had their annual festival celebrated on the 2nd October every year, in the Mor Shabor & Mor Aphrohot church at Akaparambu, in the diocese of Angamali.

According to one tradition, the Malayalam Calendar era (Kolla Varsham) started with these holy fathers who settled at Kollam in AD 825.

Malankara Church between 10th and 15th Centuries

During the 10th and the 11th centuries the Malankara Church was within the authority of the Patriarch of Antioch. This is authenticated in the Travancore State Manual as also in other books, such as that authored by the protestant historian Huff. Unfortunately, falling prey to some Roman Catholics propaganda to promote their own history and also to disseminate some vested interests, some in Malankara recently are propagating a new version that the Malankara Church had connections only with the Persian Nestorian Church till the 17th century. But all the circumstantial evidences and history proves otherwise.

As for the 12th century, there is an authoritative record now safely maintained at Cambridge University, which clearly indicates the ties of Malankara Church with that of the Syrian Patriarchate of Antioch in the period. This is the Bible written in Estrangeloyo script during the time of the great Patriarch Michael (1199). This book, which was in Malankara from the 13th century, was presented to Dr. Claudius Buchannan, one of the earliest protestant missionaries who came to Kerala in 1807, by the then Malankara Metropolitan Mor Dionysius the Great. It contained special Gospel portions for reading on the feasts of the Mother of God and the Gospel readings for the Holy Mass on Saturdays in lent. There are in the notes contained in the book, very respectful references to Mor Severios, the famous Patriarch of Antioch. All these would show that this book was not Nestorian because they do not venerate Mor Severios, nor do they call St. Mary as Mother of God.

In the 13th and 14th centuries, it can safely be assumed that the Malankara Church continued to stay within the Syrian Orthodox belief. In the 14th century, a Roman Bishop named John de Marinjoli is believed to have landed in Kollam. But he had no connection with the Malankara Church. In 1328 Pope John XXII had ordained the Friar Jordanoos as Bishop of Kollam and deputed him to India, but he does not seem to have reached India.

In short, from all the circumstantial evidences, it has to be believed that between 4th and 15th centuries the Malankara Church remained as part of the Universal Syrian Orthodox Church. This fact is recalled in the scholarly work of Arch Bishop Mar Iwanis of Syrian Catholic Church (Fr. P T Vargheese), "Were Syrian Christians - Nestorians". It says "Thus from internal - external and circumstantial evidences, it is evident that the church in Kerala was nothing but Jacobite before the 15th century". Again late Paulose Mar Gregorios of Indian Orthodox Church (Methran Kakshi) says (ref. Shema Vartha, 1968 Oct) "We in India belong to this Patriarchate even if we have our own Catholicose and are autonomous (not autocephalous). We have no other source from which to receive our ancient tradition - except the tradition of Antioch, of the great Syrian Church which once had spread through the length and breadth of Asia right up to China and Korea".

III. Nestorian influence

From the 14th century onwards, the Syrian/Syriac (Jacobite) Patriarchate of Antioch, gradually become weak following the continued persecution by the Romans, Mohammedans and also because of internal squabbles. In this period of serious crisis, the Patriarchate was not in a position to send any dignitaries to Malankara. By the 15th century, the Episcopal ties, which the Malankara Church had with its parental church at Antioch, was completely broken. So when the Nestorian bishops landed here in AD 1490 for the first time, they were received by Malankara Christians without any opposition. Moreover, since there was certain similarities in the liturgy and rituals of both the Jacobites and Nestorians, Malankara Syrian Christians who until then followed the Jacobite faith, were not reluctant to accept these Nestorian bishops.

To prove that the Church in Kerala was not Nestorian before 1490, it is only to recall a Nestorian bishop who came to Malankara in this period. He wrote to the Nestorian 'Catholicose-Patriarch' that, he was well received by Christians, that there are about 30,000 Christian families here and that the name of the area was Malabar. Obviously he was writing to a Patriarch who did not know much about Malankara.

From AD 1490 till 1599 Malankara Church had received Metropolitans from the Nestorian patriarchs of Persia. Yet it cannot be assumed that the entire Malankara Church took to Nestorian faith, this presumption is supported from the decisions of Synod of Diamper in which it is recorded that, before the arrival of Portuguese, there were people who held Dioscoros, who was revered holy father of the west Syrian Church, in reverence and that Western Syriac was in use here in addition to the use of Chaldaya (Chaldean) Syriac and that the liturgy of baptism used by the Jacobite Syrians was in operation. Yet it may be supposed that from 1490 till 1599, when the Synod Diamper was convened and the Malankara Christians were forcefully drawn to the Roman Catholic Church, the Church may have been under the suzerainty of Nestorians.



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WITNESS FOR AN APOSTLE: THE EVIDENCE FOR ST. THOMAS IN INDIA



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For centuries, Indian Christian claims of an apostolic founding and of being the earliest Christian Church outside the Roman Empire were dismissed out of hand by western historians; both southern Indian tradition and the embellished second-century Syriac Acts of Thomas seemed to be little more than apocryphal legend. Although many of the Church Fathers spoke of St. Thomas’ apostolate to India, there was no historical evidence for the existence of the ruling kings mentioned in the Acts, nor were many of the ancient place names familiar to geographers. Although the Acts had circulated
steadily through the Christian world since its appearance, both text and tradition lacked substantial material proof.

Even so, the Acts of Thomas was a fascinating narrative and began with the traditional description of the apostles dividing the world for missionary endeavors: “At that time we disciples were all in Jerusalem…and we divided the regions of the world that each one of us might go to the region that fell to his lot…India fell to Judas Thomas, who is also Didymas [Twin]; but he did not wish to go, saying that through weakness of flesh he could not travel and, “How can I, who am a Hebrew, go to preach the truth among the Indians.” …And….the Saviour appeared to him by night
and said… “Fear not, Thomas, go to India and preach the Word there, for my grace is with thee.” But he would not obey and said, “Send me where thou wilt – but somewhere else! For I am not going to the Indians” (Acts Thom. 1.1).

Unquestioning acquiescence was not a part of St. Thomas’ character and the other apostles, perhaps, weren’t terribly surprised. In the final three glimpses we have of him in the Gospel, St. Thomas urges the apostles to go die with Christ in Jerusalem, presses the Lord to explain precisely how they are to follow Him, and finally, refuses to believe the disciples’ assurance of Christ’s resurrection until he sees the risen Lord for himself.1 The apostle liked his definitions clear-cut, but once convinced, he was decisive. Powerless in the face of his outright refusal to go to India, Thomas’ fellowissionaries
appealed in prayer to the Lord Himself, Who was quick to respond. At the time of their gathering, one Abban (or Habban), an agent of an Indian King Gundaphar, was also in Jerusalem, looking for a
Mediterranean-trained carpenter to build a palace for the Indian-Parthian king. In the Acts the Lord appears to the agent, telling him that he has an architect-slave to sell, and the agent agrees: …and when the sale was completed the Saviour took Judas Thomas and led him to the merchant Abban….Abban…said, “Is this thy master?” And the apostle said, “Ye”… But he said, “I have bought thee from
him.” And the apostle was silent. On the following morning the apostle prayed… “I go whither thou wilt, Lord Jesus, thy will be done”… So they began their voyage. When they arrive in Gundaphar’s realm the king gives the apostle a large sum of money and sends him off to begin construction. Thomas, however, frees himself of the pecuniary burden by giving the money to the poor, and begins to tour the countryside teaching Christianity. Some months later, the king asks about the progress of the palace, and is told by his courtiers: “Neither has he built a palace, nor has he done anything else of what he promised to do, but he goes about the towns and villages, and if he has anything he gives it all to the poor, and he teaches a new God and heals the sick and drives out demons and does many other wonderful things; and we think he is a magician. But his works of compassion, and the healings which are wrought by him without reward, and moreover his simplicity and kindness and the quality of his faith show that he is righteous or an apostle of the new God whom he preaches (Acts of Thomas 1:19-20). 

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Ancient Cross at Chinnamali, pillar of original apostolic church.

The king calls Thomas to him and asks if the palace has been built. The apostle replies that it has. The king asks when he might see it, and Thomas, with characteristic directness answers, “After you die.” The king, predictably, throws him into prison. The king’s brother, Gad, soon dies, and in the abode of the dead sees a magnificent palace. He asks to reside there, but is told, “No, this is the palace that Christian is building for your brother.” Gad appears to his brother in a vision with the news that his palace is indeed built, and is magnificent. Gundaphar later becomes a Christian under the apostle’s hand through baptism, anointing with oil, and receiving Holy Communion. “And many others also believing… came into the refuge of the Saviour” (Acts of Thomas 2:22-27). The apostle then appoints a deacon as his successor and travels to southern India, where he is martyred after twenty years of apostolic work and the conversion of thousands. Local Indian traditions differ slightly from the Syriac Acts in claiming that St. Thomas did not at first come to the Punjab of King Gundaphar but to the Malabar Coast, landing at the ancient port of Muziris in A.D. 50 or 52, where, they say, he founded seven churches: Cranganore, Quilon, Paravur, Kokkamangalam, Niranam, Palayur, and Cayal. The story of Gundaphar’s palace is told in both traditions, as is the apostle’s end near Madras, where his tomb is still a pilgrim destination. The nature of the martrydom also differs slightly in the two traditions: the Syriac text (perhaps under later gnostic influence) has St. Thomas martyred
for inducing a local queen to avow marital abstinence, while Indian tradition insists that his death was instigated by angry Brahmans for preaching Christianity. The place, however, is agreed upon (Mylapore near Madras in Tamil Nadu State, India), as is the date of his martyrdom: he was struck with a spear on December 19, A.D. 72, and reposed three days later on December 21.2 The remaining early copies of the second-century Syriac Acts of Thomas are in many places embellished and fanciful, with gnostic novelties such as Thomas being alluded to as the “twin” of the Lord. This, along with a lack of concurring historical evidence, caused its wholesale rejection by western historians until, astonishingly, in 1834 an explorer turned up a hoard of ancient coins in Afghanistan’s Kabul Valley. Many bore the pictures and names of forgotten kings, some of them stamped in Greek and old Indian script with the name Gundaphar in various spellings. Within a few decades Gundaphar
coins were found from Bactria to the Punjab, and several dozen are now exhibited in the British and Calcutta Museums, dated to the first century A.D. At the end of the nineteenth century, a stone tablet was uncovered in ruins near Peshawar inscribed with lines from an Indo-Bactrian language. According to orientalist historian Samuel Moffett, the inscription “not only named King Gundaphar, but it dated him squarely in the early first century A.D., making him a contemporary of the apostle Thomas just as the muchmaligned Acts of Thomas had described him. According to the dates on the
tablet he would have been ruling in 45 or 46, very close to the traditional dates of St. Thomas’ arrival in India.”3 Finally, in the late nineteenth century the writings of the pilgrim-abbess Egeria were brought to light. In her travels to the Holy Land, Syria, Lebanon, and Egypt during the period of 381-384 she states: “In the name of Christ our God we arrived safely at Edessa. On arriving there we visited without delay the church and the martyrium of Saint Thomas [the Apostle]. In accordance with our usage we there performed our devotions and what else we are accustomed to do when visiting holy places. We also read portions of the Acts of Saint Thomas [at his Shrine]. The church is indeed a large and handsome edifice of a new design, and it is really worthy to be the House of God…”

[2 The Orthodox calendar celebrates St. Thomas the Apostle on October 6, on the second Sunday of Pascha, and on June 20 (the translation of his right hand from Edessa to Constantinople in 920.) The Roman Catholic and many Eastern Christian Churches celebrate him on July 3, the ancient Edessan feast, probably commemorating the relics’ arrival from India to Edessa in or before the third century. Indian Christians of various denominations commemorate his spearing on December 19, and his repose on December 21.
3 Moffett, Samuel, A History of Christianity in Asia, Vol I, Orbis Books, NY, 1998.]

Early twentieth-century Dominican commentators followed the discovery with the forceful argument that Egeria would hardly have been reading “the distorted Gnostic edition that has come down to us, but a copy of the Acts accepted and recognized as catholic and genuine by the Christians of that age…. This offers clear proof that there were copies which had not been distorted and utilized for Gnostic purposes.… The Acts the pilgrim carried with her were in Greek, as also was the Codex of the Scriptures, as shown from her quotations.”

With these two monumental discoveries, complaints of insufficient evidence and an uncertain text no longer hold the field. Although historians may continue to be sceptical, the evidence must be dealt with. Trade, Diplomacy, and Colonies It has long been known that there was widespread trade between the Roman Empire, Mediterranean peoples, and India. The subcontinent was visited a thousand years before Christ by King Solomon’s warships, and according to the first-century Roman historian Pliny, Malabar coastal traders ranged the Arab Sea, the Red Sea, Egypt, and Aden, with Muziris as
their port. Not only did the Roman Empire send diplomatic missions to India for hundreds of years, but first-century Jewish settlements in India are well-documented. Historians now believe that it would not have been unusual or even difficult for a first-century Jew to take ship for India. Moffett pushes it even further: “India was quite possibly more open to direct communication with the West in the first two centuries of the Christian era than in any other period of history before the coming of the Portuguese fifteen hundred years later…. Perhaps about A.D. 50 one such ship also carried a Jewish Christian missionary, a carpenter, to India, for carpenters are mentioned in documents of the time as being much in demand in the East. Greek carpenters were brought, for example, to build a
palace for a king in the southern Tamil kingdom of the Chola people.”

Early Church Fathers on St. Thomas’ Apostolate to India

There are many patristic references to St. Thomas in India. The most wellknown include: The Didascalia Apostolorum, from Edessa perhaps as early as 250 AD: “India and all its countries, and those bordering on it even to the farthest sea, received the Apostle’s Hand of Priesthood from Judas Thomas, who was guide and ruler in the church he built there… St. Gregory of Nazianzen (AD 329-390), who refers to Thomas along with the other apostles’ work in Homily 33, Against the Arians: “Were not the Apostles strangers amidst the many nations and countries over which they spread themselves, that the Gospel might penetrate into all parts, that no place might be void of the triple light or deprived of that truth, so that the cloud of ignorance among them even who sit in darkness and the shadow of death might be lifted? … Peter indeed may have belonged to Judea; but what had Paul in common with the gentiles, Luke with Achaia, Andrew with Epirus, John with Ephesus, Thomas with India, Mark with Italy? …(Contra Aranos et de Seipso Oratio) St. Ambrose of Milan (AD 333-397): Whence it came to pass that wearied of civil wars the supreme Roman command was offered to Julius
Augustus, and so internecine strife was brought to a close. This, in its way, admitted of the Apostles being sent without delay, according to the saying of our Lord Jesus: Going therefore, teach ye all nations (Matt. xxviii. 19). Even those kingdoms which were shut out by rugged mountains became accessible to them, as India to Thomas, Persia to Matthew. This also (viz., the internal peace) expanded the power of the empire of Rome over the whole world, and appeased dissensions and divisions among the peoples by securing peace, thus enabling the Apostles, at the beginning of the
church, to travel over many regions of the earth’ (Ambrose De Moribus). St. Jerome (AD 342-420): “Jesus dwelt in all places; with Thomas in India, with Peter in Rome, with Paul in Illyricum, with Titus in Crete with Andrew in Achaia, with each apostolic man in each and all countries” (Epistles of St. Jerome). St. Paulinus of Nola (AD 354-431): “So God, bestowing his holy gifts on all lands, sent his Apostles to the great cities of the world. To the Patrians he sent Andrew, to John the charge at Ephesus he gave of Europe and Asia, their errors to repel with effulgence of light. Parthia receives
Matthew, India Thomas, Libya Thaddaeus and Phrygia Philip” (Migne, P-L., vol. 1xi. col. 514). St. Gregory, the Bishop of Tours (AD 538-593) in his De Gloria Martyrum writes: “Thomas, the Apostle, according to the history of his passion, is declared to have suffered in India. After a long time his body was taken into a city which they called Edessa in Syria and there buried. Therefore, in that Indian place where he first rested there is a monastery and a church of wonderful size, and carefully adorned and arrayed”. 

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Other References to Early Indian Christianity Include:

The testimonies of Bishop Eusebius of Caesarea (+340) and St. Jerome (+420) detailing the mission of St. Pantaenus, a Christian philosopher sent by Bishop Demetrius of Alexandria, “to preach Christ to the Brahmins and to the philosophers of India” in A.D. 190. Both writers affirm the tradition of first-century Christianity in India, although Eusebius follows the Alexandrian tradition in reporting that St. Pantaenus met Indian Christians who told him that they had been given a Hebrew version of St. Matthew’s gospel by the Apostle Bartholomew. (Although there is no reason that Sts. Bartholomew and Thomas could not have both been in India, Eusebius is almost alone among the Fathers in claiming Bartholomew, who is usually believed to have preached in Armenia. Some historians feel that in some cases, the geographical term India, could have also included parts of Ethiopia and Arabia Felix.) Theophilus (surnamed “the Indian”) is another contemporary fourth-century source. During the reign of Emperor Constantine the Great, the young Theophilus was sent from India as a political hostage to the Romans. Constantine’s son, Constantius, later sent him on a mission to Arabia Felix
and Abyssinia (Ethiopia). His travels are recorded by Philostorgius, an Arian Greek Church historian, who relates that after fulfilling his mission, Theophilus sailed to his island home off the Indian coast. From there he visited other parts of India, reforming many things – for the Christians of the place heard the reading of the Gospel sitting, etc. His references to a body of Christians with a church, priest, and liturgy could only apply to a Christian Church and faithful who inhabited the west coastal region of Malabar, and whose liturgy was in Syriac. Long-held Indian traditions claim that St. Thomas ordained two bishops, Kepha for Malabar and Paul for Coromandal (Mylapore), the first hierarchs of India. The first historical mention of an Indian hierarch after the legalization of Christianity is John the Persian, who was present at the Council of Nicea (325) and signed the degrees of the Council with the title: John the Persian, over the churches in all Persia and Great India. It is not known when India began having resident bishops, but in 530 Cosmas Indicopleustes writes in his “topographia” (a cultural survey of the time) that there are Christians “in Male (Malabar) where the pepper grows.” He adds that the Christians of Ceylon, whom he specifies as Persians, and “those of Malabar” (whom he does not identify, which presupposes that they were native Indians) had a bishop residing at Caliana (Kalyan), ordained in Persia, and one likewise on the island of Socotra. St. Gregory of Tours (Glor. Mart.), writing before 590, reports that a certain Theodore, perhaps a Syrian pilgrim, who came to venerate the relics of St. Martin of Tours during Gregory’s episcopacy and had also visited India, told him that where the relics of Thomas the Apostle rested, “stands a monastery and a church of striking dimensions and elaborately adorned.”… “After a long interval of time these remains had been removed thence to the city of Edessa.” Theodore visited both tombs, in India and Edessa.

St. Bede the Venerable (673-735): “The Apostles of Christ, who were to be the preachers of the faith and teachers of the nations, received their allotted charges in distinct parts of the world. Peter receives Rome; Andrew, Achaia; James, Spain; Thomas, India; John, Asia….” (Opera omnia, Coloniae Agrippinae) The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, relating the events of the early history of England, tells of a vow made by King Alfred as he defended the city of London, besieged by the heathen Danes. In fulfillment of this vow he sent an embassy with gifts to Rome, and another to India to the shrine of the
Apostle Thomas: “The year 883[884]. In this year… Marinus, the Pope, then sent lignum Domini [a relic of the Cross] to King Alfred. And in the same year Sighelm and Aethâlstan conveyed to Rome the alms which the king had vowed [to send] thither, and also to India to Saint Thomas and Saint Bartholomew, when they sat down against the army at London; and there, God be thanked, their prayer was very successful, after that vow.”

A Syrian ecclesiastical calender of extremely early date confirms the translation of the relics. The entry reads: 3 July, St. Thomas who was pierced with a lance in India. His body is at Urhai [the ancient name of Edessa] having been brought there by the merchant Khabin. A great festival. Two points support the note’s antiquity: the early name given to Edessa and the fact that the translation of the apostle’s relics was so fresh that the name of the individual who had brought them was still remembered. Contemporary eye-witness evidence that the relics had been translated from India to Edessa is provided by St. Ephrem the Syrian who came to Edessa after the surrender of Nisibis to the Persians in 363, living there until his repose in 373. In his forty-second Nisibene Hymn, St. Ephrem tells that the Apostle was put to death in India, and that his remains were subsequently enshrined in Edessa. The same tradition of St. Thomas is repeated in his other hymns: It was to a land of dark people he was sent, to clothe them by Baptism in white robes. His grateful dawn dispelled India’s painful darkness. It was his mission to espouse India to the Only-Begotten. The merchant is blessed for having so great a treasure. Edessa thus became the blessed city by possessing the greatest pearl India could yield…5 

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Marco Polo also visited India on his return from China in 1293. Of the apostle’s tomb he says, “The Body of Messer Saint Thomas the Apostle lies in this province of Maabar at a certain little town having no great population; ’tis a place where few traders go, because there is very little merchandise to be got there, and it is a place not very accessible. Both Christians and Saracens, however, greatly frequent it in pilgrimage. For the Saracens also do hold the Saint in great reverence, and say that he was one of their own Saracens and a great prophet, giving him the title of Avarian, which is as much to say “Holy Man.” The Christians who go thither in pilgrimage take of the earth from the place where the Saint was killed, and give a portion thereof to any one who is sick of a quartan or a tertian fever; and by the power of God and of Saint Thomas the sick man is incontinently cured. The earth I should tell you is red… The Christians who have charge of the Church have a great number of the Indian nut trees whereby they get their living; and they pay to one of those brother Kings six groats for each tree every month.” 6 Stone crosses of ancient date, bearing inscriptions in Pahlavi letters, have been pointed out in southern India for many centuries. One is in the Church of Mount St. Thomas, Mylapore7, its presence first chronicled by the Portuguese in 1547; the second is in the church of Kottayam, Malabar. The crosses are of Nestorian origin, and are engraved in bas-relief on the flat stone with ornamental decorations around the cross. Both bear the inscription: “In punishment by the cross was the suffering of this one, Who is the true Christ, God above and Guide ever pure.” Some archeologists have remarked on their resemblance to a Syro-Chinese Nestorian monument erected at Singan-fu, an ancient capital of China, to commemorate the arrival of Chaldean Nestorian missionaries to China in 636.

[5 According to both eastern and western traditions, some portions of relics were left in India at the time of the translation to Edessa and are now enshrined at the Cathedral of St. Thomas at Mylapore (Roman Catholic) and at the Church dedicated to St. Thomas on St. Thomas Mountain, the site of his martyrdom. The greater portion of relics remained in Edessa (now Urfa) until they were taken to Chios in 1258 and then to Ortona, Italy, where they are enshrined today in the local church. At the end of the fifth century, the right hand of St. Thomas was given by the Edessans to Constantinople, and a church built by Archbishop Anastasius (490-518) to enshrine them. Western Crusaders obtained the hand during the sack of Constantinople in the Fourth Crusade, and according to some reports it was taken to Hungary after the Fifth Crusade by Hungarian King Andrew II. There is no longer any trace of it in Hungary.
6 The Travels of Marco Polo: Vol. II, Chap. 28
7 The Mylapore cross on St. Thomas’ Mountain reportedly bled every December 18 from 1158 to 1774, with only a few years excepted.] 

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Local Indian Tradition

The Indian Christians or “Thomas Christians,” as they call themselves, still hold strongly to oral traditions of their founding by the apostle. These include the Ramban Pattu or Thomma Parvom, a song incorporating narratives from the Acts of Thomas. After forty-eight generations of oral tradition, the song was finally written down in 1600 by Rambaan Thomas, of the Malyakal family, a descendent of the first bishop ordained by St. Thomas, originally a Brahmin priest. The Margom Kali and Mappila Paattu are a series of songs of the Acts of Thomas and the history of the Malabar Church. They are sung with dances that are typical of the Syrian Christians. Some of these dance dramas are still performed in the open as part of church festivals. The Veadian Pattu is sung by a regional Hindu group (Veeradians) for Christian festivals, accompanying themselves on a local instrument called a villu. It is not known if these songs are based on early versions of the Acts of Thomas or are an independent tradition based on oral chronicles of the first Christians; in any case these traditions are universally held among Indian Christians. There were no written histories of Indian Christianity until the arrival of the Portuguese in the sixteenth century, just as India as a whole developed a written history only with the coming of the Arab Moslems. The British Museum holds a large collection of folio volumes containing manuscripts, letters, and reports of Portuguese Jesuit missions in India; among them a chronicle of the history of the Malabar coast. The report’s Jesuit author carefully compiled the oral traditions of these Christians,8 and traditional Indian beliefs in our own day collaborate his chronicle. The Portuguese narrative relates that after St. Thomas’ martyrdom, his disciples remained faithful for many centuries and the Church increased. Later, suffering persecution, war and famine, the St. Thomas Christians of the Malabar coast and Mylapore were scattered, and many returned to
paganism. The Christians from the Cochin region fared better, spreading from Coulac (Quilon) to Palur (Paleur), a village north of Malabar. Living under native princes who rarely interfered with their faith, they may not have suffered the severe persecutions that their brothers underwent on the coast. In the ninth century, a Syrian merchant, Mar Thoma Cana, was given permission by Cheruman Perumal, a leading rajah of Malabar, to settle and develop a Christian township that included many local Indian Christian families. They were also given a special civil status, records of which still exist.

[8 British Museum, folio volume 9853: beginning leaf 86 in pencil and 525 in ink.] 

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Pauumala – Gospel reading at evening service.

Local tradition holds that before reaching the Indian mainland, St. Thomas preached to the inhabitants of the Island of Socotra, establishing a Christian community that was still faithful (although greatly degenerated) when visited in 1542 by the Catholic St. Francis Xavier, who found them Nestorian in belief, suffering greatly from a lack of clergy, but still claiming to be descendants of the Christians first converted by St. Thomas. By 1680 Christianity on Socotra was quite extinct, due to the oppression of the Arabs and the neglect of the Nestorian Patriarchs. Southern Indian clergy and hierarchs
appear to have been Nestorian from the fifth century: for more than a millenium the Indian Church was provided with Persian-appointed hierarchs until this patronage declined in the sixteenth century. Today there are many Christian denominations present in India. The Orthodox Church under the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople has been active in northern India since 1982 and now numbers eighteen parishes and almost 4000 members.

source http://www.roadtoemmaus.net/back_issue_articles/RTE_21/WITNESS_FOR_AN_APOSTLE.pdf


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