The ancient church of India

Attorney-at-law Johnathan Bhagan concludes a two-part series looking at India’s Christian heritage. In last Sunday’s issue, he wrote on the saints of Africa.

The state of Kerala in southern India has a rich heritage of both Judaism and Christianity. The Chendamangalam synagogue and other Jewish sites can still be seen today in Kerala.

According to tradition, the Apostle Thomas went to Kerala in 52 AD possibly travelling by sea to the bustling port city of Muziris on the Malabar coast. St Thomas likely sought out the existing Jewish community in Kerala to preach about Jesus the Jewish messiah and then preached to Greek and Roman traders and the native people of Kerala.

The ancient churches in India trace their roots back to St Thomas and are called St Thomas Christians. The life and death of St Thomas is reenacted in song and dance by Indians in Kerala as noted by Western historians.

St Thomas Christians have a liturgy that includes some Aramaic, and some churches celebrate Passover.

Many indigenous churches in Kerala were later destroyed by Portuguese soldiers who burned the libraries of the St Thomas Christians and covered up the traditional paintings of St Thomas with brown skin.

PhD candidate and Oxford graduate Allan Varghese of the Asbury Theological Seminary wrote a paper entitled The Reformative and Indigenous Face of the Indian Pentecostal Movement which is quoted as follows: “Christianity in Kerala claims its origin from the first century (AD 52) when Jesus’ disciple, St Thomas, arrived and preached the gospel to high-caste Brahmins.

Although there have been numerous speculations around the veracity of Thomas’ arrival, as Kerala historian Sreedhara Menon notes, ‘the Christians in Kerala continue to attribute to their Church an apostolic origin and call themselves St Thomas Christians’.

For the first two hundred years, the Thomas Christians held on to their apostolic succession but fell into ‘a state of disorder’ as they lacked ecclesial direction and leadership.

However, in 345 BCE, a merchant named Thomas Cana arrived from the Persian Empire with four hundred Christians and two Syrian bishops, bringing new life to the dying Church. This arrival revived preexisting Thomas Christians providing them with an association with the Syrian Church and offering them the needed ecclesial direction.

As the Thomas Christians in Kerala and the Syrian Christians in the Persian Empire held common apostolic patrimony, the Thomas Christians found it easier to integrate with the Syrian Church. The local Church ‘harmonised their church discipline with that of the Syrian Church, without looking at it as something foreign’.

Subsequently, the Kerala Thomas Christians embraced Syrian theology, worship forms, and customs. Syriac became the ecclesiastical language and the local clergy were ordained according to the Syrian Church Tradition, marking the ecclesiastical and liturgical beginning of the Kerala Syrian Christian community. Local Thomas Christians also enjoyed a measure of autonomy in their civil and ecclesiastical aspects as the archdeacon, who was not a foreigner, was essentially in charge of the local community.

This relationship of the Kerala Thomas Christians with the Syrian Church stood unchallenged for centuries, until the arrival of the Portuguese in the sixteenth century. During this period, the Kerala Syrian Church had taken shape as, in Francis Thonippara’s words, ‘truly an Indian Church rooted in Indian soil’.”

Varghese also makes the point that India had an indigenous Pentecostal movement that predated the Pentecostal revivals in America.

“The origin of Pentecostalism in world Christianity is almost always attributed to the Azusa Revival which took place in 1906. However, recently some scholars of the Pentecostal movement have rebutted this approach, reconsidering Pentecostalism ‘mostly from a post-structural or post-colonial perspective’.  Former scholarly suppositions overlooked, as Hedlund puts it, the ‘earlier Holy Spirit revivals in India’ led by indigenous Christians.

The earliest record of Pentecostal expressions in Kerala goes back to a time of CMS missionaries in Kerala, confirming historian Gary McGee’s words that ‘Pentecostal and Pentecostal-like movements in India preceded the development of 20th century Pentecostalism in North America and Europe by at least 40 years.’ Often, local revival meetings contained Pentecostal characteristics such as people speaking in unknown languages, shaking uncontrollably, crying, prophesying, and dreaming in addition to the presence of miracles. Indian Theologian, AC George highlights three early revivals in South India—in 1860, 1873, and 1895—that demonstrated such Pentecostal expressions.”

There is evidence that modern Pentecostal Christianity started in India decades before similar movements hit America. Unfortunately, due to the dependence of local seminaries on North American scholarship, the work of Indian scholars such as Dr Varghese and AC George is never discussed.

Given the serious problems in the American church with Christianity being hijacked by far-right political movements and celebrity preachers lying about their education and credentials, it may be healthy for the Church in the Caribbean to draw inspiration from the ancient African and Indian churches.

The ancient Christians of India worship with Aramaic phrases, the language of Jesus, and are closer to the traditions passed down by Jesus than Western movements such as Mormonism.

However, St Thomas Christians unfortunately practised caste discrimination for centuries as Brahmins forced Dalits to worship in separate churches.