Tradition · religion · India
Christianity
Older in India than in most of Europe, by its own account: the Saint Thomas Christians of Kerala hold that the apostle landed at Kodungallur in 52 CE, and they were a settled community with Persian bishops and royal copper-plate privileges long before any European arrived. What followed came in layers — Portuguese Catholicism and the Inquisition, then Protestant missions and the printing presses they brought, then the Anglican and Pentecostal churches of the north-east.
- Function
- Religious institution & practice
- Confidence
- Not assessed
Worth knowing
The Portuguese arriving in 1498 expected to find Christians and did — and then spent a century trying to bring a church older than their own under Rome, which is what the Synod of Diamper in 1599 was for.
The Thomas tradition is the community's own and is not independently documented; the community's antiquity and its Persian church links are.
Connections (3)
- Sacred transplantKodungallur & Mar Thoma church
Older in India than in most of Europe, by the community's own account: the Saint Thomas Christians hold that the apostle landed at Kodungallur in 52 CE, and whatever the truth of that, they were a settled community with Persian bishops, Syriac liturgy and royal copper-plate privileges long before any European arrived. The Portuguese in 1498 expected to find Christians and did — and then spent a century trying to bring a church older than their own under Rome.
- CampaignThe Goa Inquisition
What European Christianity did on arrival is a different story from how the religion got here. The Inquisition sat at Goa from 1560 for two and a half centuries, prosecuting converts suspected of keeping Hindu practice, Jews and conversos, and the Synod of Diamper in 1599 forced the Syriac church into Roman obedience and burned its books. The oldest Christian community in India was among the things the newest arrivals came to correct.
- TransmissionSerampore & the Mission Press
The most durable thing the Protestant missions left was type. Print arrived in India in 1556 and did almost nothing for a century and a half because the founts were Latin; what changed everything was cutting type for Indian scripts, and the Serampore press under Carey cut it for dozens of them, printing Bibles and, incidentally, the first Bengali prose anyone could buy. A missionary programme produced the vernacular publishing that modern Indian literature is written in.
Sources
Wikipedia, “Christianity in India”. Susan Bayly, Saints, Goddesses and Kings (1989); Robert Frykenberg, Christianity in India (2008).
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