Saint Thomas Christians

Based on Wikipedia: Saint Thomas Christians

The Church That Claims an Apostle Walked Its Shores

In the southwestern corner of India, along the lush Malabar coast of Kerala, lives a Christian community that makes an extraordinary claim: their faith was planted not by European colonizers, not by medieval missionaries, but by one of Jesus's own twelve apostles, arriving just two decades after the crucifixion.

Thomas the Apostle—the same "Doubting Thomas" who refused to believe in the resurrection until he touched Christ's wounds—is said to have landed at the ancient port of Muziris in 52 AD. If true, this would make the Saint Thomas Christians among the oldest Christian communities on Earth, predating the conversion of Rome by centuries.

Today, this community of several million believers speaks Malayalam, lives predominantly in Kerala, and practices forms of Christianity that would puzzle most Western churchgoers. Their liturgies are sung in Syriac, an ancient language related to the Aramaic that Jesus himself spoke. Their churches face east. Their priests marry. And their history is a tangled web of schisms, colonial interference, and fierce disputes about liturgy—disputes that continue to make headlines even now, as protestors occupy basilicas over questions of which direction priests should face during Mass.

What's in a Name?

The community goes by many names, each revealing a different facet of their identity.

"Nasrani" comes from the Syriac word for Christian, itself derived from "Nazarene"—a reference to Jesus of Nazareth. This is the oldest and most indigenous term, linking them to the earliest followers of Christ in the Near East.

"Mappila" is a local honorific applied to descendants of Middle Eastern immigrants who married into the local population. Interestingly, Kerala's Muslims and Jews also bear this title—Jonaka Mappila and Yuda Mappila respectively—reflecting the cosmopolitan history of the Malabar coast as a crossroads of ancient trade routes.

"Syrian Christians" is the term the Indian government uses, though it causes endless confusion. These Christians are not from Syria. They are ethnically Indian, as Kerala-rooted as the coconut palms and backwaters of their homeland. The "Syrian" refers to Syriac, the liturgical language they inherited from the Church of the East, the ancient Christian communion that once stretched from the Mediterranean to China. It's a linguistic and ecclesiastical connection, not an ethnic one.

Did Thomas Really Come to India?

Here is where faith and history diverge, or perhaps dance carefully around each other.

The earliest written source connecting Thomas to India is the Acts of Thomas, a text likely composed in the early third century, possibly in the city of Edessa (modern-day Urfa in Turkey). This is not a historical document in the modern sense—it's a devotional narrative filled with miracles and talking animals. But it places Thomas firmly in India, specifically in the northwest, in what was then the Indo-Parthian Kingdom.

Several respected Church Fathers of the third and fourth centuries mention Thomas's Indian mission: Ambrose of Milan, Gregory of Nazianzus, Jerome, and Ephrem the Syrian. More intriguingly, the church historian Eusebius records that Pantaenus of Alexandria, a Christian teacher, visited India in the second century and found a community there already using a Hebrew version of the Gospel of Matthew.

Was this Kerala? Probably not—"India" in ancient texts often meant any land east of Persia. But the Kerala tradition is specific and detailed.

The Thomma Parvam, or "Song of Thomas," is a Malayalam text written in 1601 but believed to summarize much older oral traditions. It describes Thomas landing at Maliankara, converting thirty-two Brahmin families, and establishing seven major churches along the coast: Kodungallur, Kottakavu, Palayoor, Kokkamangalam, Nilackal, Niranam, and Kollam. It narrates his missionary work throughout South India and his martyrdom at Mylapore, near present-day Chennai, where he was allegedly killed by a Brahmin priest's spear.

Skeptical historians note the lack of archaeological evidence and the suspicious gap of several centuries between the supposed events and the earliest written accounts. Believers counter that absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, and that oral traditions in India have proven remarkably durable.

What we can say with more confidence is this: an organized Christian community existed in Kerala by the third century, connected to the Persian Church of the East. Whether Thomas planted the seed or later missionaries grafted a legend onto an existing community, the result was the same—a church that considered itself apostolic, ancient, and distinctly Eastern.

The Persian Connection

Whatever its ultimate origins, the Kerala church did not develop in isolation. By the third century, it was connected to the Church of the East, the great Christian communion headquartered in the Persian capital of Seleucia-Ctesiphon, near modern Baghdad.

This church—sometimes called Nestorian by its critics, though its members reject that label—was once the most geographically extensive form of Christianity on Earth. At its height, it stretched from the Mediterranean coast to the Tang Dynasty court in China, with bishops in Tibet, Central Asia, and Southeast Asia. India was just one province in this vast ecclesiastical network.

The relationship deepened over centuries. Around 650 AD, Patriarch Ishoyahb III formally incorporated the Kerala Christians into the Church of the East's jurisdiction. In the eighth century, Patriarch Timothy I organized them as the "Ecclesiastical Province of India," one of the church's Provinces of the Exterior. A Metropolitan Bishop was dispatched from Persia to oversee the community, bearing the magnificent title "Metropolitan-Bishop of the Seat of Saint Thomas and the Whole Christian Church of India."

But here's what made Kerala Christianity distinctive: beneath this Persian-appointed bishop sat a local figure of enormous power, the Archdeacon. This position, held by a native Keralite from specific hereditary families, wielded authority over the local clergy and considerable secular influence. When conflicts arose—and they would—the Archdeacon often represented local interests against foreign ecclesiastical overreach.

Northists and Southists: A Community Divided

Within the Saint Thomas Christian community exists an ancient division that persists to this day: the Vadakkumbhagar (Northists) and the Tekkumbhagar (Southists).

The names derive from the ancient city of Kodungallur, capital of the medieval Chera dynasty and the traditional heart of Kerala Christianity. According to community tradition, the original converts of Thomas the Apostle settled on the northern side of the city. Hence, their descendants became known as Northists—they claim the most ancient pedigree, direct spiritual descent from the Apostle's own mission.

The Southists trace their origin to a different event entirely: the arrival of a merchant-missionary named Knai Thoma (Thomas of Cana), who came from the Middle East with a cohort of traders and clergy. This migration occurred either in the fourth or eighth century—the sources disagree. Because Knai Thoma's followers settled on the southern side of Kodungallur, they became known as Southists or, more commonly, Knanaya (a Syriac word meaning "Canaanite," derived from their founder's name).

The Knanaya community maintained strict endogamy for centuries—they married only among themselves, preserving their distinct identity as descendants of Middle Eastern Christian migrants. This made them a community within a community, Kerala Christians who were also, in some sense, a diaspora population maintaining their separateness through marriage rules.

The Oxford History of the Christian Church describes how "Jewish Christians of the most exclusive communities descended from settlers who accompanied Knayil Thomma became known as 'Southists'" while "the 'Northists', on the other hand, claimed direct descent from the very oldest Christians of the country, those who had been won to Christ by the Apostle Thomas himself."

This is not merely historical trivia. The Northist-Southist division matters today. The Knanaya maintain separate parishes within the larger Saint Thomas Christian churches. Questions of intermarriage between the two groups can still generate controversy.

Brahmins in Disguise?

One of the most intriguing aspects of the Saint Thomas Christians is how thoroughly they adopted certain Hindu Brahmin customs while maintaining their Christian faith.

Medieval accounts describe them wearing the sacred thread (Upanayana), a distinctly Brahminical marker. They maintained the kudumi, the traditional Hindu topknot hairstyle. They observed caste-like social distinctions. Their churches, called pallys, incorporated architectural elements from Hindu temples. They were, in many respects, a caste within the Kerala social order—a Christian caste, but a caste nonetheless.

How did this happen? One theory holds that Thomas genuinely converted Brahmin families, who maintained their cultural practices while changing their religion. But medieval historian Pius Malekandathil offers a more complex explanation. He argues that the Kerala Christians became a powerful trading community in the ninth century by integrating with Persian Christian merchant migrants. Local rulers, eager to promote trade revenue and undermine Buddhist and Jain competitors, granted the Christians Brahmin-like privileges and social status.

In other words, the Brahmin customs may have been adopted rather than inherited—a case of upward social mobility expressed through ritual markers, granted by Hindu kings who saw economic benefit in elevating a useful merchant community.

Either way, the result was a Christian community that fit into the complex social hierarchy of Kerala while maintaining its distinct religious identity—a balancing act that would eventually prove impossible when European colonizers arrived with very different ideas about what Christianity should look like.

The Portuguese Arrive, and Everything Changes

When Vasco da Gama reached Kerala in 1498, he encountered something that astonished him: Christians. Not Christians he had converted, but Christians who claimed an apostolic heritage older than Portugal itself.

Initial relations were cordial. The Portuguese saw potential allies against the Muslim traders who dominated the spice trade. The Saint Thomas Christians, after centuries of periodic isolation from their Persian ecclesiastical superiors, may have hoped for new connections to the wider Christian world.

But the Portuguese came not just as traders but as representatives of the Roman Catholic Church and its colonial-missionary enterprise. They brought with them the Padroado system—the Portuguese crown's right to administer the Church in its colonial territories. And they looked at these Eastern Christians with their Syriac liturgies, married priests, and unfamiliar customs, and saw not fellow believers but heretics in need of correction.

The culmination came in 1599 at the Synod of Diamper. This was not a meeting of equals. The Portuguese Archbishop Aleixo de Menezes essentially forced the Saint Thomas Christians to accept Roman authority, adopt the Roman Rite, and renounce their Eastern practices. Books were burned. Liturgies were rewritten. The ancient connection to the Church of the East was severed.

The community seethed under this imposition for over fifty years.

The Coonan Cross Oath: A Community Breaks Apart

In 1653, the breaking point arrived. A new bishop from the Middle East, allegedly sent to restore Eastern leadership, was intercepted by the Portuguese. Rumors spread—some said he had been drowned. Whether true or not, the effect was explosive.

At a church in Mattancherry, thousands of Saint Thomas Christians gathered around a large stone cross. With ropes tied to the cross so that all could touch it simultaneously, they swore what became known as the Coonan Cross Oath: they would no longer submit to Portuguese ecclesiastical authority.

This was the great schism that shattered the community forever.

Those who maintained allegiance to Rome became known as the Pazhayakūr (Old Allegiance) faction. They would eventually become the Syro-Malabar Church, today one of the largest Eastern Catholic churches in the world, in full communion with the Pope but maintaining their East Syriac liturgical traditions.

Those who rejected Rome became the Puthankūttukār (New Allegiance) faction. But "new" here is ironic—they saw themselves as returning to their original Eastern identity, freed from Roman impositions. They would become the Malankara Church, eventually entering into communion with the Syriac Orthodox Church of Antioch and adopting the West Syriac Rite.

Note the paradox: the "Old Allegiance" faction stayed with Rome, the new colonial power. The "New Allegiance" faction sought older Eastern connections. The names reflect the moment of schism, not the ultimate direction of each group's loyalties.

Schisms Upon Schisms

If you think this is complicated, we're only getting started.

From this seventeenth-century split, the Saint Thomas Christian community fragmented repeatedly over the following centuries, like a drop of water hitting a surface and scattering into smaller and smaller droplets.

The Eastern Catholic branch (in communion with Rome) includes:

• The Syro-Malabar Church, following the East Syriac Rite—this is the largest single group, with over four million members
• The Syro-Malankara Catholic Church, following the West Syriac Rite—a twentieth-century reunion movement that brought some Malankara Christians back into communion with Rome while preserving their West Syriac traditions

The Oriental Orthodox branch includes:

• The Malankara Orthodox Syrian Church, an autocephalous (self-governing) church
• The Jacobite Syrian Christian Church, which remains under the Patriarch of Antioch
• The Malabar Independent Syrian Church, which broke from Antiochian authority

The Protestant branch includes:

• The Mar Thoma Syrian Church, a Reformed church influenced by Anglican missionaries in the 1800s—they maintain West Syriac liturgy but with Protestant theology
• The St. Thomas Evangelical Church of India, which split from the Mar Thoma Church in 1961 over questions of evangelicalism
• The CSI Syrian Christians, who joined the Anglican-founded Church of South India

And then there's the Chaldean Syrian Church, based in Thrissur, which represents a minority faction that reconnected with the Assyrian Church of the East in the 1870s—arguably the most direct continuation of the pre-Portuguese ecclesial structure.

Plus Pentecostal and evangelical Saint Thomas Christians who joined various charismatic movements in the twentieth century.

Counting them all up, the Saint Thomas Christians today are divided into at least a dozen distinct ecclesiastical bodies, each with its own bishops, liturgies, and institutional structures. They share a common origin and many cultural practices, but they cannot share communion. They worship in the same ancient language but cannot worship together.

The Liturgy Wars Continue

These divisions are not merely historical. They generate ongoing conflict.

The Syro-Malabar Church has been convulsed for decades by disputes over liturgical reform. At issue: should the priest face the altar (ad orientem, toward the east, the traditional Eastern practice) or face the congregation (versus populum, the practice common in the post-Vatican II Roman Church)?

This might seem like a trivial question to outsiders. But for communities whose identity was forged in resistance to Portuguese liturgical impositions, the direction a priest faces is not trivial at all. It's a question of identity: Are we Eastern or Western? Did we preserve our heritage or surrender it?

The dispute has led to parish revolts, episcopal standoffs, and yes, basilica occupations. When protestors recently occupied a basilica at the heart of the controversy, they were continuing an argument that began at the Synod of Diamper over four centuries ago.

A Community That Remembers

What makes the Saint Thomas Christians remarkable is not just their claimed antiquity or their liturgical distinctiveness. It's their tenacious memory.

They remember—or believe they remember—an apostle stepping onto their shores two thousand years ago. They remember merchant-missionaries arriving from Persia with copper plates granting them royal privileges. They remember the burning of their books at Diamper. They remember the Coonan Cross Oath.

Each denomination within the community tells a slightly different version of this history, emphasizing the moments that justify their particular ecclesiastical choices. But they all share the fundamental narrative: ancient origins, Eastern identity, colonial trauma, resistance and fragmentation.

In a globalized world where Christianity is often associated with Western cultural imperialism, the Saint Thomas Christians offer a counter-narrative. Here is a form of Christianity that predates European colonization of India by over a millennium. Here is a church that fought against Western ecclesiastical control. Here is a community that insists its faith is not foreign but indigenous, planted by an apostle who came east while Peter and Paul went west.

Whether that historical claim can withstand scholarly scrutiny matters less than what it means to the millions who believe it. For them, to be Christian and to be Kerala are not contradictory. The faith came to their shores before it came to much of Europe. Their ancestors were Christians when Anglo-Saxons were still pagans, when Charlemagne's ancestors were barbarian chieftains.

This is a community that remembers. And in remembering, it persists—fractured, contentious, divided over liturgy and authority, but unshakably convinced that an apostle once walked among them, and that his faith remains their inheritance.