|
When I read the entry for St Bartholomew ("apostle of
India"), I remembered an article I read a few months
ago in 'The Guardian' about St Thomas in India.
I thought that it might be of interest:
---------------------------------------------------
Guardian, Saturday April 15, 2000
The incredible journey
Did St Thomas found a church in south India?
William Dalrymple unravels a Christian mystery
The rains come to Kerala for months at a time. It is
the greenest state in India: hot and humid, still and
brooding. The soil is so fertile that as you drift up
the lotus-choked waterways, the trees close in around
you, as twisting tropical fan vaults of palm and
bamboo arch together in the forest canopy. Mango trees
hang heavy over the fishermen's skiffs; pepper vines
creep through the fronds of the waterside papaya
orchards.
In this country live a people who believe that St
Thomas - the apostle of Jesus who famously refused to
believe in the resurrection "until I have placed my
hands in the holes left by the nails and the wound
left by the spear" - came to India from Palestine
after the Resurrection, and that he baptised their
ancestors. Moreover, this is not a modern tradition:
it has been the firm conviction of the Christians here
since at least the sixth century AD.
In 594 AD, the French monastic chronicler Gregory of
Tours met a wandering Greek monk who reported that, in
southern India, he had met Christians who had told him
about St Thomas's missionary journey to India and who
had shown him the tomb of the apostle. Over the
centuries to come, almost every western traveller to
southern India, from Marco Polo to the first
Portuguese conquistadors, reported the same story.
The legend of St Thomas led to the first-ever
recorded journey to India by an Englishman: according
to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, King Alfred (he of the
burned cakes) sent Bishop Sighelm of Sherborne "to St
Thomas in India"; years later, the bishop returned,
carrying with him "precious stones and the odiferous
essences of that country".
The stories that the travellers brought back with
them varied little: all said how in India, St Thomas
was universally believed to have arrived in AD 52 from
Palestine by boat; that he had travelled down the Red
Sea and across the Persian Gulf, and that he landed at
the great Keralan port of Cranganore, the spice
trading centre to which the Roman Red Sea merchant
fleet would head each year, to buy pepper and Indian
slave girls for the Mediterranean market.
In Kerala, St Thomas was said to have converted the
local Brahmins with the aid of miracles and to have
built seven churches. He then headed eastwards to the
ancient temple town of Mylapore, now in the suburbs of
Madras. There the saint was opposed by the orthodox
Brahmins of the temple, and finally martyred. His
followers built a tomb and monastery over his grave
which, said the travellers, was now a pilgrimage
centre for Muslims and Hindus, as well as Christians
in southern India.
Although the historicity of the legend is unprovable,
the modern St Thomas Christians - as they still call
themselves - regard this tradition as more than a
myth: it is an article of faith which underpins
religious beliefs, identity and their place in Indian
society. It is a tradition they go to extraordinary
lengths to preserve and to propagate - not least by
establishing what is almost certainly Christianity's
only troupe of dancing nuns.
Moreover they are agreed - as are many of their Hindu
neigh bours - that St Thomas is not dead: that he is
still present in Kerala, guarding his followers and
guiding his church. This was palpable at the small
"miracle church" of Putenangadi, south of Cochin. At a
time when the violent conflict between Hindus and
Christians in north India was making headlines across
the world, members of both faiths could be found side
by side crammed into the same church, all convinced
that St Thomas was present in the building to answer
the prayers of his devotees.
At the back of his church, I came across an old Hindu
woman named Jaya. I asked her why she chose to pray in
a Christian church: "So that I can be relieved of all
my troubles," she replied. "It is that faith that
brings me here. If there's anything I need, I ask St
Thomas for it."
"But, as a Hindu, why would you come to a Christian
church?," I asked. "Why not go to the temple?"
"Because I have faith," she repeated simply. "When I
have difficulties, St Thomas solves them for me. Of
course, I go to the temple too. But any big problem I
have, I come here and I pray, and my prayers are
always answered. For me, St Thomas is definitely
alive."
Later, Jaya introduced me to her Christian friend,
Miriam. "In my experience, praying to St Thomas here
is always effective," said Miriam. "Whatever I need I
pray for and my prayers are heard and answered. Of
course, there is God, but it is St Thomas's name that
we call. He is all I have."
The trail of St Thomas's journey to India begins
thousands of miles from Kerala in the deserts of the
Middle East. In the sixth century, the Byzantine
empire was beginning to crumble under a wave of
attacks, and the great classical cities of the east
Mediterranean were falling into ruin and decay. As
their libraries and universities were burned down or
deserted, many of the most important manuscripts were
preserved in the library of a remote monastery in the
deserts of the Sinai now known as St Catherine's.
Its great walls and sheer isolation preserved it from
attacks for centuries. Protected from their enemies,
the monks accumulated one of the greatest treasuries
of icons and illuminated manuscripts in the Christian
world. Scholars who penetrated the region in the 19th
century were astonished to find in the monastery a
library of unmatched richness, containing lost works
by great classical authors and the oldest extant copy
of the New Testament.
But perhaps the strangest discovery of all was a
previously unknown early Christian text dating from
the fourth century AD entitled the Acts of St Thomas.
The manuscript told a story that had been forgotten in
the traditions of the western Church. According to the
Acts, St Thomas was Jesus's twin (the Syriac for
Thomas - Te'oma - means twin, as does his Greek name,
Didymos); like his brother, he was a carpenter from
Galilee.
After Jesus's death, according to the Acts, the
apostle had been summoned to India - and his martyrdom
- by a mysterious king, Gondophares. Biblical scholars
of the 19th century were at first very sceptical of
the Acts of St Thomas. They correctly pointed out that
the story contained many clearly apocryphal Gnostic
elements, and that the earliest surviving version of
the text, written in fourth century Mesopotamia, dated
from at least two centuries after the events
described; up to the beginning of this century, the
document was sometimes dismissed as a pious romance.
Nevertheless over the past 100 years, as research has
progressed both into ancient Indian history and the
links between India and the Roman Middle East, a
series of remarkable discoveries have gone a long way
to prove that the story contained in the Acts seems to
be built on surprisingly solid historical foundations.
First, British archaeologists working in late
19th-century India began to find hoards of coins
belonging to a previously unknown Indian king: the
Rajah Gondophares, who ruled from AD19 to AD45. If St
Thomas had ever been summoned to India, it would have
been Rajah Gondophares who would have done it, just as
the Acts had always maintained.
The fact that the Acts had accurately preserved the
name of an obscure Indian rajah, whose name and
lineage had disappeared, implied that it must contain
at least a nucleus of genuine historical information.
Archaeological discoveries have since confirmed many
other details of the story, revealing that maritime
contacts between the Roman world and India were much
more extensive than anyone had realised.
In the 1930s, Sir Mortimer Wheeler discovered and
excavated a major Roman trading station on the south
Indian coast, while other scholars unearthed
references showing that in Thomas's time, the trick of
sailing with the monsoon had just been discovered,
reducing the journey time from the Red Sea to India to
just under 40 days. According to a previously
overlooked remark by Strabo, first- century geographer
and historian, 200 Roman trading vessels a year were
making the annual journey to the bazaars of Malabar
and back.
More intriguing still, analysis of Roman coin hoards
in India has shown that the Roman spice trade peaked
exactly in the middle of the first century AD. All
this showed that if St Thomas had wanted to come to
India, the passage from Palestine, far from being
near-impossible, would in fact have been easier, more
frequent and probably cheaper than at anytime in the
next 1,500 years - until Vasco da Gama discovered the
sea route to the Indies in 1498.
Scholars discovered further confirmation of the Acts
in the practices of the St Thomas Christians. Since
the second world war, theologians have become
increasingly aware of the Jewishness of Jesus and his
first disciples: it has become apparent, for example,
that the first Christians of the early church- those
who knew Jesus and his teaching personally - would
have carried on going to the temple in Jerusalem,
performing sacrifices and circumcisions, and obeying
the Jewish food laws.
If St Thomas had carried Christianity to India, it is
likely that he would have taken a distinctly more
Jewish form than the Gentile-friendly version
developed for the Greeks of Antioch by St Paul and
later exported to Europe. Hence the importance of the
fact that some of the St Thomas Christian churches to
this day retain Judeo-Christian practices long dropped
in the west - such as the celebration of the solemn
Passover feast.
Hence also the significance of the St Thomas
Christians still using the two earliest Christian
liturgies in existence: the Mass of Addai and Mari,
and the Liturgy of St James, once used by the early
Church of Jerusalem. More remarkable still, these
ancient services are still partly sung in Aramaic, the
language spoken by Jesus and St Thomas.
The more you investigate the evidence, the more
irresistible is the conclusion that whether or not St
Thomas himself came to India, he certainly could have.
And if he didn't make the journey, it seems certain
that some other very early Christian missionary did,
for there is certainly evidence for a substantial
Christian population in India by at least the third
century.
And if there is no documentary proof to clinch the
case, there is at least a very good reason for its
absence: for the entire historical documentation of
the St Thomas Christians was reduced to ashes in the
16th century - not by Muslims or Hindus, but by a
newly arrived European Christian power: the
Portuguese. As far as the Portuguese colonial
authorities were concerned, the St Thomas Christians
were heretics, an idea confirmed by their belief in
astrology and reincarnation, and the Hindu-style
sculptures of elephants and dancing girls found carved
on their crosses.
Notions that they might also have maintained early
Christian traditions predating the arrival of the
faith in Europe were dismissed out of hand. The
Inquisition was brought in, and the historical records
of the St Thomas Christians put to the flame. Yet the
old stories did survive, locked in the minds and
memories of Christians in inaccessible Keralan
backwaters.
In songs and dances passed on from father to son and
teacher to pupil, they preserved intact many of their
most ancient traditions. Scholars now believe that if
the answer to the riddle of the legends of St Thomas
lies anywhere, it is in this rich and largely
unstudied Keralan oral tradition.
The man who has done more than anything to preserve
this heritage is a plump catholic priest and village
schoolteacher named Father Jacob Vellian. Working in
isolation in his spare time, with little help and
pitiful resources, Fr Jacob has since 1973
single-handedly travelled from village to village in
Kerala systematically collecting Christian songs and
dances about St Thomas's travels and exploits in
India.
On two occasions, hidden in remote villages, he
stumbled across palm-leaf books from the 16th century,
which preserved other fragments of the songs and
ballads in tiny Malayalam lettering: the oldest
surviving documentation of the St Thomas Christians.
There were, he discovered, still current in the
Keralan countryside, hundreds of songs recording the
deeds of St Thomas, as well two ancient full-length
ballads, the older of which, The Margam Kali Pattu or
Song of the Way, was of epic proportions.
Both these ballads predated the coming of the
Portuguese and both, from their very archaic language,
showed every sign of dating from the earliest
centuries AD.
Almost everywhere Fr Vellian found the oral tradition
on the verge of extinction, with the young people
unwilling to carry on the job of learning by heart the
complex stanzas. In several places he was able to
record lost fragments of the epics just weeks before
the last of the asans (or village bards) died, taking
their songs to their grave. "Over the years I have
tried to meet with every Christian asan in Kerala,"
Vellian told me. "Most of them were illiterate:
isolated old men who were only barely aware of the
importance of what they were clinging on to. Some had
a few disciples and were very eager to teach what they
knew; others had none. But no one was trying to write
down what they had preserved. No one was promoting
them or rewarding them for their work.
"As a result much must have been lost: not one asan
knew the whole of the two longest ballads: some knew
20%; some 70%. But the 14 sections that we now have
seems to be the whole of The Song of the Way, and the
job now is to study this and to make sure it is passed
on." To that end, Vellian has been building on
another, almost lost Keralan tradition: the dancing
nuns of Malabar. Fr Vellian has spent the last few
years training up some of the many hundreds of nuns of
Kerala to dance the ancient dances of St Thomas, and
groups of wimpled sisters can now be seen swaying
uncertainly to the beat of the tabla as they attempt
to master the dances which tell of the apostle's
travels. In this way, what may be the last surviving
link with the tradition of the apostles is now being
preserved by a group of south Indian Whoopi Goldbergs.
Fr Vellian is adamant that the oral traditions have
accurately preserved a series of texts that may well
hold vital clues which could help prove the St Thomas
legend: "The palm-leaf documents that we have
collected show how accurately the bards have preserved
the text," he says. "Here or there a word may have
changed, in the 300 years since the earliest was
written down, but by and large the versions we have
collected in the fields are consistent both with each
other and these palm leaf-texts. These traditions are
an authentic and incredibly valuable and ancient
source of Christian history, and should be respected
as such."
Vellian is right. For while Christianity has never
been a major faith in India, it is a religion with
deep roots, which has clung on with incredible
tenacity, despite all the odds. Above all, the church
here has remained faithful to the tradition of St
Thomas's journey from Palestine to India. It is a
story long forgotten in a west which has come to
regard itself as the true home of the faith,
forgetting that in essence, Christianity is an eastern
religion.
Before leaving Kerala, I asked Dr Vellian whether he
really believed his work would eventually provide some
conclusive evidence to prove St Thomas's journey. "In
the end, we are the evidence," he said. "We have a
very ancient, unbroken tradition that St. Thomas was
the founder of the church in India. Our traditions are
unanimous that he came here, and that is something we
have held on to, despite persecution, for 1,700 years.
Our spirituality is very close to that of the early
church and we believe our church is as old as any
Apostolic Church in the world. Our songs and
traditions are quite clear about this. In the end it
is these traditions that we base our belief on: not
something on paper or stone which is secondary. It is
our fidelity to St Thomas that is most important to
us."
-----------------------------------------------------
http://www.guardianunlimited.co.uk/Archive/Article/0,4273,3986339,00.html
-----------------------------------------------------
__________________________________________________
Do You Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Mail - Free email you can access from anywhere!
http://mail.yahoo.com/
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
|
