Thomas of Cana (Circa 345 AD )

A Later Thomas?

Keralite tradition tells of a later arrival named Thomas. In the fourth century (345 AD), it is said, the Metropolitan Bishop of Edessa had a vision in which the apostle asked him to help his Indian flock. Informed of this saintly appeal, the Catholicos of Seleucia-Ctesiphon, head of the Christian church in Mesopotamia and Persia, dispatched a colonizing group of some three hundred families from Jerusalem, Baghdad, and Nineveh. At their head was a merchant known as Thomas of Cana (Canaan).

 The Edessan prelate whose vision is credited with inspiring the migration accompanied the colonists on their sea trip from the Persian Gulf. The newly-arrived Christians, according to the story, took presents to the local king, who greeted them warmly, gave them lands , and bestowed on them various privileges. They then busied themselves building a church and a new town.

 Some accounts of this new missionary venture are precise about the date when the infusion of Christian blood took place -- the year 345. The Persian emperor Saphur II had begun persecuting Christians in his empire in the middle of the fourth century, and it is possible that a substantial group took flight to India, among other places, as Zoroastrian Parsees did centuries later when Muslims conquered Persia. Conceivably such immigrants to the Malabar Coast were the first substantial Christian community in India.

 One social division that is popularly dated from the supposed migration under the aegis of Thomas of Cana persisted into the twentieth century. It is said that the new arrivals settled north of the Periyar River near Cranganore, the place where Thomas was thought to have come ashore, and obtained a land grant from the local ruler. They are known as Northists. They said that the Southists, living south of the river, were descendants of Thomas of Cana by his concubine, an outcaste washer woman, whom Thomas arranged to be married to a low-caste youth. Seven daughters, the issue of this lowly union, were married to seven sons of southern colonists, and their descendants became the Southists (Kananites). So say the Northists. The Southists reverse the story, claiming higher lineage than their rivals. The two groups worship together but do not intermarry. Northists insist that their forbears at one time held inscribed copper plates, grants from the local rajah, giving them lands, servants, and privileges.

 A Portuguese friar claimed to have seen the metal plates in the sixteenth century, but somehow they got "lost" while in the "safekeeping" of the Portuguese authorities. A later set of plates survives. Some think they were delivered to a new set of Christian immigrants from the Middle East who arrived with a bishop named Thomas late in the eighth century. A few Persian crosses, still to be seen in Kerala and Madras, may come from that period. The Pahlevi script used in inscriptions indicates that the crosses can be dated to some time in the sixth to eighth centuries. This is the oldest epigraphic evidence of Christians in India.

 It would have been entirely in accord with traditional practice for a rajah to set up a system of rights, privileges, and duties for a group of foreigners whose presence and services he found useful -- because, say, of channels of foreign trade they could open up and exploit. Thomas of Cana and his flock, or any group of immigrants with useful foreign connections, might well have been the beneficiaries of such a scheme. The higher ranks in the Keralan population of the time did not engage in sea trade, leaving it to Arabs, Jews, and other aliens.

 Two saints highly venerated by the Thomas Christians, especially in the city of Quilon where they had served as bishops, date from the ninth century. And their tombs were to be found in the commercial center of Quilon, established in that century. Interestingly, they bore names related to Persia: Sapor and Prodh, from Sapur and Firoz. The only available archaeological evidence, the old stone crosses revered by the Thomasites, bear epigraphs in Iranian languages.

 What precise groups of settlers arrived, and at what precise times, remain matters of doubt in the case of the Thomas Christians. We are told that the Patriarch of Seleucia-Ctesiphon reproved the bishop of Rawarishir, in the southwestern Persian province of Fars, for neglecting his duties, which included oversight of churches in India and other places on the Arabian Sea. Such troubles took place in the seventh and eighth centuries. Quite probably Indian churches had been established at about that time.

 The early Church in India remained on at peace, treasuring the same ethnic and cultural characteristics as the rest of the local community. Its members enjoyed the goodwill of the other religious communities as well as the political support of the Hindu rulers. The Christians of India were known as St. Thomas Christians welcomed missionaries and migrants from other churches, some of whom sought to escape persecution in their own countries in the fifth century.

A Synod of the Persian Church ( 410 AD ) affirmed the faith of the ecumenical synod of Nicea and acknowledged the Metropolitan of Selucia-Ctesiphon as the Catholicos of the East. Not long after, the Christological controversies of Chalcedon, fuelled by the strains between the Persian and Byzantine empires swayed the Persian Church to declare itself Nestorian and its head to assume the title of the Patriarch of the East ( Babylon ). From their base in the then flourishing theological school of Nsisibis, Nestorian missionaries began to move to India, central Asia, China and Ethiopia to teach their doctrines. This would later be one of the greatest missionary journeys ever undertaken.

By the seventh century, specific references of the Indian Church began to appear in Persian records. The Metropolitans of India and China are mentioned in the consecration records of the Patriarch of the East. All throughout this time, it had been an ascertained fact that the Indian Church was autonomous under its own Metropolitan. All temporal powers were vested in the Archdeacon and he was the undisputed leader and the Head of the Malankara Christians. Most of the Archdeacons were from the Paklomattom family who ruled the Church from AD 345 to 1308.