The Early Medieval Era · 849-1054 · Malabar Coast
St. Thomas Christians of India
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About This Movement
On the Malabar coast of India there was, long before any European arrived, a Christian community that traced itself to the apostle Thomas, worshipped in Syriac, and received its bishops from the patriarch of the Church of the East in Mesopotamia — an Indian church inside an Asian communion, on nobody's European line at all. What it left of itself in this period is mostly not writing but objects and documents drawn up by others: granite crosses carved with inscriptions in Pahlavi, the language of Persia, and above all a set of copper plates issued around 849 in which a local ruler grants land and trading privileges to a church at Kollam and names the Christians as a recognised community with standing among their neighbours. Almost nothing survives in which these Christians describe themselves in their own words before about 1500. Which makes them at once one of the oldest continuously existing Christian communities in the world and one of the hardest to hear.
Sources
- Quilon (Tharisappalli) copper plates, c. 849 CE (primary) — Royal grant of land and privileges to the Tharisappalli church community under Mar Sapir Iso, discussed in recent scholarship (e.g. the Tarisappalli Copperplates study on academia.edu). Specialist editions only; no single standard English reader edition.
- Ishoyahb III, letter to Shem'on of Rev Ardashir on the lapse of the Indian episcopate (c. 650s) (primary) — Church of the East patriarchal correspondence attesting India's place in, and friction with, the Persian hierarchy.
- Pahlavi-inscribed 'Persian crosses' (St Thomas Mount, Kottayam, etc.) (primary)
- Cosmas Indicopleustes, Christian Topography (trans. McCrindle, 1897; online) (primary) — Outside travelers'-notice attestation of Christians in Male (Malabar) with clergy from Persia — technically just before this period (c. 550) but the standard attestation bridge into it; translation available online.
- A. Mathias Mundadan, History of Christianity in India, vol. 1: From the Beginning up to the Middle of the Sixteenth Century (CHAI, 1984) (secondary) — Standard scholarly history from within the tradition's homeland academy. Honest about how thin the early inside voice is.
- Cambridge History of Christianity, vol. 3, ch. 3: 'Beyond empire I' (Igor Dorfmann-Lazarev) (reference)