The Incredible Journey

[Guest guest]

(Note: see paragraph eight which states: 'Moreover they are agreed - as

are many of their Hindu neighbours - that St Thomas is not dead: that he

is still present in Kerala, guarding his followers and guiding his

church.'

 

http://www.guardianunlimited.co.uk/Archive/Article/0,4273,3986339,00.html

 

The Incredible Journey (Thomas/Murugan related)

 

Did St Thomas found a church in south India? William Dalrymple unravels

a Christian mystery

 

Saturday April 15, 2000

 

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 neighbours - 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."

 

William Dalrymple's film, Doubting Thomas, the third in his series

Indian Journeys, will be shown on BBC2 on Monday at 7.10pm.