The Peshitta and the Saint Thomas Christians: What Survived Diamper
The Peshitta is the main Syriac Bible tradition used by many Syriac-speaking churches. For Christians in Kerala, Syriac was more than an old language. It connected worship in India with a much wider Christian world to the east.
The Portuguese challenge to this world was serious, but it did not erase it. Modern manuscript research is showing just how much survived.
A Syriac Bible tradition in South India
The Saint Thomas Christians of Kerala had long ties with the Church of the East. Bishops and books came through networks that reached Mesopotamia and Persia. Syriac was used in worship even though everyday speech in Kerala was Malayalam.
The Peshitta belongs to that Syriac world. It is not one single old book kept in one place. It is a textual tradition copied in many manuscripts. Bible books, lectionaries, prayer books, hymns, church law, and theology all traveled through the same manuscript culture.
That difference matters. When later sources speak about “Syriac books” in India, they are not always talking about a complete Peshitta Bible. They may mean a liturgical book, a legal collection, a commentary, or another work.
What Diamper banned, changed, and failed to erase
At the Synod of Diamper in 1599, Portuguese Catholic leaders condemned a number of local customs and Syriac works. Some books were ordered burned. Other texts were corrected to match Latin Catholic teaching and practice more closely.
For a long time, it was common to say that the flames destroyed the old literary culture almost completely. Manuscript research has changed that picture. István Perczel has shown that texts survived in Indian and European collections. Some local Christians hid books. Some missionaries kept books they had taken. Scribes even continued copying some condemned works long after 1599.
A striking example appeared in a collection cataloged by the Hill Museum & Manuscript Library. A sixteenth-century East Syriac Nomocanon, a book of church law, survived even though the work had been formally banned at Diamper.
This does not mean the Portuguese campaign caused no damage. Books were lost, rites were changed, and church authority was redirected. It means the destruction was incomplete, and the surviving manuscripts let historians recover parts of the world that officials tried to reshape.
Where the tradition is now
The old Saint Thomas Christian community did not stay one church. Centuries of conflict, new outside ties, and reform movements produced several churches.
Today, communities that trace their history to the Saint Thomas Christians include the Syro-Malabar Catholic Church, the Chaldean Syrian Church linked with the Assyrian Church of the East, the Malankara Orthodox Syrian Church, the Jacobite Syrian Christian Church, the Syro-Malankara Catholic Church, the Mar Thoma Syrian Church, and the Malabar Independent Syrian Church.
Their worship and theology are not all the same. Some keep East Syriac traditions. Others use West Syriac traditions. Some are Catholic, some Oriental Orthodox, some connected with the Church of the East, and some shaped by later reform.
The manuscripts now being digitized in Kerala are important because they sit underneath these later divisions. They show that the history of the Bible in India was not a side story. It was part of the larger history of how Christian texts were copied, controlled, translated, and preserved.
Sources and further reading: István Perczel, “Have the Flames of Diamper Destroyed All the Old Manuscripts?”; HMML on surviving Syriac manuscripts in Kerala; Cambridge, “South India”.
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