When Portugal Met the Syriac Christians of India
When Portuguese ships reached the southwest coast of India at the end of the 1400s, they did not find Christianity for the first time. They found Christians who already had their own history, leaders, worship, and sacred language.
These communities are often called the Saint Thomas Christians. Their exact earliest history is hard to reconstruct, but they had existed in India for centuries before Portuguese rule. Their church life had strong ties to Syriac Christianity and to bishops from the Church of the East.
Europeans found an old Christian world
Vasco da Gama reached India in 1498. Formal Portuguese contact with Thomas Christians grew soon after. The Europeans and the local Christians could both call themselves Christian, but they came from very different church worlds.
The Christians of Kerala used Syriac in worship. Their Bible tradition included the Peshitta, the main Syriac Bible tradition. Their church connections looked east toward Mesopotamia and Persia. The Portuguese came from Latin Catholic Europe and were tied to the pope, the Portuguese crown, and a colonial system called the padroado.
At first, contact could be friendly. The Portuguese offered military and political power. Local Christians had status and networks of their own. But the relationship became unequal as Portuguese control grew.
Rome tried to reshape the Indian church
By the late 1500s, Portuguese church leaders wanted the Thomas Christians brought more closely under Latin Catholic control. They questioned East Syriac theology, church law, customs, and books.
The key event was the Synod of Diamper in 1599. It was organized by Aleixo de Menezes, the Portuguese archbishop of Goa. The synod condemned some local customs and a number of Syriac books. It ordered some texts corrected and some destroyed.
After Diamper, church leaders produced a revised Syriac liturgy with many changes drawn from Latin Catholic practice. Scholar István Perczel describes this as an attempt to replace important parts of the older East Syriac, or Chaldaean, tradition.
It is important not to turn this into a false story that “the Portuguese burned the Peshitta.” The surviving evidence points to a wider program. Liturgical books, canon law, theological works, and other Syriac texts were judged, edited, banned, or destroyed. The Syriac Bible tradition itself survived.
Resistance changed Indian Christianity
The effort to control the Thomas Christians caused long-term anger. In 1653, a large group took part in the Coonan Cross Oath, also called the Bent Cross Oath. It became a symbol of resistance to Portuguese and Jesuit control.
The community later split along several lines. Some remained in communion with Rome while keeping an East Syriac heritage. Others developed ties with the Syriac Orthodox Church of Antioch and adopted West Syriac forms. More divisions followed in later centuries.
The important point is simple. European Christianity did not arrive in India and create a church from nothing. It met an older Christian culture. The struggle that followed was about who had the right to control that culture, its bishops, its worship, and its books.
Sources and further reading: István Perczel on the struggle over rite and jurisdiction; Perczel on manuscripts that survived Diamper; Cambridge, A History of Christianity in India.
Read the Bible with Original Names
A Bible for people who care about how it was created.
See original names and explore what words meant in the languages people spoke. Feel the history behind the text as you read.
Free browser reader and EPUB. No purchase required.