Paul Yohannan
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part B
No, this is not accurate.
It is entirely accurate, or else I would not have posted it. I am not in the business of misleading members of CF.com
First thing to consider is that the Jewish believers Peter, James and most likely Thomas , were still under the law and zealous for it way after Jesus death. We see this all through the book of Acts. In chapter 10 , 15 , 21 etc. In Acts 21, the Jewish believers were still zealous if the law and the customs and sacrificing animals in the temple and other things. It is thought that Acts 21 was written about 64 AD or later.
Unlikely, since Sts. Peter and Paul had been martyred by that time.
So to say that Thomas went off to the Gentiles and made some building called s church , or even to imply it would be hard to believe or accept given the climate of the church and the many issues around that time .
We know for a fact that he went on a mission of evangelization in the East. His early converts included King Agbar of Edessa. His disciples included Sts. Addai and Mari.
What is more, archaeological evidence confirms the Church of the East, until the persecutions of Timur the Lame, in the 13th century, extended into China, Tibet and Mongolia.
The Acts 15 counsel where they wanted to make Gentiles keep the law of Moses and be circumcised to he saved was around 50 AD or so.
That is not what "they wanted to do." The Council of Jerusalem, presided over by St. James the Just, did away with those requirements.
But a closer look at the St. Thomas so called "Church building" . Here are some considerations about the myth of St Thomas church
http://indiafacts.org/the-mylapore-st-thomas-myth-that-just-doesnt-seem-to-die-part-1/
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That article, a mere blog post, is an irrelevant expression of opinion.
My sources are The Blackwell Companion to Eastern Christianity and The Oxford Handbook of Christian Worship.
One very offensive aspect of that article, by the way, is that the author cites the opinions of various dated Protestant scholars while entirely ignoring the historical record of the Christian community in India, which strikes me as an appalling instance of a neo-Colonial, regressive mentality.
In other words, the story of St. Thomas coming to India is primarily based on a hagiography called the Acts of Thomas –
No. The Acts of Thomas is rejected in the Nasrani churches as being spurious Gnostic apocrypha.
in which we find no indication of Thomas ever landing in India – and which, being a hagiography, has no historical authenticity.
It is not a hagiography, but, your statement that hagiographies have no historical authenticity is both offensive and wrong. Hagiographies are a vital source of information on the early Church even for secular scholars.
For a pious Christian, their content should be regarded as second only to Holy Scripture and the liturgical texts of the Church.
The story was then reinvented many times over by the Syrian Christians who sought refuge in India,
The Nasrani are not ethnically or otherwise Syrian.
They historically spoke the Syriac language, but so did most Jews across Asia.
There was a substantial Jewish community in India at the time of the Apostle Thomas, by the way, and it continues to survive as well. See the Kochin Jews of whom Vidal Sasoon was a prominent member, and the Bene Israel.
It is also dismaying by the way to see you characterize not just one Christian denomination, but around 8-10 denominations, that collectively comprise an entire ethnic group within the population of South India, as lying refugees.
As it happens, the Indian Christian population, from a genetic perspective, is Indian. They are more genetically and ethnically Indian than the Iranians or Parsees, who did as it happens flee persecution in the Persian Empire ( a problem never faced to that extent by Assyrian Christians).
Also, Syriac Christians of the Middle East are largely resident in Iraq, Lebanon, Iran, and Palestine; they historically were extremely common in the Tur Abdin area of Turkey. To call them Syrian is a huge error; almost none of the Assyrians live in Syria, and only some of the Syriac Orthodox.
and was later picked up and reported by Marco Polo in his encounters with some of these Syrian Christians.
Marco Polo did not
From here, the story was lapped up by the Portuguese who then ‘established’ the link between this legendary St. Thomas and India by building the church on the Mylapore beach.
No, the Portuguese attempted to forcibly converted the Indian Orthodox to Roman Catholicism. They failed, but did manage to inflict some cultural damage.
However, we know a lot about the Indian church, its history, and liturgy, before the Portuguese.
Yet, to this day this myth lives on. Attempts are being made to unabashedly perpetuate the propagation of this falsehood. Tomes of literature are written by theologians who pass off as historians and other ‘eminences’ who invariably have some ideological or political agenda. Starting from the Protestant missionary Claudius Buchanan to the Roman Catholic historian Fr. A Mundanan and the ‘historical fiction’ writer of our own time, William Dalrymple, all have parroted the same fabrication that originated with the Syrian Christians and have tried to legitimize it as the ‘truth’."
There is a lot of sites that expose the myth but regardless, such a story is clouded with doubt.
Not to mention the most important part the scripture speaks of the church meeting in homes all through the recorded record and this was the apostolic order. Even if we did suppose that Thomas did use a pagan temple to have meetings in this would by no means justify calling the man made building a church by any means. Or could it bring proven that if Thomas was there that he called it a church. Such understanding came later and attached to the myth as if the building was a church.
It is a good study to go and see what the church is as scripture shows and what the church does , .where they meet etc all by scripture alone. This should be enough to shake the error if calling a man made tradition or man made structure "the church" , or trying to use confusing words to make it so
Continued in part C ...
I have no idea where you found this misinformation, but it is astonishingly offensive to see an entire ethnic group of my coreligionists libelled and accused of propagating a myth with the assistance of hapless, misguided Orientalist westerners.
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