Indian Antiquary Vol 57

Author(s): Richard Carnac Temple, Charles E A W Oldham, Krishnaswami Aiyangar
Publisher: Swati Publications

Page 15

JANUARY, 1928)
ST. THOMAS IN SOUTH INDIA
3. The Legend of Setting up Crosses. Paragraph 6 states that Malabar tradition is wrong in holding that St. Thomas set up crosses. Even if this allegation was true, the whole tradition cannot be discarded because of this one anachronism. But there are various considerations to be taken into account.
(i) Early Christian monuments of Oriental countries have not yet been sufficiently scrutinized as to assert confidently that the worship of the Cross was not in vogue in the East before a certain date.
(ii) The Acts of the Apostles do not purport to give the complete doings of all the Apostles, and even if it is true that other Apostles did not set up Crosses this legend does not altogether 'fall to the ground. Thomas might have felt the special need in India of getting up some visible emblem of Christian worship in the place of similar Non-Christian emblems (e.g., the phallic cult).
(iii) St. Ephraim was not perhaps indulging in a mere metaphor when he sang that "The Cross of Light has obliterated India's darkened shades." Does it mean that Thomas replaced the Cross of darkness by the cross of light? It is also significant that no other country has made a speciality of open air Crosses as Malabar has done. The number and prominence of these huge granite Crosses in Malabar is a feature that deserve special consideration in this connection.
I do not, however, claim that this part of the Malabar tradition is completely historical, and it is not essential for my purpose. The worship of the Cross might as well have been a development since the arrival of the Persian colonists, but this is by no means proved. Evidently, the Thomis. tio tradition will not fall to the ground, even if we discard the story about setting up Crosses.
4. Portuguese Accretions. Your correspondent labours hard to prove in paragraphs 7 to 16 that the Portuguese embellished the Malabar tradition, and that the dates of the Apostle's arrival and martyrdom were "invented by them. But ho has produced no single shred of evidence to prove that view, and offers only guesses and surmises instead.
(a) He supposes that as a rosult of Portuguese interpolation, we have the dates 50, 51 and 52 A.D. for the arrival of St. Thomas. The very fact that there is no agreement on this date is sufficient proof against this supposition. If the Portuguese had concocted the date, there would necessarily have been greater uniformity about it. These discrepancies, by the way, do not materially weaken the tradition, seeing that early Christian chronology (e.g., the date of Nativity) is by no means accurately fixed.
(b). So far as I am aware, the Portuguese were not much interested in the Apostolic origin of the Malabar Church. Instead of embellishing the theory they would, if they could have probably tried to question it. But they found the mediæval travellers unanimously acclaiming the tradition and they were compelled, willy-nilly, to grant the apostolic claim put forward by the St. Thomas Christians. I do not think that any one who knows the methods and habits of the Portuguese would credit Mr. Joseph's supposition that the Portuguese taught such works as de Miraculis and Passio in their Seminaries in the sixteenth century. The supposition that the Portuguese borrowed from the Acta is also unwarranted. That work was not known in Malabar, so far as I am aware, and even if such a borrowing happened, it does not materially weaken the Malabar tradition, since it is admitted that that tradition existed in some form in pre-Portuguese times.
5. The Pre-Portuguese Tradition. In spite of the many blemishes of the Malabar tradition Mr. Joseph finds it hard to explain away the fact that the tradition of the preaching of St. Thomas in Malabar existed long before the arrival of the Portuguese. That tradition has been recorded by early travellers like Marco Polo, Marignolli, Friar Odoric, John of Monte Corvino and Nicolo Conti. Their versions vary, but this must have been due to the imperfect understanding of these globe-trotters rather than to the feebleness of the tradition itself.
The Malabar tradition existed in songs and poems, and at present it is embodied in two extant works, Märgam-Kali Pattu and Thomas Ramban's Song (called Thômd Parvam).