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JARL CHARPENTIER
proved that this missionary was St. Thomas nor is there so far
any definite reminiscence left of Christian missions in the South
of India during the first centuries A.D.
The testimony of Cosmas Indicopleustes, however, makes
it highly probable that a Nestorian church was founded in
Malabar and Ceylon some considerable time before 500 A.D.
about which date our author paid a visit to those countries.
Under these circumstances it seems highly probable that such
communities had been founded by Nestorians who fled from the
persecutions in Persia during the first half of the 4th century
and shortly after that. If so were the case they would not,
a century and a half later, have found time completely to forget
their origin and to style themselves Christians of St. Thomas.
But a little later — say after the conquest of the Sassanian
Empire by the Mohammedans in the middle of the 7th century —
these South Indian Christians may have been completely cut off
from the connection with their brethren in Persia and thus have
successively lost the contact with their real tradition. And as
it had already for a long time been an established truth within
the Church that St. Thomas had been the Apostle of India these
Christians, who knew of no fellow-believers within that distant
land, by and by came to believe themselves the descendants of
converts made by the Apostle. Consequently his missionary
labours must have been located in Malabar and neighbouring
parts. Exactly why Mylapore was chosen to be the place of
his martyry will probably never be known.
I feel still more confident in the probability of these
suggestions because there are undoubted similarities between the
South Indian tradition and the Acts of St. Thomas — on which
we shall speak presently. Thus in both of them the Apostle
arrives in India by sea; in both of them he is killed by the
sting of a lance; and in both of them — which has scarcely
been pointed out before — he acts as a master-builder. For,
in the Acts he is sent for by the King of India to build a
palace; and in the South Indian tradition he himself builds a
church from the enormous timber he had brought to land. Thus,
in my opinion, there is a strong probability that the South
Indian tradition was originally derived from some version of the
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