SAINT THOMAS, CHRISTIANS OP, a remarkable religious community settled from a very early date on the Malabar coast of the Indian peninsula. They take their name from the apostle St. Thomas, who, according to •a very ancient tradition, for which, however, no very positive evidence or satisfactory authority can be alleged, preached in India, and is regarded as the apostle of that country. As early as the 6th. e. the well known voyager, Cosmas Indicopleustes, reports of numerous Christian communities settled in India, under the pastoral care of bishops sent from Persia. To this eiremn stance it may be attributed that the Indian Christians, like those of what may he called the mother church of the Persian kingdom, lapsed into the Nestorian heresy, which, after the decrees of Ephesus and Chalcedon, having been suppressed by the civil laws of the Roman empire, was driven beyond the limits of Roman authority, and found its most favored sent among thb hostile Persians. Once established among the people, these opinions continued to be professed by the Christians who survived in those regions the vicissitudes of the revolutions of which India in mediaeval times was the scene. Their seat was almost entirely along the Malabar coast, and extended from the s. cape, Comorin, as far as Calicut ; and they are found scattered throughout this length over the whole space from the western declivity of the Ghants to the sea. From the time of their lapsing into Nestorianism, their bishops were ordained by the Nestorian patriarch of Babylon. and they possessed certain civil rights nnder tie successive dynasties which ruled in the s. of India. On the whole, however, they were much oppressed; and on the arrival of the Portuguese in 1598, the Christians of St. Thomas,
although Nestorians, regarded them as their deliverers. Nevertheless, the diversity of creed was at once recognized by the western missionaries, and attempts were made by the successive bodies of missionaries Franciscans, Dominicans, and finally Jesuits, to reconcile them to the Roman church. A union, more or less real, was effected by a synod held at Diamper in 1599; and one of the Jesuit fathers. padre Roz, was named bishop in 1601. This union, however, was not lasting; they fell away once again from the Roman eommidon, and the expulsion of the Portuguese from Cochin by the Dutch completed the disruption. A considerable number of them, however, were again united to Rome through the missionaries of the Carmelite order; and toward the close of the 17th c., the emperor Leopold I. obtained the leave of the Dutch to send a bishop and 12 priests of that order to the Malabar coast. One of the most serious impediments to the influence of those missionaries, as well with the schismatics as with the heathen, was found in the intrigues and jealousies of the Portuguese. In later times, the Christians of St. Thomas, have for the most part been absorbed in the native Christian populattion. Their tenets were in the main those of the NestOrians of ChaIdea and Mesopotamia, about the precise details of which much controversy has prevailed, and many conflict ing statements have been made, according to the religious views of the various travelers or missionaries who have reported regarding them. Much of this conflict of testimony arises from a confusion of names rather than of things. • See NESTORIANS.