SYRIAN CHRISTIANS. A community in India. According to a tradition cherished by the Syrian Christ ians in Southern India, the Apostle St. Thomas founded seven churches in Cochin and Travancore, and then extended his labours to the Coromandel coast, where he was martyred. The apostle is supposed to have landed about 52 A.D. In the second century Demetrius of Alexandria is said to have been requested by natives of India to send a Christian teacher to them. Pantaenus of Alexandria, who undertook to go, and sailed between ISO and 190 A.D., found some " to whom Bartholomew, one of the apostles, had preached," already in possession of the Gospel of Matthew in Hebrew. The traditions in fact (whatever their value) waver between St. Thomas and St. Bartholomew. According to Dorotheus of Tyre (254-313 A.D.) and Jerome (390 A.D.), St. Thomas was martyred at Calamina in India. According to Rufinus, his remains were taken from India to Ephesus. It has been urged by some that the Thomas who introduced the Gospel into India was rather Thomas the Manichtean. He is supposed to have gone to India in 277 A.D. But still a third Thomas is associated with the evangelization of India. About the middle of the fourth century one Thomas Cana, a Syrian merchant, is said to have con ducted a mission to the Malabar coast to improve the conditions of the Christians there. In any case, from this time until the arrival of the Portuguese in India the natives of Malabar seem to have welcomed the visitations and teachings of Nestorian and Jacobite Bishops without troubling to distinguish between them. In the sixteenth century they seem to have come under the authority of the Nestorian Patriarch of Mesopotamia. When the Portuguese came, they lost little time in converting the Malabar Church into a branch of the Roman Church (A.D. 1599). But the conduct of the Jesuits led before long to a split in the Malabar Church and the rise of two parties, the Romo-Syrians and the Jacobite Syrians, who acknowledged the spiritual supremacy of the Patriarch of Antioch. The Romo-Syrians are now known as
Catholics of the Syrian rite. The converts made among the various castes of the Hindus by the Portuguese formed a third party, known as Catholics of the Latin rite. A long dispute between the claims of Rome, Babylon, and Antioch sharpened the divisions of the Malabar Church. In 1893 Titus Mar Thoma was chosen to preside over a Reformed Party of Jacobite Syrians, who prefer to be known as St. Thomas' Syrians. The original Jacobite Syrians are under Mar Dionysius, and owe allegiance to the Patriarch of Antioch. There are besides the Chal damn Syrians who are so called because in 1856 a large section of the Syrians asked the Catholic Chaldazan Patriarch of Babylon to send them a Chaldiean Bishop, 23 which he did in 1861. It seems that " while the Jacobite Syrians have accepted and acknowledged the ecclesiasti cal supremacy of the Patriarch of Antioch, the St. Thomas' Syrians, maintaining that the Jacobite creed was introduced into Malabar only in the seventeenth century after a section of the church had shaken off the Roman supremacy, uphold the ecclesiastical autonomy of the church, whereby the supreme control of the spiritual and temporal affairs of the church Is declared to be in the hands of the Metropolitan of Malabar. The St. Thomas' Syrians hold that the consecration of a Bishop by, or with the sanction of the Patriarch of Babylon, Alexan dria, or Antioch, gives no more validity or sanctity to that office than consecration by the Metropolitan of Malabar, the supreme head of the church in Malabar, inasmuch as this church is as ancient and apostolic as any other, being founded by the Apostle St. Thomas;