When Jesus was born, Helvetia was a remote province on the edge of the Roman empire. Britain was a hostile land which Roman culture had hardly touched, a source of copper and tin. When we think of the early expansion of the church, we tend to think of Paul's journeys reported in Acts, or of the seven churches in the Book of Revelation, of the northern and eastern Mediterranean.
But Jesus sent his apostles to teach "all nations". Paul, a Jew, took the good news to the synagogues of Asia Minor, Greece and Rome, But we forget that other apostles, also Jews, preached in synagogues elsewhere. Groups of Jews lived all around the Mediterranean, and in present-day Iraq, in Upper Egypt, in Ethiopia, the Arabian peninsula, and as far away as the Indian coast. The ground was prepared for the Message.
Tradition has it that Thomas went to India only a few years after the time of Jesus. One story tells how an Indian king sent to Syria to find an architect to build a palace. The merchant whom he sent met Jesus, the carpenter's son, who recommended his 'servant' Thomas. Thomas went. The king gave him vast sums of money, but Thomas gave it to the poor. When the king found out, Thomas told him of the far richer palace in heaven his money would earn, and the king was converted.
Story or not, there were certainly Christian communities by the fourth century in southern India, both on the western, Malabar coast (present-day Kerala), and on the east (the Coromandel Coast, in Tamil Nadu, south of Madras). They had links with the Persian and Chaldean churches in Iran and Iraq, and with the churches based around Edessa (now Sanlıurfa in eastern Turkey).
Before the rise of Islam, Syriac, a dialect of Aramaic, was widely spoken in western Asia, including India. The Malabar churches held their services in Syriac, and were looked after (not every well, because of the distance!) by the Chaldean patriarch in Baghdad. They had split off from the main Christian churches after the Council of Chalcedon in 451 owing to a disagreement about how Jesus was both truly God and truly human, but again, nobody noticed, because of the distance! The clergy were also untrained and unsophisticated.
All this changed after 1498, when Vasco da Gama landed on the Malabar coast. The churches came to be administered from Rome, though services continued to be held in Syriac. In the 17th century, dissatisfaction with the Portuguese led to the founding of a separate church - this looked to Antioch for leadership, another group of Christians who had separated themselves from the orthodox in 451, but for a different reason!
The British came to Kerala at the end of the 18th century, and in 1810, the British Resident in Travancore, Colonel Munro, arranged funds to endow a seminary at Kottayam. He also invited the Church Missionary Society, CMS, to help. One result of this was the translation of the Bible into Malayalam, completed in 1841.
But another result was further disagreement. The church needed to be reformed - children were being appointed as clergy, other clergy were immoral, the liturgy was incomprehensible, and Professor Abraham Malpan at the seminary took a stand against unorthodox prayers and practices in worship. There was a period of painful wrangling, with interventions from the Syrian patriarch of Antioch, and a long legal dispute about who was entitled to the funds for the seminary. In the end, a third church was formed in 1889, the Mar Thoma Church. (A second Uniate Catholic church founded in 1930 brought the total of churches in "the Thomas tradition" to four!)
The Mar Thoma Church was the product of a reformation, but it retains a distinctive liturgy (now in Malayalam, rather than Old Syriac) and its own traditions steeped in Indian life - though this is not always an advantage: the margavasi ("followers of the Way") do not fit neatly into the caste system! There are ten dioceses, and a General Assembly which is the supreme authority in the church. The church has always been very active in evangelization, Christian education and youth work.
In the 1930s the Mar Thoma Church forged formal links with the worldwide Anglican communion, and we and they recognize each other's ministry and seek to work together - just as we do with our Old Catholic friends here in Switzerland. So it is a special delight to welcome them as friends here at St Ursula's.
HD