India's Ancient Christmas Tradition

[TomSea]

India's Ancient Christmas Tradition
By Ela Dutt
http://www.newsindiatimes.com
Posted 2016-12-17 06:19 GMT

Christianity came to India centuries before it entered the Americas or Western Europe and as such, Christmas deserves to be seen as an ancient festival of India and Indian-American Christians, Ela Dutt reports.

Christmas is celebrated by Indians the world over not just as the more visible manifestation of the Hollywood, mass-produced version, but also as an ancient festival with indigenous Indian traditions.

Christianity was brought to India in the beginning of the last millennium by St. Thomas the Apostle in the middle of the First Century, 20 years after the death of Christ, notes Rev. Columba Stewart, executive director of the Hill Museum & Manuscript Library (HMML) and professor of theology at Saint John's School of Theology and Seminary in Collegeville, Minnesota.

That is corroborated by evidence of the Roman trading post in Kerala, proof that Christianity could easily have been part of the imports along with the trade missions that frequented the post, said Rev. Stewart who is described by the Guggenheim Foundation which awarded him the 2016 fellowship, as a modern Benedictine monk recognized as an expert on the history of early Christianity and monasticism.

The original Christian churches in Kerala conducted their liturgy in the Syriac language and those churches continue the traditions, Rev. Stewart told News India Times. (Syriac language is a dialect of the Aramaic language that was used by Jesus.) When the Portuguese came to India in the 15th Century, they were surprised not just by the existence of Christianity but also by the different practices dissimilar to the Catholic tradition, he noted.

Continued: http://aina.org/ata/20161217011935.htm

[The_Reader_David]

Centuries before arriving in the Americas, but surely not centuries before arriving in Western Europe.   The Holy Apostle Thomas's missionary journey to the East, including finally India, was contemporaneous with the Holy Apostle Paul's missionary activity, which as we all know, included writing a letter to the already existing church in Rome.

Actually the juxtaposition of the news source and the content is interesting.  The Mar Thomas churches of India were for centuries part of the Church of the East, of which the Assyrian Church of the East is the last existing remnant, which broke communion with the churches of the Roman Empire at the time of the Third Ecumenical Council (Ephesus 431), preferring the Christology of Nestorius to Orthodox Christology.  After the rise of Islam, the Mar Thomas Christians were cut off from contact with the Assyrian church, but at some point, they sought to reestablish contact with churches "in the West".  When they did so, the did not manage to reestablish contact with the then much diminished Assyrians, nor with the Orthodox or Latin churches, but with the Syrian Jacobites, along with the Copts and Ethiopians the polar opposites of Nestorius on Christology, adherents of Monophysite Christology who very much agreed with the Ephesian condemnation of Nestorius and broke communion with everyone else over the Fourth Ecumenical Council (Chalcedon 451).