Is Christianity a Western Religion?
The case for Christianity in India — and why the faith reached Kerala long before it reached most of Europe.
It's a common line, repeated so often it rarely gets questioned: Christianity is a "Western" religion, brought to India by European colonisers. The trouble is that the history doesn't cooperate with the claim. Jesus was never European. Neither were HIS apostles, HIS mother, or the writers of the New Testament. They were all Jewish men and women from Judea and the surrounding region, a part of the world that sits in Asia, not Europe.
Even more striking: there is real historical evidence that organised Christian communities existed on India's Malabar Coast centuries before Christianity became the settled religion of most of Britain, and well over a thousand years before the first Portuguese ships reached Kerala in 1498.
I. An Asian Faith From the Start
Christianity was born in Judea, a Roman province in the Middle East, part of the continent of Asia. Jesus preached in Aramaic, a Semitic language of the Near East. His first followers were Jewish fishermen, tax collectors, and tradesmen from Galilee. The very word "Christian" was first used not in Rome, but in Antioch, a city in what is now Turkey.1 For its first few centuries, the faith's major centres, Jerusalem, Antioch, Alexandria, Edessa, were all in Asia and North Africa. Rome only became the dominant centre of Christianity later, and Britain later still.
II. Christians on the Malabar Coast, Long Before Colonisation
Kerala's Saint Thomas Christians, sometimes called the Nasrani community, trace their origin to the apostle Thomas landing at the port of Muziris in AD 52.2 That specific date rests on oral tradition and cannot be independently verified, and honesty requires saying so plainly. But the claim that Christianity itself arrived in India only with European colonisers doesn't survive contact with the documented record.
Eusebius of Caesarea, the first major church historian, records that Pantaenus of Alexandria travelled to India and found a Christian community already using a Gospel of Matthew.3
Stone crosses and inscriptions on the Malabar Coast provide physical evidence of a Christian presence in the region.4
Cosmas Indicopleustes, an Alexandrian merchant-monk, personally records organised Christian communities with bishops in Malabar and Ceylon.5
The Quilon copper plates, engraved land grants from a local Hindu ruler, record legal and trade privileges given to an established Syrian Christian community in Kollam.6
Vasco da Gama's Portuguese fleet reaches Kerala, and finds a thriving indigenous Christian community already there, one that had never heard of the Pope and worshipped in Syriac, not Latin.7
The precise AD 52 date for Thomas's arrival and the founding of seven specific churches.
Eusebius's 4th-century account of Pantaenus finding an existing Christian community in India in the 2nd century.
Physical stone crosses, Cosmas Indicopleustes's eyewitness account, and the dated Quilon copper plates.British and Indian historical scholarship on Malabar Christianity
III. Why the "Western Import" Idea Persists
The confusion is understandable. European colonisation, especially the Portuguese effort to bring Kerala's ancient Christians under Latin Rite obedience at the Synod of Diamper in 1599, is a real and often painful chapter of history.8 But colonisation is not the same event as Christianity's arrival. The Portuguese didn't introduce Christianity to India. They found it already there, already indigenous, already a thousand years old by their own reckoning, and tried to reshape it to look more European. Conflating that later colonial chapter with the faith's actual origin gets the history backwards.
"Indian in culture, Christian in faith, and Syrian in liturgy." Traditional description of the Saint Thomas Christian community
None of this means every detail in the Thomas tradition is proven history; the earliest specific date claims aren't independently verifiable, and that should be said honestly rather than smoothed over. What is well documented is that organised Christian communities existed in India centuries before European ships arrived, which is the actual point at issue.
IV. The Bottom Line
Christianity did not originate in the West, and it did not arrive in India by way of the West either. It began among Jewish believers in Asia, and reached India's shores through the same eastward trade routes that carried spices and silk, most likely centuries before it took firm root in most of northern Europe. Calling it a Western religion isn't just historically shaky. It gets the map backwards. (You can read my earlier blog about Apostle Thomas' ministry in India here.)9
— The Christian Case
- Acts 11:26.
- Saint Thomas Christian tradition, as recorded in the Malayalam ballad "Thomma Parvam" and affirmed by the modern Nasrani community; see Britannica, "Thomas Christians."
- Eusebius of Caesarea, Ecclesiastical History, Book V, Ch. 10.
- Stone crosses and inscriptions on the Malabar Coast, discussed in Britannica, "Thomas Christians," and multiple Kerala church histories.
- Cosmas Indicopleustes, Christian Topography (c. 550 AD).
- Quilon (Kollam) Syrian Copper Plates, c. 849 AD, granted by Ayyan Adikal to Mar Sapir Iso of the Tharisapalli church.
- Accounts of the Portuguese encounter with existing Malabar Christians upon arrival in 1498, widely documented in histories of the Saint Thomas Christians.
- Synod of Diamper, 1599, convened by Archbishop Aleixo de Menezes to bring the Saint Thomas Christians under Roman Latin Rite authority.
- "Did Jesus’ Disciple Thomas Minister In India?" https://rajkumarrichard.blogspot.com/2021/11/did-jesus-disciple-thomas-minister-in.html
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