Pantænus, the saintly and learned Presbyter and Christian philosopher of Alexandria and the renowned teacher of the illustrious church fathers, Clement and Origen, is the first honoured name which finds historic sanction in the grand roll of Christian missionaries to India. He visited Malabar, South India, during the last decade of the second century. He was a man wonderfully equipped by deep spiritual insight and piety and also by philosophic training and metaphysical acumen to become the messenger of Christian truth and life to the Buddhists and Brahmans who lived side by side in South India in those days.
We know little of his work in that land. He found in Malabar a colony of Jewish Christians who possessed a copy of the Gospel of Matthew in the Hebrew tongue, said to have been given to them by the Apostle Bartholomew. It is not known, however, whether this last named apostle laboured among these Christians in that region.
Probably a century later that Christian community formed connection with Antioch, Syria, which was the first of all Christian missionary centres; but which, through its Nestorian faith, soon lost its missionary ardour.
1. And thus emerges out of the darkness into its long and unique history the Syrian Church of Malabar.
It has passed through many vicissitudes and has lost much, if not all, of its positive Christian influence and missionary character. During a recent visit to [pg 165] that region I was saddened by the sight of this Christian community which had lived all these centuries in the centre of a heathen district with apparently no concern for the religious condition of the surrounding, non-Christian, masses—content to be as a separate caste without religious influence upon, or ambition to bring Christ into the life of, its benighted neighbours.
This church has survived its own apathy, on the one side, and Roman Catholic inquisition on the other, and appears before the world as what it really is—the only indigenous Christian Church in the peninsula of India. It enjoys the unique distinction of having lived more than a millennium and a half in a heathen land, for a thousand years of which it was entirely surrounded by a non-Christian people.
During the last half century it has been considerably influenced by the work and example of the Church Missionary Society which is established in that region. Through this influence a Reformed Syrian Church has come into existence which promises to do much for the whole community in ideals and life. The Syrian Church has hitherto been greatly cursed with the trinity of evils—ignorance, ceremonialism and superstition. It was not until 1811 (at the suggestion of an Englishman) that it translated a part of the Bible (the four gospels) into the vernacular. And this is the only translation of the Scriptures ever made and published by the natives of India.
The Syrian Church now numbers 248,741. That part of the Syrian community which the Romish Church compelled, by the inquisition, to unite with it numbers 322,586.
2. From the fourteenth century the Roman Catholic Church has continued to send out her emissaries and missionaries to that land.
Jordanus and his brave band of missionary associates were her first representatives.