P.J.Cherian Says ST' Thomas Landed at Pattanam -in Voice of the East -May-June 2011

                                                                                          


                                                Dr. P.J.Cherian  is seen at Centre



Voice of the East
Vol. 58 May - June 2011 Nos. 5 & 6
Ancient Assyrian Texts get
Digital in India
Posted on 05 March 2011.
An attempt to trace and preserve documents
pertaining to St. Thomas Christians in Kerala
received a boost when some ancient texts were
digitized.
8
“This historic achievement would help establish
the Syrian Christians link with Saint Thomas the
Apostle,” said Metropolitan Mar Aprem
Mooken of Church of the East, a day after 180
rare documents were digitized. The metropolitan
heads the St. Ephrem Ecumenical Research
Institute in Kerala which has undertaken the
project in collaboration with the state’s communist
government and the Central European
University in Budapest.
The project aims to catalogue and digitize the
documents related to Christians who trace their
faith to the apostle, Bishop Mooken said. It
wants to find out the roots of religious practices
among these Christians who are now scattered
in many denominations, including the Catholic
Church, the Chaldean bishop said. These Christians
believe the saint came to Kerala in 52 AD
and preached the gospel before his death in
neighboring Tamil Nadu state 20 years later.
The digitized documents were in Bishop
Mooken’s possession. One of them was a facsimile
edition of the canon law practiced by St.
Thomas Christians. Its original had disappeared
seven centuries ago, Bishop Mooken said.
Metropolitan Abdisho Bar Brikha of Nisibis and
Armenia, a province of the Church of the East,
compiled the canon in his own hand in 1291.
Istva Perczel of the Budapest University edited
the revived text.
Bishop Mooken, 70, said the research center
has received another 200 documents from various
sources that it plans to digitize soon. He
said Syrian Christians lost vital clues about their
culture and heritage when the Portuguese
missioners burnt large volumes of their literature
in 1599.
St. Thomas Christians had for centuries followed
the Eastern rites and liturgy which brought them
in conflict with the Portuguese missioners. The
Portuguese wanted to ensure the dominance of
Latin liturgy over St. Thomas Christians, he explained.
Another retrieved document is Kashkol, a breviary-
prayer book, that “miraculously survived
destruction by the Portuguese inquisitors,” the
prelate said.
P.J. Cherian, who heads the Kerala Council of
Historical Research, said the facsimile edition
of religious texts of St. Thomas Christians is a
“turning point” in history. Recent excavations in
Kerala have found evidence of a port city that
existed more than 2,000 years at a place where
Saint Thomas is believed to have landed. Preserving
the lost documents would shed new light
on the cultural heritage of people of Kerala.