Saint Thomas Christians (Kerala)
A living tradition within Christianity. The disagreements in the sources are shown rather than settled.
Saint Thomas Christians (Kerala) is a living tradition within Christianity. Also written Nasrani, Syrian Christians of India, Malabar Christians.
Origin
No founding year is given below, because the sources read do not agree on one and a date has not been chosen for them. An indigenous Indian Christian community of the Malabar Coast claiming evangelisation by the apostle Thomas, said by tradition to have arrived at Malankara near Kodungallur in 52 CE. Britannica notes the historicity of that tradition is not verified but that evidence places Christians on the Malabar Coast from the 2nd or 3rd century. Not a denomination: the community is now divided among Catholic, Oriental Orthodox, East Syriac and Reformed-influenced bodies, following the Synod of Diamper (1599) and the 1653 break with Rome.
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Citation
English
The language and the date you read it belong in the citation: this corpus is multilingual and articles are revised after publication.
John Shaqi. “Saint Thomas Christians (Kerala).” English version. 11 August 2026. https://johnshaqi.com/articles/sect-saint-thomas-christians-kerala.
@misc{johnshaqi-sect-saint-thomas-christians-kerala-en,
author = {John Shaqi},
title = {Saint Thomas Christians (Kerala)},
year = {2026},
howpublished = {English version},
url = {https://johnshaqi.com/articles/sect-saint-thomas-christians-kerala},
note = {Accessed n.d.}
}The word count is counted from this edition. The minute estimate uses 238 words a minute, the silent reading rate for English non-fiction reported by Brysbaert (2019). The Urdu, Hindi and Roman Urdu editions carry a word count and no estimate, because no comparable rate has been published for those scripts.