Thomas, CHRISTIANS OF ST, or Syrian Church of India, the oldest Christian church in India, numbering in 1891 some 400,000 adherents in the native states of Cochin and Travancore on the Malabar coast. The church professes to have been planted by St Thomas, but is doubtless an offshoot of the Nestorian Church of Persia (in the patriarchate of Babylon), transplanted to India about the beginning of the 6th century. Founded by missionary effort, the Indian Church was probably recruited from Persia by the struggles of Christianity with revived Zoroastrianism and the triumph of Islam. Missionaries from Rome failed in the 14th century to persuade the Indian Christians to accept the authority of Rome; but the influence of Jesuit missionaries succeeded at the Synod of Diampur (Udiamperur, 12 miles SE. of Cochin) in 1599 in nominally bringing the sectaries into the Western Church. The yoke of Rome was, however, thrown off again in 1653, under the leadership of a Syrian Jacobite metropolitan
Gregorius. English Protestant missionaries have established no permanent relations; though dissensions amongst themselves (concerning questions of property) have had to be settled, after years of litigation, before English judges, the ancient church asserts its independence; not even recognising dependence on the patriarch of Antioch, but essentially Nestorian in theology and rites. Their sacred language is Syriac. The clergy are celibate. See GREEK CHURCH; and G. M. Rae, The Syrian Church in India (1892).