INDO-PERSIAN CHURCH COLLECTION

Christianity occupies a small space among the various religions of the Indian subcontinent. However, India has a population of 28 million adherents. The earliest history of the St. Thomas Christians is obscured by time. By all accounts, the apostle Thomas landed on the shores of India during his lifetime, traditionally in the year 52 AD. There are various patristic writers who note this encounter and the presence of an early Indian church. Some of this has been preserved in the legendary Acts of St. Thomas, which claim to recount his sojourns. However, more broadly, texts from the St. Thomas Christians are few and far between. What does survive are references made by the Church of the East and various folk songs that are alleged to spring from antiquity about the origins of the community and the encounters made by St. Thomas. Just the same, several of Christ's apostles are known to have traversed the aging Parthian Empire in the 1st century. Among them are Sts. Bartholomew, Jude Thaddeus, Matthew, Thomas, and Simon of Cana, all of whom established early Christian communities with a distinctive Persian tradition of Christianity. These communities would not experience centralization until the end of the Sasanian persecution and the formal establishment of the Church of the East in the 5th century. This church, long known as Nestorian by Westerners, maintained its traditions against various waves of Islamic persecution until the present time and represents one of the largest organized Christian churches outside the boundaries of the Roman Empire. While much of the Persian church was localized in the west, near Mesopotamia, certain historic sees in Herat, Rai, Nishapur, and Beth Lapat were major centers of the Persian church until the late medieval period.