to have introduced the East Syrian rite, to have arrived with a great colony of Syrians and to have introduced Syrian customs at Malabar. I gather that the legend told above (in which he is not a bishop, but arrives with a Bishop of Edessa) is the older one. We need not give much importance to the details. There does not appear to be any independent tradition of a Bishop of Edessa who left his see to go to India; all about Thomas the merchant of Jerusalem, or Thomas Cannaneo, comes only from Malabar. Yet the story may well contain an important kernel of truth.[1] In the 4th century the Persian Christians were being cruelly persecuted (pp. 45-47). At that time may not a number of them, with bishops and clergy, have fled to the more tolerant Hindu princes on the western coast of India? There is considerable evidence of some such migration as this;[2] it forms an interesting parallel to the Parsi migration to India after the Moslem conquest of their land, and it accounts for the Syrian (and later the Nestorian) character of Malabar Christianity.
The sum, then, of what we know about the introduction of Christianity in South-Western India would seem to be this. At some unknown period, but early, probably in the 2nd century, there were Christians in India. They had come either overland from East Syria or by sea from Arabia. In the 4th century a body of Christians from Persia arrived on the Malabar coast. These were subjects of the Persian Metropolitan; they brought their language and rites, and had bishops ordained in the East Syrian mother-Church. So Malabar is a very early, perhaps the earliest case of those wonderful missions throughout Asia which are the chief glory of the East Syrian Church. Jews and Hindus were converted; so a missionary Church, dependent on the Katholikos of Seleucia-Ctesiphon, was formed.
2. Before the Portuguese Conquest
From the 4th century we have a number of more or less incidental allusions which show us a Church in Malabar, East Syrian
