Travancore. A translation of the inscription is as follows:—
"In punishment by the cross (was) the suffering of this One;
He who is the true Christ, and God alone, and Guide ever pure."[1]
This inscription is doubly important. In the first place, the use of the Pahlavi language in which it is composed is an unmistakable testimony to the antiquity of Christianity in the places where the crosses are set up, helping us to fix an approximate date for them. In the second place, the singular wording of the inscription contains an apparent statement of Nestorian doctrine. The second line seems to refer to the Trinity. The order in which the Three Persons occur is not so very surprising when we consider that it is the order of St. Paul's doxology. But the couplet appears to identify all Three Persons of the Trinity as present in the Incarnation and as therefore present also at the crucifixion. The same idea is found in later Nestorian documents; it was expressly condemned in the synod of Diamper (a.d. 1599). The doctrine thus expressed comes very near to Patripassianism; but then it must be remembered that, as held by Nestorians, who made a sharp distinction between the two natures in Christ, it did not involve the suffering of the Divine Persons in the way in which the union of the natures would imply. It was the human nature that was tortured on the cross and that died. With this view it was possible to think of the Divine nature in Christ as consisting of the whole Godhead, and yet not be Patripassian.
There is a second cross in the old church at Cottayam—with a modification of the curious inscription—making three of these crosses in all; but this is assigned to the tenth century. A panel in the same slab of stone, similar in shape and decoration to that
- ↑ The Indian Antiquary, vol. iii., 1874, pp. 308–316, article by A. C. Burnell, Ph.D., of the Madras Civil Service, on "Some Pahlavi Inscriptions in South India," quoted by Rae in notes to chapter ix. p. 370. But there is some doubt as to the correctness of this translation.
