Lingerings of Light in a Dark Land
An English clergyman’s account of the Thomas Christians of Kerala, printed in 1873. It is cited for what their own tradition told, two centuries after the event, about the oath of 1653: a cross outside the church at Mattancherry, with ropes tied to it.
The title page calls the author formerly minister of the Government Church at Cochin. He writes as a Protestant and against Rome. He is cited here only for two things that he reports from the Thomas Christians themselves.
The first is a “Brief History” which, he says, was kept among them and given to the first English missionaries, and which professes to have been compiled in 1770 (p. 63). As he quotes it, the Portuguese drowned the patriarch who had come from Antioch, and “all the Syrians assembled in the church at Muttancherry” and swore to acknowledge Portuguese bishops no longer (p. 160). Whitehouse himself holds that the man was not drowned but sent on to Goa.
The second is what one of their metropolitans told him: that the oath was taken at the foot of the cross outside the church, and that, because not all could touch the cross, long ropes were tied to it for those at a distance to hold (p. 160). This is the earliest printed account of the cross and the ropes that this wiki has found. It is an oral tradition written down 220 years after the oath, and is cited as that.
Cited in
- 1599 to 1653, firm date