Aramaic Peshitta
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page VII
It
seems to be certain that in the time of the apostles the language of the
Israelites in Travancore must have been Syriac. For although the language now
most in use, both among the Israelites and the Christians, is the Malabar, or
Malayalim, which is the vernacular language of the country, (pg. 99); yet the
ancient Peshito-Syriac Scriptures are still used by the Christians in worship,
and they have to be "expounded to the people in the vernacular
tongue," (pg. 100).
The ancient Christians of Travancore and Malabar are still called 'The Syrian
Christians of St. Thomas' and have received that name from their use of the
Peshito-Syriac Scriptures, and from the fact that their ancestors received the
gospel from the lips of the apostle Thomas. Dr. Buchanan says that the apostle
Thomas is said by them to have landed at Cranganore, when he first arrived from
Aden in Arabia; that not far from Cranganore there is an ancient church which
bears his name still; and that the tradition among these Christians is, that he
afterwards went to the Coromandel Coast, and was put to death at the place still
called St. Thomas's Mount. (Researches, pg. 114) When the Portuguese invaded
that part of India, and had established at Goa, what even the Roman Catholic
Superintendent of sixty-four R. C. churches called in the presence of Dr.
Buchanan, the "horrid tribunal" of the Inquisition; that tribunal used
its utmost power to bring the Christians of St. Thomas under the dominion of the
Pope. By bitter persecution and condemning some of these Christians to be burnt,
it obtained the possession and use of many of their church buildings. The
Peshito-Syriac Scriptures which they used, like all copies of the original
Peshito, did not contain 2 Peter, 2 and 3 John, Jude, Revelation, and some other
passages contained in the Roman Catholic Latin Vulgate. The copies of these
Syriac Scriptures were ordered by the Inquisition, at the Synod of Diamper, to
be all conformed to the R. C. Latin, and all books containing Nestorian teaching
were ordered to be burnt. (Decrees of Synod of Diamper, by Dr. Michael Geddes,
pp. 134, 147, 428)
But even in the buildings which were thus obtained, the Roman Catholic Service
was still conducted in Syriac instead of in Latin, as Dr. J. W. Etheridge states
in his History of the Syrian Churches, 1846, pg. 158.
EUSEBIUS says that in the reign of Commodus (A. D. 180-192), Pantaenus, a
Christian who had been a philosopher, went as an evangelist from Egypt as far as
India; and was said to have found there "the Gospel of Matthew in
Hebrew," that is, in Syriac, then called Hebrew, "among some who there
knew Christ; to whom Bartholomew, one of the apostles, had proclaimed Him."
Dr. Buchanan says that these Christians now possess the Peshito-Syriac
Scriptures of both covenants in writing; thay they believe they possessed them
"before the year A. D. 325," (pg. 118); that "they have preserved
the manuscripts of the Holy Scriptures incorrupt," (pg. 124); and with such
care that in one written copy which he saw, "the words of every book are
numbered." (pg. 118)