St. Thomas Christians The Syrian merchant Thomas Cana arrives in Malabar
There is one incident of the long period of isolation of the St. Thomas Christians from the rest of the Christian world which they are never tired of relating, and it is one of considerable importance to them for the civil status it conferred and secured to them in the country. This is the narrative of the arrival of a Syrian merchant on their shores, a certain Mar Thoma Cana — the Portuguese have named him Cananeo and styled him an Armenian, which he was not. He arrived by ship on the coast and entered the port of Cranganore. The King of Malabar, Cheruman Perumal, was in the vicinity, and...
Read MoreLand of Two Rivers The Gnostic Apostle Thomas / chapter 8 / Herbert Christian Merillat
Between the upper Tigris and Euphrates, whose waters nourished one of the first civilizations on our planet, we find Sanli Urfa, Turkey. Here is the homeland of Thomas lore, the native ground of the principal Thomas traditions and writings. Arising in the Caucasus mountains, then making its way southwestward across the Anatolian plateau, the Euphrates describes a huge bend, about l00 miles across, as it turns south. Then it crosses from present-day Turkey into Syria, and then southeastward to meander the length of Iraq to the Persian Gulf. Within that bend lay, in ancient times, the...
Read MoreGo Ye Into All the World The Gnostic Apostle Thomas: Chapter 14 / Herbert Christian Merilla
The Great Commission, as it is often called, was the instruction by Jesus to his close followers to spread his message to all peoples. It appears in various forms in the bible now accepted by Christian churches. In the evangelist Mark’s version it is found (among final verses added some time after the original text was written) in the words, “Go ye into all the world and preach the gospel to every creature.” Of the books regarded by mainstream churches as authoritative, only the Acts of the Apostles has much to say about what the apostles actually did to spread the new...
Read More