Medieval History, Modern History, Syro Malabar Church, Thomas Christians

Paul’s authority is not questioned by me at …

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Comment posted on Major Arch Bishop Alencheril Mar Giwargis II Bava-The Patriarch of Syro Malabar Church and The Gate of All India- A Discussion on The Historical Hierarchical Status of The Church of Saint Thomas Christians by Steven Ring

Paul’s authority is not questioned by me at all. In fact, his recollections of the gospel text which he included in his letters, more closely match the Peshitta Syriac text than they do the secondary Greek version typified by codices Vaticanus & Sinaiticus. The Greek version has been altered in many places relative to the Aramaic & Syriac originals to remove references to Hebrew and oriental culture and to erase (miss out) whole sections of gospel texts in order to promote the Roman view of the world. The gospel quotations of both western and eastern saints bear testimony to the mutilation of the gospels. This is something I have written about and published. Details can be found on my website if you wish.

The Diatessaron is (or was) a harmony of the Syriac gospels as they existed in about AD 170, vulgarized in places quite gently by Tatian using an Old Latin (or similar Greek) text. The Syriac texts Tatian harmonized were similar to the Peshitta, but they were not as revised as the Peshitta text we are more familiar with, as published by Gwilliam & Pusey / BFBS. Again, I have written, given and published papers explaining how all this was worked out.

Celibacy is a way of life open to the faithful, just as marriage is. In times of persecution, married Christians and their children are far more vulnerable and this is sufficient grounds in my view for the apostles and early saints to suggest celibacy as an option in such situations, (but it is no grounds to mandate celibacy at any time).

Catholicism is distasteful to me, just as Protestantism is. Both are western and hellenistic, both systematically contradict many aspects of the original faith as set out in the gospels and in the writings of both early eastern and western saints. Both branches of hellenistic institutional religion and the cenobitic monastic system are no older than the 4th century in origin and there is a gulf as wide as the Atlantic between those ideas and the earlier, non-institutional oriental Christian faith I am researching.

Steven Ring.