Interview with D.P. Curtin

Welcome to the restless theologian podcast, where we focus on having insightful conversations in biblical history and theology. I'm your host, Zechariah Eshack. For the 5th episode of season 2, I have a very special guest on with me, DP Curtin. Now DP is a translator, and he's translated, several works. How are you doing, DP?

I'm alright. How are you, Zech? Good. Good. Thank you for coming on today.

I'm really excited to get into this. I actually went online and, bought your book. It's called Margam Kalli Patu, and it's about the Saint Thomas Christians. And can you explain to us what that title means, just the historical value behind it? It's a very interesting titles.

In the southern Indian Dravidian dialects, Pattu just means a song. So there's a similar work by the St. Thomas Christians, the Ramban Patu. A Ramban is a deacon similar to the Syriacord rabbi, it's the song of the rabbi. The Marugam Kalipatu is the song of the way, which is a real curious title.

For those people who are very interested in the history of the early church and read Acts of the Apostles carefully, the movement of Christ in the 1st century was not called Christianity, they weren't known as Christianoids yet, they were simply known as The Way. So, there's a large question of exactly how much of an artifact is this title, especially considering what an isolated strain Southern Indian Christianity is from the rest of Christianity. And there's the prospect that there's at least sections of this song that date back to an early tradition of Christianity, and we see that as being very specific to the St. Thomas Christians, where the song itself is very important. There's very little in terms of written documentation, but the transmission that's been done generation to generation, especially within the church, has all been musical, which is very distinctive to Indian Christianity.

From what I could find online, it sounded like, it was primarily passed down orally, obviously, through song, and it wasn't actually put pen to paper until maybe the early 9 or late 1800. Does that sound correct to you, or can you shed some light into that? Yeah. So it's a little bit of a a little bit of a historical quagmire here. So the songs themselves in terms of content do seem very ancient.

There is a lot of, classical Syriac loanwords that are attached to them. The references that they make are unusually detailed, especially the Ramban Pathu, but there's nothing to be able to clarify their historicity in terms of the provenance. So with the text, you know, through philiological analysis, we have a good idea of when a text is composed. It's a lot more complicated with the song. Now, eventually, in the 16th century, the Portuguese showed up and were very suspicious of Southern Indians' Christianity's theological claims, which at that point had been at least partially immersed in Hinduism.

Even some of the representations of St. Thomas would not be familiar to Western imagination, where he's the sacred board of Milapur, a large peacock, which sometimes you still see him, represented as in churches. The Portuguese were very concerned with heterodoxy, so they decided to take whatever remaining potential heretical texts and destroy them. So, whatever information that we have about the early St. Thomas Christians is lost to history.

These songs survive simply because they couldn't be destroyed, and the meter that's imposed on them is very specific. We recognize, even going back into the annals of prehistory, texts like the Iliad, which was intended originally to be rehearsed to be sung Same thing in Anglo Saxon circles with Beowulf. There's no written composition to way long after the text itself has been considered almost an antique item. For texts like the Manakam Kalipattu, it is very much immersed in the culture of southern India. The way that it's stylized, the way that it's structured, it's just the content is distinctively Christian.

And other texts like Duraman Pattu it's a very intricate song, I think it's something like 430 stanzas. The way that it's laid out does not fit exclusively with some of the more familiar Southern Indian or Dravidian musical traditions there. There's this Syriac and potentially even Jewish undercurrent to it, which no music ethnologist has really been able to fully explain. But they stand as very strange artifacts in the history of writing Christian tradition. In about the year 1600, some of the native deacons recognized that they wanted to be able to preserve these texts, or preserve these songs, I should say, and they did start writing them down.

And that's really the oldest references that we have to them to be able to document that they were pre existent before the colonial period. There is a scholarly pushback to this claiming that maybe some of these texts are really just inventions of 16th century. I find that to be a very unsatisfying view. It doesn't explain the extensive detail, it doesn't explain the heavy influx of Syriac influence into the text, and references, just like the title that you had mentioned, the way If these were constructions of the 16th century, why not make it specific to the cultural and theological milieu then? Why make such an archaic reference?

Do you know what time frame that the reference for early Christianity stopped being termed the way? Because I noticed that too. I you know, that's something that's brought up in the new testament several times, and that's how early Christians kind of talked about just the Christian life and and community. One of the things I thought of too was I wasn't sure if you thought that there was a certain percentage of the lyrics that changed over time or do you think it, for the most part, it's pretty pretty true to its original? Well, I I guess that's the the big question there because if it if it remains true to its original form, I mean, here's a window into 1st century Christianity that hasn't been tainted by any other potential influences.

The issue is that there's nothing to compare it to. Again, with texts, you can kind of you can compare texts side to side, and you can see drift in terms of manuscript transmission. There's nothing wrong with that, it happens all the time with texts. If it's an oral transition, then there's nothing to compare it to, which makes it really difficult to be able to say that the fidelity of this information is strong. A lot of the songs in southern India do appear to relate to each other.

They appear to come from some common source. It's just exactly what is that source and when did it originate? Because the history of the St. Thomas Christians is really complicated. Certainly, the tradition that seems to be universal of St.

Thomas the Apostle coming to Southern India, we see that in all of the Latin and the Greek Church Fathers. Everybody talks about it, but nobody goes into any detail about it. It's just this kind of passing throwaway reference. Yeah. When it comes to the disciples, I would say, definitely, Saint Thomas is one of the ones I don't hear referenced at all really about what happened to him.

Or do you know if tradition holds it that he was martyred or does it not really have any insight into that? So the tradition that appears again in the early church fathers is usually one that parallels what we see in the Acts of Thomas, that's a separate apocryphal text. We see it in the Ramban Pathu, where it says that he went to Mount Chennai, which is in southern India, and he was speared to death by a group of brahmin who were trying to get him to worship the local deity. And his tomb remains on Mount Chennai to this day. It's a major site of pilgrimage.

It's in the southwest coast of India. For the most part the majority of, the serial Malabar and serial Malankar community is in this very specific section. But you're right, there really isn't a lot of talk about Thomas. So clearly in reading the New Testament, there's a lot of talk of Paul and Peter. They go to Rome, they're involved heavily in the Greek world, that becomes very much their thing.

But the bridgehead became Antioch, so the apostles went north and they kind of went their separate ways there. Certainly there's quite a few of them that make their way in the Hellenic world, but Thomas is very different. And the stories that are usually told about him, whether they're historically accurate or not, is that he went initially into Persia, into what would have been the Parthian Empire at the time, and encountered a king called, Gondefaerys, who was a historical personality. We have his coins at this point, and this becomes the basis of the Acts of Thomas, that there was a showdown between him and the king, that he was trying to build a metaphorical palace, and the king was very agitated at this. But there's a secondary tradition that Thomas took a boat south after returning to Jerusalem for the Synod in 49 AD, and that he took a boat to India, which is a very strange and specific claim.

So, there was quite a while where historians were trying to challenge this, but there was an extensive trade between the Roman Empire and the port of Maseris in southern India at this time, exclusively built around black pepper, which was considered to be an extremely valuable item in terms of commodities traded, and up until 19th century, black pepper only grew in one specific area of India, which is exactly where the St. Thomas Christians, developed. It's also the case that there's a Jewish community there. Thomas' gospel that would be presented wouldn't have fallen on very alien ears. The Colossian Jews would have been familiar with some of the messianic hopes that were taking place around the 2nd Temple at the time.

It's almost a perfect situation to be able to establish that community, one that would not have been capable of happening 2 centuries earlier or 2 centuries later. And we find independent cooperation when St. Francis Xavier went to, Southern Arabia, there are some islands off the coast, he encountered the natives, who were a variation of St. Thomas Christians. They'd never encountered their Southern Indian counterpart, but they said, yes, Thomas the Apostle was here, he built our church, we're very familiar with him, and he came exactly through that legend by boat where he was sold as a as a slave or as a servant, and then he went and made his way to India where he continued his missionary work.

There's a lot of data here. It's just trying to sort it out to make it coherent to a particularly an unfamiliar Western audience. Yeah. I think when we think of India, we don't really think a lot about Christianity having much of an impact there just because of the predominance of Hinduism. Now I noticed that when reading the the lyrics for the song that it it did reference the term Hindu.

Now is that something that was a later insertion or I was reading the footnotes and it made it sound like that that term had actually been previously used before even the Hindu religion. Is that correct? Yes. So Hindu is well, it could mean a lot of things. Technically, our term India stems from the same origin point.

So, Hindi as a language, the Indus river itself, what they call in northern India, the most populated section of India is Hindustan. A large question with these stories is their encounter with Hinduism and particularly Brahminism for their historicity. So there are certainly Brahmins in northern India that push what we would now describe as the Hindu faith, but they're not really present in southern India. So a lot of Thomas's debacles with the Brahmins, it's a question: Is this historically accurate? Is this a later insertion or a later invention?

And, to be honest with you, that's really anybody's game. The amount of scholarly research on this topic is almost at nil in the West. But clearly there was some continual tension with the Brahmin class, even with the development of that community into the 7th 8th century, and even to this day. You don't hear about them a lot in America or there are Hindu fundamentalists who believe that any kind of foreign insurgent, including Christianity and Islam, are alien to India, ultimately a potential threat to the integrity of Indian statehood, some kind of vague sense of nationalism. I was reading that that there is a difference between the, northeast and the southeast.

I'm not sure if I'm using those terms correctly, but between the Saint Thomas Christians that there was, like, the northern side and the southern and that there was a little bit of a issue when it came up. They were supposed to express that their or, display their dance, I think, maybe even at the Vatican. And there was some controversy over that because the northern Saint Thomas Christians did not care for it, and they looked down upon it. Can you do you know anything about that? Yes.

So there's a lot of fragmentation amongst the the Saint Thomas Christians. We use that term as an exonym, as outsiders talking about all of them. So this is a relatively complicated case. Originally, Christianity outside of the Roman Empire to the east was all under the umbrella of a large organization known as the Church of the East. Sometimes Westerners refer to them as historians.

They generally tried to maintain their ecclesiastical order over a very large geographic area. And if you look at the maps for them, you see them in Sri Lanka, and Southern India, up into Persia, into China, and going as far as Shanghai. And there is no civil element, there's no state that's supporting this. For a few centuries early on, the Sassanid Empire kind of gives a tacit support to this. It's kind of like the Christians within the empire to be able to keep things relatively tame.

This is the status quo for quite a while, up until the Mongol invasion, at which time several Mongol khans did not like the Church of the East, they've been very familiar with it, but they had made an active effort to demolish it as best possible, which is why you don't No one really considers the Church of the East to be a major denomination today. Certainly the Nestorian movement is still in existence, and there are successor agencies like the Ancient Church of the East or the Chalcedonian Catholic Church. But what was subsequent to the Mongol invasion was its fragmentation. So now you have small communities that have very specific historical traditions that are essentially isolated to eat from each other for centuries. And in this situation, you had the Portuguese enter into it.

Here are Roman Catholics who have a very distinctive tradition that have a large degree of economic and military might behind them. They wanna create a sense of uniformity to Christians in southern India. The challenge is what to do about it. So there is a Senate that takes place, in the beginning of 16th century to be able to try to settle these things. And some of the St Thomas Christians are on board for it, some of them are lukewarm, some of them are totally against it.

And so what you see is the beginning of fragmentation in the St Thomas Christian community. So some of them join up with the Orthodox cause, and form things like the Indian Orthodox Church, some of them want to maintain their distinctive East Syriac liturgical tradition, the Liturgy of St. James, which is one of the oldest in Christianity, and that becomes the Holy Corbana within the Syrio Malankara church. And later on you see the introduction of Protestantism, the Church of India through the Anglican tradition. So when we talk about St Thomas Christians, they're not a single homogeneous group.

There was a time when they were. But this comes down to not only a denominational split, but a split between largely a geographical split, where the northernists tend to look down on the southernist tradition. There is a little bit of that in Indian culture in general, where South India is considered to be very rural and very agrarian, and northern India is considered to be industrial and metropolitan. Some of that might be leading through. There's also the issue, and this is very specific to Indian Christianity, of caste.

There are separate churches in the St. Thomas tradition specifically for caste, where you have a church for the Brahmin class, the upper echelon of Indian society, and you also have churches for the deletes, the untouchables. This is something that clearly has nothing to do with Christianity, but it has immersed itself into the life of St Thomas Christians, and a lot of resentment has been built up about this. So, the tradition that exists that St. Thomas had come to India, and was he converting was he converting the Brahmin class?

Was he converting a general portion of the population? Was he going for the lowest end, the poor, the destitute, the ones who we usually associate Christianity with in the West? There's not really a clear answer to that, and it remains not only a historical sticking point but a cultural sticking point between St. Thomas Christians, where clearly the elites believe that yes, Thomas came here for the poor, for the working class, for the people who really are desperate for the Gospel to be here, straight from Matthew's Gospel itself, blessed are the poor. That is his purpose.

That was his social mission. That is part of his ministry, but there is pushback to that. I wanna touch on a couple of things that you brought up. One being, have you ever heard of liberation theology? Oh, yeah.

I'm familiar with liberation theology. Yeah. That is, that kind of reminds me of it a little bit because I feel like, you know, it's a little bit more geared towards the poor as in, you know, being the ones that Christ is saving and not about the gospel being spread equally to all men, but almost targeting the oppressed. And, I mean, I'm I'm not an advocate for liberation theology, but the distinctions between, you know, these groups when it in terms of, like, monetary wealth or lack thereof, it definitely does make me think of a little bit of that. Like, when you start kind of tying the gospel message to a specific cast within India.

And I do find that very fascinating to think about that that there may be a little bit of, a hostility there between between the classes because I think a caste system system is definitely for a foreign concept to us. The other thing I wanted to mention was you said that the some of the Saint Thomas Christians kind of geared more towards the east and about how the liturgical practices more in the west do not seem to have any form of song or dances associated with it and how that's like distinctive specifically to the Saint Thomas Christians. Did some of that bleed over into any sort of eastern churches or the Orthodox church? So churches do usually have some kind of relationship. The closest relationship that Saint Thomas Christians have is to Syriac Christianity.

So, like, the names of the ones that are in union with Rome, the the Syrio Malabar, the Syrio Malankar, their tradition is heavily Syriac. It does kind of blur the line historically, too. So, Thomas came to India in the 1st century, but then about 2 or 3 centuries later we have this historical personality, a Thomas of Cana. We don't know exactly what that surname is supposed to be, but he came with a large group of Syriac refugees to southern India who then settled the region, and there's not really a lot of information about this event. We can clearly see it happening, we can see it linguistically in the language that's being slowly pervasive in southern India, but also in the tradition that there's just no outside documentation.

This is a later tradition, probably from like the 8th or 9th century. And it also blurs the line because now we have 2 St. Thomases that are coming in that are doing very similar things. And so, are we making any attributional errors historically? Like in southern India, it's claimed that St.

Thomas the Apostle founded 7 churches in the South, all of which with very exceedingly long names. But is that the right St. Thomas? In terms of the establishment of formal church structures, Is that something that we can really attribute to the apostolic age which we usually attribute to house churches, right? Not the more formal, particularly familiar to the West, basilica style churches.

This is a struggle historically. So we're in a situation now where we have 2 St. Thomas'. We have them being very similar in a situation where there is no documentation. There's just no records whatsoever, but a historical tradition that is a little hard to discern.

And what's more, most of these documents are unfamiliar to Western scholars. They've been just solely relegated to the realm of folk songs for centuries. But to your question about the music, the music is very distinctive. And the music is, of all things, linking them further to an antiocian tradition more than anything else. The stylized of the music, it's not Southern Indian.

There are elements of the Marugam Kalipattu which are familiar in Dravidian circles, but not exclusively so. What is interesting is this tradition of the music seems to go back and become a defining feature of Indian Christianity. So, if we look at the text The Acts of Thomas, which is a fairly famous text, it's an apocryphal work from the 3rd century, probably composed in Edessa, we see in it that there are several references to songs, and there are a list of lyrics that are associated with these things. Jewish songs that are not known to the rest of the Jewish world at the time, that exist exclusively in the Acts of Thomas. We could probably infer very strongly in this situation that there is a musical tradition that is unique even outside of the Syriac tradition of Christianity that exists exclusively through Thomas and his subsequent apostles who we don't really know all that much about.

In general, the Eastern tradition of Christianity does encourage liturgical song, The divine liturgy in Byzantine and Orthodox circles is intended to be sung the whole thing is supposed to be one prolonged song as part of the liturgical process there. India kind of takes that a little bit of a step further, where they have these songs that are associated with the transmission of information. So, songs like the Raman Pattu are intended to be liturgical, but they're also brought out at festivals, especially at wedding festivals, which is very interesting because it, again, it pairs very heavily to the earliest references that we have to these songs in the acts of Thomas. What would you say that are a couple of the most predominant or prominent, I should say, themes within the Margam Kalipatu? I think because of its brevity, that might be hard to say.

In contrast to the Margam Kalipatu, the the Ramban Patu clearly is intended and composed to be a chronology of events. So if the question is, St Thomas was here, what did he do? It seems to be a response to that as an attempt at pedagogy for the early community there, saying, yes, Thomas went here, Thomas did this, Thomas founded that church, he encountered the Brahmins. There's even one line from it which claims that he went to China, which seems very historically unlikely. It's probably an interjection to the story.

Confabulation of Chennai, which is a mountain, the one that he died on, rather than the more familiar, Chena, which would be China itself. If there's a latent theme attached to it, I think it's the intention of trying to go back to the very origin point of that community, and Thomas holds the position of tremendous predominance in the same way that Peter does if you would walk around the city of Rome. It's hard to throw a stone without seeing a reference to Peter in Rome. In southern India, amongst the St. Thomas Christians, the Nazrani, Thomas is everywhere.

Thomas is an extremely popular name even to this day. Thomas invoked in the liturgy, in all the churches. Thomas is the main man for southern Indian Christianity. Now from a historical standpoint with Saint Thomas, has there been any evidence to show, like, obviously, the song is kind of a broad view of him coming to India and spreading the gospel and, taking care of the poor. When you say invocation, like, asking for his help, like, almost like have there have there been prayers to Saint Thomas in the Indian tradition, or is that something that's kind of foreign to Indian Christianity?

There are there are plenty of prayers and additionals. Additional folk songs usually have a shorter nature. A lot of them are around the wedding feast itself. But what's really curious if the question is historicity, it's one thing to have texts from a Christian community that survive that say, you know, a particular apostle was here, but in southern India we see traditions about Thomas which are from non Christian sources. So, southern Indian pantheons.

There's one we can't even call him a deity in particular. He's usually called a Thundachan or Thommachan, the old man Thomas, who is memorialized outside of the homes for southern Indian Hindus. And his point of origin is very strange, because they say that he was a holy man who came from the west and arrived in India. There's not really a lot of detail about what that looks like. There is one family who is Hindu that tells a story about Tomacyan that said that he had come off the boat and that he was very ill, and that their family had offered him hospitality and brought a doctor and had him cured.

And that that once he was cured, he got up and was very thankful for them, and gave them 4 pieces of silver, 4 silver tyran shekels, which the family still maintains to this day. They won't sell them, they won't touch them, but it's very hard to explain why a family in southern India has such a reverence for this character and holds on to 4 pieces of silver from the Middle East in the 1st century. The point of origin for that, the the etiology of that would be very strange, unless it was reflecting something that was taking place as a historical event. When it comes to liturgical, like, the liturgical dance, I wanted to find out, from you. Do you think that there's like, when you said the Portuguese came and didn't know really what to make of the Saint Thomas Christians, Do you feel that, like, there was some hostility overall towards the idea of dancing in a liturgical type setting?

Because from what I can tell, it seems like with the west, it does seem like that that's kind of a foreign concepts, entirely. I'm really curious how the Portuguese really handled that. Well, the Portuguese were very concerned in what they encountered. Some things have to do with the intentional liturgical Latinization of, peoples that they would encounter, and we saw things very similar in Ethiopia at the time, where the Portuguese certainly made themselves very unwelcome there very quickly. But the biggest concern that were taking place at, the Senate of Dhampierre was the infusion of reincarnation, which is something that clearly does not exist anywhere else in Christianity.

There were elements that they were concerned about in terms of formal teaching that unfortunately we don't know a lot about, because the few documents that did exist were destroyed by that synod, and the only things that seem to survive are just the oral traditions. The canons of that synod are publicly available, very long and tedious, and they do mention a list of books that would be fascinating if we could really find copies of them. But it's been 5 centuries and I have not seen any references to them since. Specific to dance, I don't know if the Portuguese were so much concerned with dance. SOLOMON It was more with the content?

The content was certainly very alarming to them, and some of their even representations. So, southern Indian, St Thomas Christian art is very specific. They're clearly dwelling from their own cultural milieu in the same way that all Christianity does. But in this case, the representation of the devil as the goddess Kaali, who's picking up and digesting his opponents, that was very concerning to them. So trying to, in this case, separate Southern Indian Christians from their distinctively Indian culture was kind of at the heart of that council.

I'm trying to think I don't think there was anything specific to dance. Dance was kind of practiced in the backwoods of Kerala for quite a while, but even to this day in any of those Catholic or Orthodox circles, it usually is incorporated into liturgical festivals itself. Now how did you you stumble across this work in translating it? Now I'm assuming it wasn't, like, readily available anywhere. And how did you just decide that this was a work that you were go going to translate or have translated?

Yeah. So So for a lot of works, my background is with Latin and ancient Greek. Theirs are usually readily available in most Western seminaries. Catholic, Protestant, Orthodox. They're a known quantity.

Even for ones that are relatively obscure, you can inevitably find a copy of them. But I've been very interested in the kind of Christianity that was existing outside of the Roman Empire, because it's unfamiliar, especially the further east that we go. There's other similar alien traditions, let's say, in Ethiopia, which had the opportunity to develop separate from the rest of Christianity, and to some degree in Armenia, but the East Syriac, Persian, and Indian experience of Christianity seemed totally unfamiliar to me. Trying to find those texts, though, especially years ago, was basically impossible. The advent of the internet certainly has expediated things like that.

Some of it was just kind of asking around in communities and trying to get a sense of like, okay, I know this is an important text for you, where can I get a copy of it? It is usually relatively easy to do so if you have some boots on the ground, so trying to find it in the United States or in the UK is largely an impossible task. But in southern India, they will publish specific texts, and I believe the Indian Orthodox Church has been very public about some of these works. So, initially trying to get a copy of these, the step from there becomes what to do with it, because clearly this is a language that's totally unintelligible to me. The jump from ancient Greek to medieval Greek was a challenge, but this is a language that's not even an Indo European language, it has no relationship to anything that I'm familiar with.

So trying to bring in 1st and foremost transcribers to be able to take the text and put it into a document form, and then having translators who are familiar with the work itself. Which, even that is a challenge, because the way that these songs are composed, if you look at the actual lexography of it, sometimes there are no spaces between words, they're just full words. The stanzas themselves are an entire word. That makes things very challenging. In addition to that, the archaic use of that language, because it is standalone, also serves as a potential barrier to us trying to understand exactly what it is.

In terms of the validity and quality of that translation, I feel like it's reasonable, but like a translation with any other tongue, it's not perfect. There's implicit meanings that were clearly missing that are lost in translation, because there's no way to be able to fully do so. I think this work probably represents kind of a first generation of Western scholars kind of dipping into Indian Christian texts which have been largely ignored, trying to work through even some of the cultural references that are taking place in either the the Marigamkali Pathu or Raman Pathu is also a little bit of a touchdown moment, because there is a lot of Tropitian culture that's inserted into these things that I'm not familiar with that require some additional consultation to be able to comprehend. Some of the content I could see being super difficult to try to understand because of the, I mean, the time frame it's in and, you know, some some, phrases and idioms and just kind of you know, that's very specific to the culture and the time period. I could see it being, you know, also too, there's times I I I think even in the Greek from Hebrew to Greek, you know, like the terms I know we talked about this before, Sheol and then Hades Mhmm.

About how there really wasn't a comparable word in the Greek to represent, Sheol. So in Hades was more of a, obviously, a Greek term. So sometimes there's not a one to one translation, which I can see adding an extra layer of difficulty. So when it comes to foreign languages, the more culturally removed you are from that language, the more difficult it is going to be. And Greek, with its multiple meanings for words, which certainly come up relatively frequently in the New Testament and even in the church fathers, is still relatively proximal to English.

So I know there's all kinds of disputes over the interpretation of words like prespitiros, whether that's supposed to be priest, or minister, or some kind of elder But all of those are acceptable understandings, because we share similar cultural touchstones. We don't have as many similar cultural touchstones with Southern India, so even in that word that I had mentioned earlier, 'ramban', which we take from 'rabbi', it doesn't really fit our understanding of it. In the Indian Orthodox Church it's usually used to refer to a deacon, but it's also used to mean a teacher or a professor, an association with a diaconal role which we really don't have in the West. So, there was always the temptation to try to translate that title distinctively as the rabbi's song, or the teacher's song, but it wouldn't really make a lot of sense. Sometimes preserving the original word itself is valuable, just to be able to keep intact some of the cultural meaning of that word, especially if it's totally untranslatable.

These are all some of the challenges that come in trying to translate any kind of text, where the cultural divide is fairly vast. You also see it in the famous Jesus sutras, the texts of Christ's life that had made their way into southern China. In the understanding of Han Chinese, how do you translate words like holy ghost? There is no understanding of holy in the Western sense in China, so they usually talk of the cool wind, which to our understanding is very, very different, a very different phraseology altogether. There's a hard task of trying to be able to not only translate words, but translate culture when it comes to any kind of historical document like this, and it's a big challenge because there's no clear singular way of doing that.

Yeah. So I wanted to wanted to switch gears here and kind of, touch on the council of Florence. I know that that was one that we wanted to kinda hit. I wanted to I wanted to see if you could give our audience, an idea of what the council of Florence was, you know, when it was, and, like, the overall importance of of it just to us as Christians. Yes.

So it's almost like there's 2 plots that are interwoven here. So I guess starting off in the East, starting in about the year 1400, it becomes increasingly clear that the days of the Eastern Roman Empire are fairly limited. The rise of the Ottoman Turks had been essentially a continual march westward to the point where the Balkans and all of Anatolia were essentially under their control. The Roman Emperor in Constantinople was very concerned about what to do next, and was desperate to be able to do anything to be able to receive foreign, Western military aid, to be able to save what was the fragments of the empire at the time, which at that point was a few cities in Greece, Thessalonica, and the area directly around the city of Constantinople. There was certainly a lot of political expedience to be able to use the control that they had because Constantinople as the hub of Eastern Orthodoxy was important, as it still is to the current day.

Simultaneously in the West, there is a lot of struggle over the role of the papacy. So, what exactly is the pope's role, and what authority does he have? There's a lot of push, particularly at places like the council of Constance, to try to limit the power, the authority of the papacy because it's been running amok for a few centuries. Whole issues like the Avignonian split, or the exile there, or a very brief period in the history of the the Roman Catholic church where there were 3 popes all contesting one another. That was at the time around the Council of Constance.

Is that correct? That's right. The pope who had initiated this was Pope Eugene IV, so he saw the Council of Constance as a potential threat to his authority, and the very strong authority of the Roman papacy. So, he was concerned about potentially losing power. While this was happening, envoys from the Eastern Roman Empire come knocking on his door, saying, Hey, we would really like to have a council to be able to talk about our differences for potential reconciliation, with the understanding that you'll be able to send us military aid against the Turkish empire.

Which is a tremendous political windfall for Pope Eugenius, because not only is there the prospect of reuniting churches, but it also solidifies his authority because the Greek envoys are coming to him, they're not going to the council up at Constance. It's a very shrewd political move to take place. Initially, they have the meeting in an Italian city called Ferrara, which I believe is in Tuscany, but there's a plague and they have to relocate to the southern city of Florence, which is where the main body of the council is held. But the arrival of the Byzantines in Florence it's hard to say what it would be comparable to in our own time. They usually talk of the Beatles coming into New York as this big, like, explosion.

It was really exciting, the Byzantines were here, they have these teachers who are so well versed, their academic institutions go back a 1000 years, they have all these texts, and in the background of the council while this is taking place, characters like guestemus Platon have shown up, the famous Greek professor who inadvertently triggers the Italian Renaissance. There's a sudden interest in everything Byzantine, everything that's stemming from the ancient world, and so on the the book collector end of things, we see this flux of manuscripts coming in from the Greek world into Italy, this interest in everything that was associated with classical antiquity, and we see it in art, we see it in literature, we see it in the humanities. That's the background that's happening there. Fascination. The political and I guess ecclesiastical situation in the council itself is a lot more tense.

So, there's the discussion over the nature of the Filioque, the addition to and the sun, Tensions get fairly high with this. Latin Christianity, particularly at this time, are heavily influenced by Aristotle and empirical investigations into the natural world, which would later devolve into science. The Greek East do not have any interest in this whatsoever. All of the claims of that, y'know, there's a sense of natural theology that we can explore transcendentals are completely out. The idea of God and his infinite majesty being talked about in any kind of finite way is more than heterodox to them.

The issue is that they can't say that they have their arm tied behind their back by the emperor and the political situation that's taking place. There is eventually a reluctant agreement that takes place between both parties, and they create this document, La tentra Caile, that says that there is now a formal union between churches. The Greek scholars reluctantly agree to the arguments of the West, except for 1 Mark of Ephesus, who is now a saint within the Greek Orthodox Church, and they have what they call a union of churches, which is very, very tenuous. It doesn't really involve all that much of a change, just the admission of the pope, the bishop of Rome as the formal head of Christianity, and the submission to the value of the Filioque. And the council is concluded, the patriarch of Constantinople Joseph II goes back to Constantinople, where there's chaos in the streets.

The Byzantines saw themselves as this cultural elite, the highest element of civilization within the Christendom, and to have to act in a way of submitting to Roman authority feels like them as a betrayal of their own heritage. So, there's not really a clear response to what exactly they should do. There has to be some sense where we need to be able to maintain the fidelity of the union to be able to survive, and at the same time betraying orthodoxy if we actually agree to these terms. I wanted to ask, like, for the early church, for the first, like, 3, 400 years of the church, Were there councils that were ever decided, that were based in Constantinople? Because usually, you know, Rome being the the deciding factor and then but I do think that there's this idea among some of the churches that that maybe the bishop of Rome maybe had authority or maybe like the first among many.

I'm trying to think of the term, but, basically, it wasn't so much that he had authority, a jurisdictional authority. It was more of, like, eminence, more of honor. It was a primacy of honor, not of jurisdiction, I think, is what I'm getting at. But for the most part, yeah. So it's spelled out, I believe, at Chalcedon or maybe Ephesus.

They talk of 'Pantarchy' theory, which remains the working theory of the Eastern Orthodox Church, that there are 5 predominant bishops Rome, Constantinople, Alexandria, Antioch, and Jerusalem and these are the senior bishops, with Rome being the first among equals. That seems to be the kind of practical setup for quite a while. The issue is, at least partially phenomenological, because clearly with the rise of Islam, and the capture and conquest of Jerusalem, Antioch, and Alexandria to Islamic authorities, those seeds are now under foreign hegemony, which only really leaves 2. And so starting in the late 7th century, you see a lot of conflict developing. It's a little slow at first between Rome and Constantinople.

This breaks out into a full schism under Photius the Great in the late 9th century, where there's a question of who gets to appoint other patriarchs. And this is still a sticking point. So, the Orthodox church has a council at Constantinople, which they call 4th Constantinople, but it's different from the Roman Catholic row of 4th Constantinople, which takes place 20 years earlier. And so this issue was never discussed in-depth what exactly it means to be first among equals. There are some things like, okay, the eventualization of new peoples.

You have jurisdiction in your particular area, but people who are coming in should fall under the purview of Rome. At least, that's what's being claimed. So with groups like the Bulgars, who are a new people, but they enter into the jurisdiction of the patriarch of Constantinople. Who has the rightful authority there? Now, Rome initially tries to claim that it's them, and the same thing with all Slavic peoples.

Eventually, an uncomfortable alliance has to take place where some Slavic peoples become Roman Catholic and some become Eastern Orthodox. So places like Poland, and Czechia, and Croatia are all on the Catholic end of that, but clearly if you go into the Ukraine, and Russia, and Belarus, and Romania, Bulgaria, they fall on the opposite end of that split. Because these are never really well defined, and the politics are also shifting as well, where clearly Constantinople is heavily tied to the imperial court of the Roman Emperor, the development of the Frankish Empire in the west, and the subsequent Holy Roman Empire creates a separate sense of loyalty there, particularly as Charlemagne and his successors are considered to be guardians of the pope, creates a set of shifting loyalty. So prior to this, if there's just one emperor, it's easy to maintain loyalty to that one person, but now there's 2, with 2 different demands and 2 different senses of, I guess we can call it political theology Yeah. Which create a little bit of a caustic situation going into the the alleged official split in 1054.

Now going back to Mark of Ephesus, and he was the only one from my understanding that really disagreed with the with the council of Florence. Now did he even attend the council of Florence or no? I believe he was in attendance, but my understanding is that he refused to sign anything. So, in the Greek Orthodox world, he is considered a hero for that, for refuting the council, for refusing to submit to the arguments of the Latin clerics, especially with having so much political pressure applied to him by the emperor John the 8th. Clearly, that council didn't didn't work out, and a lot of the aftermath of it is well, it's inspired a lot of the political tension of our own time.

There is a deep distrust in the Orthodox Church of any attempt at humanism with the West, even the arrival a few years ago of Pope John Paul in Greece, which was very unwelcome, or Pope, not Benedict, Pope Francis into Georgia. There's always the concern amongst the Orthodox Church members that the West is not sincere about its interest in ecumenism, and is really just kind of this divide and conquer. Even with Eastern Catholic churches, When I was on residency, there was a seminary in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, a group that were originally Orthodox and then had made the jump to Catholic in the 17th century, but were mistreated by the Latin clergy in America, they were trying to be Latinized and have all these other things that were associated with Roman liturgical traditions, so they decided to get up and switch back to Orthodoxy, which is it's a very roundabout way of operating. But that's a very, very real fear here, that we're gonna have these foreigners who are gonna come in and try to change things around and mess with the root of Orthodox Christianity, the true doctrine. Yeah.

With the Orthodox church, definitely the Eastern Christians, they probably viewed it as it's not ecumenicalism. It's more of, like, trying to get the Orthodox church to bring them back into the fold. Maybe that's how they're viewing it, and, you know, they're probably fearful of losing their distinctives. What's really interesting, there was a couple of things I wanted to bring up, and I did watch a a a video about eastern orthodoxy, and there was two things that kinda stood out to me. For all of its criticisms of the West, I think, for the for the from the Orthodox church, especially geared towards protestantism, more of my tradition, I think it's funny to me that here you have them criticizing guys like John Calvin, Martin Luther, you know, making comments about, like, who are you to disagree with councils, ones that are ecumenical councils, and then you have at the same time, you have Mark of Ephesus who is just one single man disagreeing with the council.

And what's the irony, I think, too is the idea of there doesn't seem to be a clear distinction of what is considered an ecumenical council. Like, it's just whichever ones they say that they are, and those are the ones that have authority. But if it's ones that they don't like, then, well, then that's not an ecumenical one. Is that how you feel about it? Or So this is, probably an unfamiliar talking point to people in, in either Catholicism or Orthodoxy.

Sticking with the the original 7 ecumenical councils, there some of them were intended to be designed as being ecumenical and representing the whole of the church, but some of them were declared that later. And what's more, there are ecumenical councils that were held that were later told to be bogus. So, the famous Robert Synod, 449, called 2nd Ephesus, was originally designed to be an ecumenical council, but was 2 years later totally removed from that kind of canon. And there was another one in the 8th century, which name escapes me, that was intended to be held for ecumenical purposes but was later withdrawn from that. With the original 7, there's general consensus on that, but after the fact it gets a lot more cloudy.

So, if you look at the Catholic list of ecumenical councils, there's this big jump. All of the original 7 are in Constantinople or thereabout. Nicaea is just across the straits. Ephesus is a little bit distant away. But starting with the Council of Lyon in 12th century, they're all French and Italian.

And what's more, the language that's used at the time, they don't call themselves ecumenical councils. It's not until the Council of Trent where there's this retroactive look to be able to say that there's a line of continuity between the old imperial councils, the 7 in the East, and the more recent ones that are held under the authority of the Pope, so that there's there's a clear line from Nicaea to Trent. The Orthodox church doesn't define what its ecumenical councils are until 19th century, and a lot of it's done to be able to be in opposition to the Catholic church. Yeah. So things like the 2 different 4th Constantinople are done intentionally.

The Orthodox Council of 4th Constantinople is not particularly consequential, but they don't want to accept the canons that are put forward by the Catholic version of it, because it would undercut a lot of their argument. The whole ecumenical council movement is not really built on a great premise, because how do you know that something is truly ecumenical there? If it's defined in the moment, it's one thing if it's defined there? If it's defined in the moment, it's one thing. If it's defined retroactively, it's defined by people who have a a vested ecclesiastical and political vision for what they want to be binding and what they don't.

Yeah. That definitely poses a lot of different issues because yeah. Because if there's no clearly defined guidelines as to what makes a council ecumenical and therefore binding, it definitely muddies the waters. Can you speak to how many ecumenical councils or how many councils are considered ecumenical by Rome versus the Orthodox church? Say, like, is does the Orthodox church only hold to, like, the original 7, or So there's there's the Eastern Orthodox Church with its various subrights, so, the autocephalous, autonomous churches, Russian, Greek, Romanian, Bulgarian, Georgian, but there's also the Oriental Orthodox Church.

So, the Ethiopian Orthodox Church, the Armenian Apostolic Church, the Coptic Orthodox Church. You recognize a lot of people who are unfamiliar with that community get very confused because these 2 Orthodox communions are not speaking to each other. Some communication there. Going down the list, everyone universally accepts the First Council of Nicaea in 325, and the subsequent First Council of Constantinople in 381. Even when you go into Nestorian circles, they have a council of their own at Seleucia, Seleucia, Stephan, in 410 that say Yes, we agree to these 2 councils, or in full accord on everything that they have to say, most of which has to do with Arianism and the Nicene Creed that we're all familiar with.

It's after that point where things get a little bit more murky. So in 4/31 there's the the Council of Ephesus, which has to deal with other Christological controversies, where things start to get a bit hazier, especially on the Oriental Orthodox end of things, and the Council of Chalcedon, which follows 20 years later, where you have churches which are distinctively pro Chalcedon and churches that are anti Chalcedon. This is very strong amongst the Copts and the Syriac rites in particular. The Orthodox and the Catholic churches accept all of those, there's no issue, and they accept the following 3 councils: 2nd Constantinople, 3rd Constantinople, and 1st Nicaea. At least, eventually, the West initially tried to push back against 2nd Nicaea, they had a synod at Frankfurt dealing with the iconoclast controversy, but eventually everyone's on the same page there.

It's just what happens subsequent to this that starts to create the issue of tension and what's ecumenical. So the Catholic church has, I wanna say, like, 23 ecumenical councils going all the way up to the most recent Vatican 2 in 1965. The Orthodox Church does have some later ecumenical councils, none of which they share with the the Catholic Church. I believe there was a Synod of Jerusalem in 17th century. Most of that was responding to Protestantism and claims of the biblical canon, but for the most part there really hasn't been an ecumenical council in the Orthodox Church in about 700 years.

Some of that is for political reasons. Clearly a large number of the Orthodox faithful in the east have been under the sovereignty of the Turkish empire, so there really wasn't the opportunity to do so. There have been more recent pan Orthodox councils to be able to try to establish something like that, but there's no notion of trying to contemporize like, what you see in the West and distinctively within the Catholic church with its modern understanding of ecumenical councils. I do think that there's probably some difficulties with the orthodox when it comes to you would think that they would be trying to avoid having too many ecumenical or what they would term ecumenical councils because if it's you know, if their church is never changing, I think adding too many different councils on top of that could make it really complicated pretty quickly. Because if it if it can't change, then it's like any sort of new sort of development of theology or understanding of theology.

I think it might be presented with, hostility. Because I think that in my opinion, I think the west hasn't been able to grow a lot more. And, obviously, I'm gonna be biased in this in terms of its theological concepts and understandings because of its willingness for growth. Yeah. So the the Orthodox Church is always very concerned about what they'll call innovations.

So most apostolic churches are very interested in their sense of tradition, in being able to stem back centuries and have things vetted through them, but Orthodoxy is very concerned with things that are being inserted that have nothing to do with either the biblical foundation of Christianity or its subsequent tradition. So, there are things at the forefront of that, like the Catholic postulation of purgatory, which certainly is supposed in Protestant circles for being unbiblical, but in Orthodox circles it's usually called just that as being an innovation, like where are you getting this from the church fathers? There's some church fathers that talk about universalist redemption but that's not the same thing as purgatory, and so the argument is a relatively tenuous one to try to claim that it's a foundation from something older. Usually the Roman Catholic church talks about things that can be philosophically thought out, that are able to be developed, and the attempt to try to be a church that's living in the contemporary world. The Orthodox claims are usually the church is contemporary because it's eternal, there's no reason to change anything.

The ideas of Vatican 2 would be so incredibly alien to any kind of orthodox clergy for that very reason. Although, I believe that they were offered to be observers for that council even if they weren't participating in it. Going back to what you said about innovation, I think that that's really important because, you know, like, in the reformed tradition, you know, you have, like, the ordo salutis, and I think that I think every Christian tradition has this. It's just the order that we're discussing and pinpointing a system that already exists within scripture. Even the the the trinity itself, that term isn't used in scripture.

We know it to be a biblical true concept or, you know, at the heart of what Christianity is about, you know, 3 in 1, father, son, and holy spirit. So I think that there's maybe an elaboration on doctrine that exists, but also to, you know, you have to kind of set the backdrop as being we can't invent doctrines out of thin air at the same time. So it's just a question of how much do we change and what can be changed without changing who we are as Christians because I think that that's the issue a lot of the west has been facing the progressive movement. I think that there's been a lot of churches that have had difficulty because once you get more of the liberal strain within the churches, you know, it affects their politics as well as their theology. And I think the orthodox is fairly good at resisting this because, obviously, they're not big on innovation.

They're not big on you know, it's a little bit more of trying to keep things status quo and the same. But I think that as Christians in the west, I think that there's pros and cons to, like, being resistant towards change because we don't wanna change the scriptures, the gospel, the message. But at the same time, you know, the the theological thought and the elaboration and commentary that's given by a lot of important, you know, Roman Catholic and Protestant theologians have benefited the church, I think, as a whole. And I think that that's where, in my opinion, I think the orthodox have been a little bit more at a disadvantage. So it's a little bit of a a double edged sword here.

So I know I mentioned this dispute with ecumenical councils and questions of primacy between bishops, but at least in my estimation the biggest split between East and West has to do with Aristotle. So, in the 12th century, Aristotle was rediscovered in the West, or I guess technically speaking, the notes of one of his students were rediscovered, but the idea of empirical investigation of the world was reborn, And at this time we see the founding of all the great universities in Western Europe, we see embryonic science starting to take shape. But there's a lot of concern on exactly what that means. So previous to this, knowledge is very straightforward. We have knowledge of the world, but we have to be cautious with it, because anything that enters the intellect could mislead us.

The sacred scriptures are valuable in this way because they provide a clear link for revelatory knowledge where we're able to be able to tap into the mind of God, where we don't have to be able to trust the intellect. For Aristotelians, nothing enters the intellect except through the senses, so you have to trust the senses. This is totally you can't do this in the East. Aristotle and his claims for empirical investigation, especially in theology, it's just non existent. When this enters in, it does a lot of things.

So, we can start to be able to philosophize more about the nature of God, about how do we interpret the scriptures as a document, which is the short road to the development of Protestantism and individualism, which are now I mean, trying to talk about the West outside of the context of individualism would be really difficult, but this ability to be able to explore the world outside of the context of exclusively scripture does open us up to a lot of other potential things. And you mentioned the Progressive movement there. That's probably the tail end of this kind of thing. How much do we really need to depend upon the divine scriptures for any kind of knowledge? At this point, with a lot of the progressive churches, well, they're very direct.

They don't seem to think very much of the scriptures at all. They'll try to contextualize them as being like this historic document that goes back into it, but I think you'd be hard pressed to walk into a Quaker Meeting House or a Unitarian Universalist church, and find much that has to do with Christianity, or the scriptures, or anything that really we've been talking about. This question of how much should change to be contemporary is a very real one, and it's linked to this question of what are we doing with the evidence that we have of the external world right now? Does truth change? Is truth subjective?

Can truth in its purest form be observed? Because good Platonists say that no, truth is eternal, truth is fixed, and nothing can change that fact. The Aristotelians will say otherwise. They'll say that we need to be able to investigate it, and the context of truth is important here, which is very much the progressive argument right now. I don't really know where this is gonna go.

It would seem how do you maintain yourself within the fold of Christianity if what you're doing as a church has nothing to do with Christianity? Yeah. No. I agree. I think that it's kind of surprising too that, some of the progressive and there's a distinctive thing that I think that happens in the west when it comes to some of our mainline churches and there's a personality out there.

I watch him from time to time. He he's a really nice guy. He's a younger guy named, Redeem Zoomer, but he talks about this kind of phenomenon where you have these churches that are mainline churches. And then historically, in the past 100 years, a lot of times, the fundamentalist will end up either getting pushed out or leave because of how progressive things are becoming. And I get it to some degree because you don't want to compromise your beliefs and you don't want to stick around at a church where you you think they're teaching heretical views or views that not in line with the, you know, God's word.

So I I think that as a result, when the fundamentalists leave, what typically happens is the spiral into progressivism and, like, more liberal theology ends up being quite dramatic. And, and there's really no balance there at all. Going back to what you had said about Aristotelian, I don't know a lot about Aristotle, but I do know that that does make sense to me about the differences between the east and the west because even the view of transubstantiation. It's it's reasoned from an Aristotelian standpoint where the orthodox have more of a view of it is the body and blood of Christ. We don't bother explaining how that happens.

But in obviously, in the west, you have a little bit more of, you know, from Roman Catholicism to Presbyterianism to even Lutheranism, you have kind of well thought out, you know, even though they disagree, you know, disagreeing viewpoints, but trying to explain how that how that happens. You know, if it's a spiritual unification with Christ's body or if it's, the culminate in Lutheranism, it's more of a combination of the bread and wine along with the body and blood of Christ. But, yeah, I I I definitely see how, you know, I I could think their version's a little bit more simplistic where they don't try to go into explaining it, I guess. So usually the accusation that's laid by the east on the west is that there's a high level of hubris, And this was even a talking point with the Council of Florence, that you think you can explain the nature of God, which is quite a claim to make. Now, clearly Thomists and even well into the Reformulae, don't claim that they understand the nature of the Godhead, but there is a lot of interest in trying to explain things.

Explain things, there's a clear definition for what we're talking about, whereas the east wants to actively engage in a sense of mystery, that things still have to be outside of the scope of not only the human intellect, but our rational understanding of it. And that does, I suppose in a theological sense that is accurate, but it doesn't really present us with the ability to really talk about much then, if it's just there's a mystery here, we don't know about it, and we should probably just shut up. What would the universities ultimately be doing at that point? There is no investigation, period. Every theologian would eventually just be nothing.

The I mean, that does make sense to me why there seemed to be, resistant towards the idea of any sort of form of predestination because both, you know, Roman Catholicism I mean, you have the Thomists and the Molonists who disagree. I mean, obviously, they they have a lot of shared belief and everything, but when it comes to that specific doctrine of, you know, free will and predestination, there's some differences there, and it's the same thing within the Protestant tradition. You have the Armenians and the Calvinist. We understand that predestination is a biblical concept that it's within very well laid out in scripture, but it's like, what do we make of it? And I feel like the orthodox have been a lot more.

I think that since that would require a lot of investigation and a lot of explaining because it's it's a very complex doctrine, and maybe that could play into why that they see it as unbiblical. So some of it might also have to do with the character of Augustine himself, who he is probably the first one to talk about the ideas of predestination, even though I think Roman Catholic circles and even the Augustians will be relatively cagey about that. But clearly, in reading some of his works, particularly De Civitas Dei he does express some views that do, at least on the surface, appear to be, evoking predestination. In the Eastern imagination, Augustine is almost the pure source of heterodoxy. They accept him as a saint, they believe that he's a good, holy man, but his teachings on things like the trinity and his postulate of original sin, they will not accept.

And then they consider that all Western error really stems from Augustine. So, when Calvin starts making some of the quotations, even in institutes, to Augustine, that's that's gonna be a hard stop for the east. It's almost as if they hear that name and then everything just kind of stops. Yeah. Because in the reform tradition, it's definitely there's a lot of influence from Augustinianism.

And I I think that Saint Augustine definitely had a huge impact on the west. And, like you said, the the Filioque way and then also to predestination with his, works on against the, Pelagians as well as on the gift of perseverance or on the predestination of the saints. Yeah. You you could see how they would kind of have an aversion or, a lot of disagreements with Augustine and and I think that that kind of helps explain a little bit of largely their disagreements with the West. Yeah.

Augustine's kind of a a lightning rod. You're correct. He's probably one of the predominant figures in terms of Western thought, which is really hard to avoid. So much of the way that we think and perceive the world is through the guise of Augustine's eyes in his 5th century understanding of the world. I can't imagine a situation where the East would be able to open things up, with the exception of works like Confessions, which are not really those are really more psychological works than theological, the act of introspection that takes place there.

But other works like Die Tren Etats, On the Trinity, by Augustine, would not be you would never find in an orthodox library. So I'm gonna be wrapping up here shortly, but I I wanted to ask about the orthodox in terms of it does seem like Saint Athanasius had a kind of a big role in their train of thought. Are there any other early church fathers that you think that they highly revere or highly impacts their theology? So they'll break things down by class of church fathers. So there's Egyptian church fathers, so Athanasius is certainly probably the predominant one there, there's also Cyril of Alexandria, there's what they call the Cappadocian Fathers, so a lot of them are actually related to each other.

And the Greek fathers you deal with St. John Chrysostom is probably the orthodox heavyweight there. Gregory of Nisa, Gregory Nancianciences. For particularly later Greek theology, these are the characters that they kind of come back to time and time again. They'll accept some of what they call the Latin Fathers, so Jerome and Ambrose usually take a distinctive position there, but they're not quite the heavy hitters, particularly ones like St.

John Chrysostom and St. Basil the Great, who are brought up time and time again as what it really means in the the mind of the orthodox to be orthodox. This is this is the sync that we go to, whereas the west will pick someone like Augustine as kind of their cultural touchstone. I wanted to see if you could maybe tell our listeners a little bit about, the scriptorium project, about about your work as, you know, a translator and, you know, what that entails and how that they can find you and just and why you find that the work, you know, is super important and relevant to Christians of all denominations. Yeah.

So to a certain degree, this is almost an ecumenical project. The scriptorium project has been running for about 20 years now. What we are is a large library of texts relating to the history of Christianity from roughly the fall of the Roman Empire in the West, from 4 76 until about the middle of 15th century, so about a 1000 years of history, texts that have for my part, really not been accessible to most people. Some of it has been the barrier of time or the fact that libraries don't tend to carry this kind of thing, but some of it is the language barrier itself. Trying to make texts publicly available so that you're able to go back to the the primary source, the original document itself, and see what exactly has been said.

And that's true for councils, for Church of Fathers, for relatively arcane documents that you wouldn't have access to. The Persian councils in the Sassanid Empire are very popular. Trying to encourage people to be able to read documents that go deep into the history of Christianity, so that maybe they're able to understand better exactly where the roots of these divisions take place, why there is a long standing division between Eastern and Western churches. Even within Western churches, there's the appeal to particular traditions. Catholicism certainly claims a lot of things in terms of its traditional life.

Where do those things come from? Are they just pulled at random, or are they from distinctive sources? And even Christianity in places that people would not expect there to be a Christian tradition, like southern Arabia, the church in Najran, which was very active prior to the birth of Muhammad and has subsequently disappeared. I really want this project to be a work not only of uniting people who would otherwise not be able to converse with each other, but also making these texts accessible so that anyone who has an interest will be able to access them. We do have a website, the scriptoriumproject which has the fullest of our catalog, broken down east and west, and then by geographic region.

We do have quite a collection at this point, spanning into a few 100 and expanding every month a little bit more. Trying to get the word out about this as best possible, which is why I'm here with you right now, Zach, being able to talk about this to your audience. Yeah. Yeah. No.

I really appreciate you taking the time to discuss this with our audience. I and with me, I think it's really important. I think that I do think a lot of people, a lot of Christians, you know, that they might read a lot of current works, but I think that the early church fathers I mean, there's a lot of just fascinating history as well as the theology that's there and and seeing how that plays out throughout history as well. So do you, would you say that one of the important ways that, people can help you with your project is obviously picking up a a work or 2, like, on Amazon, or do you guys also accept donations, anything like that? So, certainly, the works are available.

Amazon's the big one. I think we have 40,000 distributors at this point. Wow. Okay. So, like, the the business aspect of it certainly has picked up.

I don't think we have anything in terms of donation right now. Maybe that's something that we should have. So a lot of the money that's generated goes back into the translation of some of these texts. The greater majority of them are from Greek and Latin sources, but clearly there are other ones that I don't have access. I clearly don't speak Georgian.

So we, we hire translators to be able to have the accessibility of that, which can be quite pricey, but in the age that we live in, it's also possible to be able to distribute across the planet. Well, awesome. Well, thanks, DP. I really appreciate you taking the time with us today. I definitely would love to have you on again.

I think that there's a lot of different things that we could talk about and go into. I mean, I definitely think that the rise of Islam, I think, would be another fascinating one to discuss because I feel like as as Christians, I I know, myself included, I I don't know a lot about Islam other than, you know, I know that their idea of the trinity is very absurd to them because they they they view it as 3 gods rather than, 3 persons in 1 godhead. So I would love to be able to discuss that with you and, you know, maybe unpack as to how they developed and and and how they view Christianity. But, thanks again. I really appreciate you coming on.

Yeah. Absolutely. Thanks for having me.

Primary Historical References:

• Margum Kali Pattu – Traditional Indian Christian chant recounting the apostolic origins of the Saint Thomas Christians.

• The Saint Thomas Christians – Ancient Christian community in India traditionally tracing its founding to the Apostle Thomas.

• Council of Florence (1431–1449) – An ecumenical council aiming to reconcile Eastern Orthodox and Western Catholic churches.

• Synod of Diamper (1599) – The Latinization of the Saint Thomas Christians under Portuguese influence.

Theological Concepts Referenced:

• East–West Schism (1054) – The major division between Eastern Orthodoxy and Roman Catholicism.

• The Filioque Controversy – The debate over the procession of the Holy Spirit ("and the Son") added to the Nicene Creed in the West.

• Apostolic Succession – The belief in the direct lineage of church authority from the apostles.

• Syncretism – Blending of Christian beliefs with local cultural and religious practices.

Scriptures Referenced or Alluded To:

• John 20:24–29 – The apostle Thomas' confession of Christ after the resurrection ("My Lord and my God!").

• Matthew 28:19 – The Great Commission to spread the Gospel to all nations.

1. What is the Margam Kali Pattu, and why is it significant to the St. Thomas Christians?

   In the episode, D.P. Curtin explains that Margam Kali Pattu translates to "Song of the Way" in the southern Indian Dravidian dialects, with "Pattu" meaning song. He notes that this song is significant because early Christians were referred to as followers of "The Way," as mentioned in the Acts of the Apostles. The Margam Kali Pattu is a traditional song of the St. Thomas Christians, passed down orally through generations, reflecting their unique Christian heritage in southern India.

2. How were these songs preserved, and what challenges exist in dating them?

   Curtin discusses that these songs were primarily transmitted orally, which presents challenges in determining their exact age. He mentions that while the content appears ancient, with classical Syriac loanwords and detailed references, there's a lack of written documentation to clarify their historicity. The oral tradition, combined with the specific meter of the songs, helped preserve them through generations.

3. What impact did the Portuguese have on the St. Thomas Christians and their traditions?

   The episode highlights that when the Portuguese arrived in the 16th century, they were suspicious of the theological claims of the St. Thomas Christians, especially as their practices had been partially immersed in local Hindu traditions. Curtin notes that the Portuguese sought to eliminate what they considered heretical texts, leading to the destruction of many documents. However, the oral songs survived because they couldn't be destroyed in the same way.

4. Are there unique elements in the Margam Kali Pattu that differentiate it from other Indian musical traditions?

   Curtin points out that while the Margam Kali Pattu is immersed in the culture of southern India, its content is distinctively Christian. He mentions that the structure and stylization of the song don't fit exclusively with familiar Southern Indian or Dravidian musical traditions. Instead, there's a Syriac and potentially even Jewish undercurrent, making it a unique blend of cultural influences.

5. What does the representation of St. Thomas as a peacock signify in this context?

   The episode discusses that in some representations, St. Thomas is depicted as the sacred bird of Mylapore, a large peacock. Curtin explains that such representations might not be familiar to Western imaginations but are part of the unique iconography of the St. Thomas Christians, reflecting the integration of local cultural symbols into their Christian faith.

6. How does the Margam Kali Pattu compare to other ancient oral traditions like the Iliad or Beowulf?

   Curtin draws parallels between the Margam Kali Pattu and other ancient oral traditions, noting that, like the Iliad and Beowulf, these songs were intended to be rehearsed and sung, with their written compositions coming much later. He emphasizes that the oral transmission, specific meter, and cultural immersion of the Margam Kali Pattu have helped preserve its content over centuries, similar to these other epic traditions.

• "The Indian Church History Classics: Volume 1 – The Nazranies" edited by George Menachery — A major resource on the history of the Saint Thomas Christians.

• "The Lost History of Christianity" by Philip Jenkins — A compelling book exploring the forgotten Eastern churches, including the spread of Christianity to India.

• "Christianity in India: From Beginnings to the Present" by Robert Eric Frykenberg — A scholarly but readable history of Christianity's deep roots in India.

• "The Acts of Thomas" (Early Christian apocryphal text) — An ancient document recounting Thomas’s missionary work in India