Our first guest of the semester on April 19th was Jan Van Ginkel from Frei Universität, Berlin.
His talk focused on Syriac Christianity in Kerala: The History of an Indian Minority from Antiquity until Today”. From the beginning of Christianity, there was an “Eastern” side to this story. Although the New Testament was written in Greek, it was quickly translated into Aramaic/Syriac for the new converts in the Middle East and further away in Central and East Asia and in India. The presentation described the arrival of this Semitic form of early Christianity in India, mainly Kerala, in Antiquity. How it became “indigenous” and survived in its own special way until the arrival of the Portuguese explorers in the 15/16th century. How this contact with “European Christianity” impacted on this “Indian” form of Christianity and how it evolved and fragmented from then on. A central issue is the relation with the “Indian” environment on the one hand, and with the Syriac churches in the Middle East on the other, and how they belong to both in a unique way.
