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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 27 June 2017
This article explores the locally specific (re)construction of a biblical figure, the Apostle St Paul, in India, to unravel the entanglement of religion with British imperial ideology on the one hand, and to understand the dynamics of colonial conversion on the other. Over the nineteenth century, evangelical pamphlets and periodicals heralded St Paul as the ideal missionary, who championed conversion to Christianity but within an imperial context: that of the first-century Roman Mediterranean. Through an examination of missionary discourses, along with a study of Indian (Hindu and Islamic) intellectual engagement with Christianity including Bengali convert narratives, this article studies St Paul as a reference point for understanding the contours of ‘vernacular Christianity’ in nineteenth-century India. Drawing upon colonial Christian publications mainly from Bengal, the article focuses on the multiple reconfigurations of Paul: as a crucial mascot of Anglican Protestantism, as a justification of British imperialism, as an ideological resource for anti-imperial sentiments, and as a theological inspiration for Hindu reform and revivalist organization.
The research for this article was supported by funding from the European Research Council under the European Union's Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007–2013)/ERC grant agreement no. 295463. I would like to thank Simon Goldhill, Michael Ledger-Lomas, Gareth Atkins, Brian Murray, and other members of the ERC project ‘Bible and Antiquity in Nineteenth-Century Culture’ at the University of Cambridge for their critical engagement with drafts of this article. I also thank Joel Cabrita and Rajarshi Ghose for their input, as well as Rohan Deb Roy for his helpful feedback.
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21 According to the Bible's New Testament, the apostles were the primary disciples of Jesus Christ. Christian tradition refers to the apostles as being twelve in number and the period of early Christianity during the lifetimes of Jesus and the apostles is called the Apostolic Age. Although not one of the twelve apostles commissioned during the life of Jesus, Paul is still considered a significant apostle as he claimed a special commission from the resurrected Jesus. Paul has been traditionally understood to be the author of fourteen of the twenty-seven New Testament books (although the exact number is now disputed), most of them written in the form of epistles to early Christian communities in the ancient world.
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30 In the context of 1830s ecclesiastical politics, these were loaded terms. The Tractarians talked a lot about apostolic succession (from the early church and especially the Fathers), and evangelical anti-Tractarians like Wilson were keen both to appropriate the same language (the church was derived from Christ and the apostles, not rationalism or political authority or expediency), but also to redefine it: apostolic as the pure simplicity of the early church, not the more elaborate and corrupt thing that came later. Paul was a keystone of that effort.
31 Bateman, Life of Daniel Wilson, pp. 223–4.
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36 Ibid., pp. v–vi.
37 Tractarianism or the Oxford movement was a movement of a section of the Church of England which wanted to move away from Anglicanism and eventually developed into Anglo-Catholicism. The movement, whose original devotees were mostly associated with the University of Oxford, argued for the reinstatement of some older Christian traditions of faith and their inclusion into Anglican liturgy and theology. The movement's philosophy was known as Tractarianism after its series of publications, the Tracts for the Times, published from 1833 to 1841.
38 Ibid., p. 15.
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42 Ibid., pp. 7–8.
43 Ibid., pp. 7–8.
44 Ibid., pp. 52–3.
45 Ibid. pp. 297–304.
46 Ibid., pp. 28–9.
47 Ibid., pp. 175–80.
48 Bateman, Life of Daniel Wilson, p. 528.
49 Ibid., p. 529.
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70 Ibid., p. 46.
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76 While older analysis like that of Borthwick, Meredith, Keshab Chunder Sen: a search for cultural synthesis (Calcutta, 1977)Google Scholar, considers the New Dispensation as a synthesis between Christianity and Hinduism, newer analysis is increasingly holding it to be an attempt at universalism, fusion of all religion; see John Stevens, ‘Colonial subjectivity: Keshab Chandra Sen in London and Calcutta’ (dissertation, University College London, 2011).
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79 Ibid., pp. 452–3.
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84 Ibid.
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87 Ibid., p. 488.
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96 Ibid., pp. 232–3.
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99 John Muir, ‘St Paul: a model for the missionaries’, Calcutta Christian Observer (1838), pp. 68–9.
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105 Ibid.
106 See Brown, E. F., First epistle of Paul the apostle to Corinthians with introduction and notes (London and Madras, 1923), pp. vii–viii Google Scholar.
107 Although Protestants at the time believed Paul to be the author of Epistle to Hebrews, current New Testament scholarship mostly considers its authorship unknown.
108 Ibid.
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111 Ibid.
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114 Ibid., p. 69.
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121 Ibid., p. 180, See the long discussion on Origen's testimony on St Thomas. Also, pp. 182–5.
122 Ibid., p. 19.
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125 Anonymous, Sadhu charitra: lives of apostles and saints of the early church, p. 48.
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128 Ibid., pp. 51–2.
129 Ibid., pp. 63–73. Also, see Anonymous, History of the apostles, pp. 64–5.
130 Anonymous, Sadhu charitra: lives of apostles and saints of the early church, p. 76.
131 Ibid., p. 7.
132 Anonymous, History of the apostles, pp. 68–70.
133 Anonyous, Sadhu charitra: lives of apostles and saints of the early church, p. 78.
134 Anonymous, History of the apostles, pp. 68–9.
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137 Ibid., p. 11.
138 Ibid., p. 11.
139 See Frykenberg, Robert and Low, Alaine, eds., Christians and missionaries in India: cross cultural communication since 1500 (Grand Rapids, MI, 2003)Google Scholar; and Jeyaraj, Daniel, ‘Indian participation in enabling, sustaining and promoting Christian mission in India’, in Young, Richard Fox, ed., India and the Indianness of Christianity (Grand Rapids, MI, 2009), pp. 26–40 Google Scholar.
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141 Barua, Ankur, Debating ‘conversion’ in Hinduism and Christianity (New York, NY, 2015), pp. 53–6Google Scholar.
142 For an account of the confrontation between Banerjea or Day with the Protestant missions in Calcutta in the 1840s and 1850s on grounds of racial discrimination and hierarchy, see Copley, Antony, Religions in conflict: ideology, cultural contact and conversion in late colonial India (Delhi, 1997), pp. 226–38Google Scholar; and Nandini Chatterjee, ‘The political theology of Indian Christian citizenship: Krishna Mohan Banerjea to K. T. Paul’, paper delivered at the University of Cambridge, 2012, pp. 2–11, http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:nF0W6VZ4EYgJ:www.cccw.cam.ac.uk/media/documents/HMC%2520seminars%25202012/N_Chatterjee_ChristianCitizenship.doc+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=uk&client=safari.
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