Other reinforcements came from Persia in 822, but the Malabar church never developed any intellectual vigour or missionary zeal.
Gregory, the Jacobite metropolitan of Jerusalem, visited Malabar, and, as the people had no consecrated bishop at the time, he consecrated Mar Thomas, who had been filling the office at the people's request, and remained in the country jointly administering the affairs of the Church with Thomas.
Thus the Nestorian Church in India, voluntarily and with perfect indifference to theological dogmas, passed under Jacobite rule, and when early in the 18th century, Mar Gabriel, a Nestorian bishop, came to Malabar, he had a cool reception, and could only detach a small following of Syrians whom he brought back to the old Nestorianism.
The theology of the Indian Syrian Christians is of a Nestorian type, and Cosmas Indicopleustes (6th century) puts us on the right track when he says that the Christians whom he found in Ceylon and Malabar had come from Persia (probably as refugees from persecution, like the Huguenots in England and the Pilgrim Fathers in America).
On the death of the bishop Mar Athanasius Matthew in 1877, litigation began as to his successor; it lasted ten years, and the decision (since reversed) was given against the party that held by the Nestorian connexion and the habitual autonomy of the Malabar church in favour of the supremacy of the Jacobite patriarch of Antioch.
