Week 10: “Cutchery Tamil versus Pure Tamil” -Israel (Sugirtharajah)

In his piece on the controversy surrounding the revision of Protestant Tamil canon from one particular missionary translation to another, Israel, shows the necessity of a non-Western Protestant community’s need for a deeply rooted and historicized text to validate its place among native historical religions. The most interesting aspect of this discussion was Israel’s commentary on the inability of older Protestant Tamils to accept a recently altered text based primarily out of there cast position, as well as their desires to combat deeply historical native religion. This debate is one still held today, and one that Christians past and present have attempted to debate. The common debate and apologetic used among Western Christians is that the entirety of the Hebrew scriptures points to and affirms the existence and importance of Jesus. This recognition is very important for Christians today as well as the past, because this historicity serves as affirmation for the validity of our faith, which is similar to the debate of Tamil Protestantism and their desire for a “true” historically Tamil text.