Abraham Malpan was born in 1796 at Maramon and taught Syriac at the Old Seminary in Kottayam, where Church Missionary Society missionaries had been working alongside the Malankara church since 1816 in what was called the Mission of Help. When the alliance broke down in 1836, the reform party continued on its own. Malpan translated and revised the liturgy, and in 1837 he had a venerated image removed from a festival at Maramon to make the point about intercession. He sent his nephew Deacon Mathews to Mardin, where the Patriarch of Antioch consecrated him metropolitan in 1842 as Mathews Mar Athanasius — which meant the reform held valid orders from the same source as its opponents.