St. Thomas in India

St. Thomas Cross

Via Alex Tabarrok, I discovered this fascinating Theodore Dalrymple article on the Christians of southern India who believe that their church was founded by the apostle Thomas. When the Portuguese reached India in the sixteenth century they accepted these teachings and built a grand cathedral over the modest shrine at the site of Thomas's martyrdom. Later on skepticism set in, as with everything in providential Christian history, but modern scholarship is making the story of Thomas look more plausible.

Besides the claims of the Indians themselves, there is a strange document called the Gospel of Saint Thomas. This is one of the "Gnostic Gospels," apparently written in the 200s AD and containing gnostic ideas that don't fit with the early church. But it may contain traces of an earlier and more authentic account:

After Jesus's death, according to the Acts, the apostle had been summoned to India – and his martyrdom – by a mysterious king, Gondophares. . . . British archaeologists working in late 19th-century India began to find hoards of coins belonging to a previously unknown Indian king: the Rajah Gondophares, who ruled from AD19 to AD45. If St Thomas had ever been summoned to India, it would have been Rajah Gondophares who would have done it, just as the Acts had always maintained.

The fact that the Acts had accurately preserved the name of an obscure Indian rajah, whose name and lineage had disappeared, implied that it must contain at least a nucleus of genuine historical information.

Besides that, archaeologists have uncovered evidence that the trade between the Roman Empire and India was quite robust in the time of the Apostles, so it would not actually have been very difficult for a Palestinian to reach India in that period. (I have written about some of this evidence here and here.)

In the 1930s, Sir Mortimer Wheeler discovered and excavated a major Roman trading station on the south Indian coast, while other scholars unearthed references showing that in Thomas's time, the trick of sailing with the monsoon had just been discovered, reducing the journey time from the Red Sea to India to just under 40 days. According to a previously overlooked remark by Strabo, first-century geographer and historian, 200 Roman trading vessels a year were making the annual journey to the bazaars of Malabar and back.

More intriguing still, analysis of Roman coin hoards in India has shown that the Roman spice trade peaked exactly in the middle of the first century AD.

Also, the practices of India's ancient Christians suggest that their church was founded early in Christian history, because they continued many Jewish customs that Christians in the Roman Empire later abandoned:

If St Thomas had carried Christianity to India, it is likely that he would have taken a distinctly more Jewish form than the Gentile-friendly version developed for the Greeks of Antioch by St Paul and later exported to Europe. Hence the importance of the fact that some of the St Thomas Christian churches to this day retain Judeo-Christian practices long dropped in the west - such as the celebration of the solemn Passover feast.

One should also note that in the fourth century, when we first get Christian literature in any real quantity, everybody assumed that Thomas had been to India.

In the 4th or early 5th century, Saint Jerome wrote that “Christ lives everywhere. With Thomas in India and Peter in Rome.” 

Indian writers as early as the 4th century mention the followers of Saint Thomas, and the genealogies of some Indian families trace back to people the families say were converted by Saint Thomas himself. 

Reliquary of the Spear Supposed to Have Killed Thomas

As Tabarrok says, the evidence that Thomas preached in India is at least as good as the evidence that Peter preached in Rome. Which, of course, doesn't make it anything like a certainty.

Wikipedia has several articles on the ancient Indian Christians, one of which says that they have more than a million members, now scattered around the world with the Indian disapora. The Portuguese got part of this community to join them within the Catholic fold, which divided the Indian church; these days the people who follow the old Syrian rite are often called Orthodox to distinguish them from the Catholics.

I find all of this wonderful, because I love these questions that hover on the boundary of historical knowledge, trying to piece together hints from oral tradition and documents written two centuries later into some kind of probable truth.