Person · apostle of Jesus, apostle of India in tradition

Thomas the Apostle

Also known as Saint Thomas, St Thomas, Didymus, Judas Thomas, Doubting Thomas, Tʾōmā, Thōmâs, Mar Thoma, Apostle of India

Function

Religious institution & practice

Confidence

Traditional / narrative attribution — A New Testament apostle; his Indian mission, the seven churches, his death at Chennai and the Mylapore tomb are community tradition, disputed by historians.

Worth knowing

The earliest record of his death is in the fourth-century Syriac hymns of Ephrem, who wrote that he was killed in India and that a merchant carried his bones to Edessa. The feast of 3 July, which the Malankara Orthodox church keeps in memory of that translation, is celebrated as Indian Christians' Day.

Connections (21)

• Traveller routeMuziris / Pattanam

  Thomas Christian tradition has the apostle land at or near Muziris, the Chera pepper port on the Periyar, in 52 CE, after a sea voyage from the north-west; the Acts of Thomas also send him to India by ship. Nothing documents the landing, but the setting is not implausible: Muziris was the chief Roman-trade harbour of the Malabar coast, and Jewish communities lived in Kerala in the first century, so an Aramaic-speaking Galilean could have made the journey. Historians still dispute whether he did.

• FoundedKodungallur & Mar Thoma church

  Kodungallur, the Chera town known also as Cranganore, Makotai and Shengala, heads every list of the seven churches as the first that Thomas is said to have founded on the Malabar coast. Tradition says he baptised the king of Kodungallur and his household there, together with forty Jews. The Ramban Pattu calls the district Maliankara, and later tradition holds that Kodungallur rose to prominence as Christianity weakened at Mylapore. The account is the community's own, written down from the seventeenth century.

• FoundedPalayoor

  Palayur near Chavakkad is the oldest of the three surviving churches of the seven. Tradition says Thomas came to evangelise its Jewish settlement, worked miracles before Brahmins at a temple there and turned the temple into a church; the Brahmins who refused left, cursing the place as Sapakkatu, the cursed forest. Scholars such as M. Jussay think a first-century Jewish settlement there probable. The church was rededicated from Saint Cyriacus to Thomas only from 1948, to assert its Thomasine origin.

• FoundedKottakavu, Ernakulam

  Kottakkavu at North Paravur is one of the seven churches Thomas is believed to have founded, and one of only three still standing. The Ramban Pattu names it Kottakkavu or Kottakkayal, and tradition says it was rebuilt in the ninth century under the Persian bishops Sabor and Aphroth and again in 1308. Its dedications show the layers: Sabor and Aphroth in a Syriac manuscript of 1556, All Saints at the Synod of Diamper, then Gervasis and Protasis, and Thomas only from the mid-twentieth century.

• FoundedKokkamangalam Mar Thoma, Alappuzha

  Kokkamangalam near Pallippuram in Alappuzha district is counted among the seven churches, and the Ramban Pattu says about 1,600 people were converted while Thomas preached there for a year. Tradition adds that he set up a cross, which local Brahmins threw into the lake and which washed ashore on an island near Pallippuram. The name itself appears in no European record; it is matched with Kulasekharamangalam, whose St Thomas church Archbishop Menezes visited before and after the Synod of Diamper. The present church dates from 1900.

• FoundedNiranam St Mary's, Pathanamthitta

  Niranam on the Kolayar, a tributary of the Pamba near Thiruvalla, is one of the seven churches, said in tradition to have been founded by Thomas in 54 CE. The story runs that he preached and set up a cross at nearby Thrikkalpeswaram, and that Brahmin opposition moved the Christians to Niranam, where a church was built. The church's granite lamps and carvings resemble those of Hindu temples, and the Ramban Pattu and Margamkali songs describe the old church and its place.

• FoundedChayal, Idukki

  Chayal is the seventh of the churches attributed to Thomas, and the only one in the hills: the Ramban Pattu places it in mountain country, unlike the six churches near the sea. Its identification with Nilakkal in the Western Ghats rests on that Thomas Christian tradition alone. Family histories say its Christians, who lived by trade on the route between the Malabar and Coromandel coasts, left for Kanjirappally, Kadambanad and Niranam. An ecumenical church of six denominations opened at Nilakkal in 1984.

• FoundedKollam Marth Mariam

  Kollam is the second church in the Ramban Pattu's list of the seven, and tradition says the church Thomas founded there decayed and was rebuilt by the Persian bishops Sabor and Aphroth. Its documented history begins only with the copper plates of 849. Giovanni de Empoli, a colleague of Albuquerque, found about 3,000 native Christians there in the early sixteenth century who believed their church had been founded by Thomas. The old church at Tangasseri vanished inside the Portuguese fort and, by 1863, under the sea.

• FoundedThiruvithamcode Arappally

  Thiruvithamcode in Kanyakumari district is the half church of the seven-and-a-half, and its current tradition says Thomas founded it around 63 or 64 CE after converting the local king, who built the church. The name Arappalli is read both as royal church and as half church, the second because it was smaller and lay far to the south. An older recorded tradition instead derives its Christians from families who fled persecution in Mylapore, which makes the apostolic foundation a later layer.

• Traditional linkMalayattoor

  Malayattoor is not in the conventional seven but is often counted among the Arappallikal associated with Thomas, and some old lists place it among the seven. Oral tradition says that, returning towards the coast through Malayattoor and meeting hostile people, he fled to the hilltop, prayed there and left his footprint on a rock, and that blood flowed from a rock he touched in prayer. The hill shrine grew from these stories; nothing earlier than the tradition itself records the visit.

• Traditional linkSt. Thomas Mount, Chennai

  Syrian Christian tradition holds that Thomas was killed with a spear on St Thomas Mount on 21 December 72 CE and buried at Mylapore. The Portuguese missionary Diego Fernandes built an oratory on the summit in 1523, reportedly on the foundations of an earlier church, and Gaspar Coelho laid the foundation of a larger church in 1547. The hill has been revered by Christians since at least the sixteenth century; the date and manner of the death are tradition, not record.

• Buried atSan Thome, Mylapore

  Tradition says Thomas's body was buried at Mylapore after his death on St Thomas Mount, and San Thome basilica stands over that tomb. Marco Polo's visit, dated 1292, is generally accepted, and Duarte Barbosa found the tomb maintained with a lamp burning in the early sixteenth century. The Portuguese rebuilt the neglected shrine from 1522 and consecrated it in 1523; the present neo-Gothic church opened in 1896, with its second spire marking the believed tomb.

• Traditional linkLittle Mount, Chennai

  Little Mount, Chinnamalai, is a hillock about 24 metres high on the Adyar at Saidapet, with a cave where, according to tradition, Thomas lived for a time as a refuge from persecution. The Portuguese built the church of Our Lady of Good Health there in 1551, and the cave is entered through that church; a newer church followed in 1971 or 1972. Of the three Chennai sites tied to the apostle, with San Thome and St Thomas Mount, it carries the least religious weight.

• Traditional linkTakshashila / Taxila

  Early Christian legend has Thomas visit a king Gondophares around 46 CE, and A. E. Medlycott placed the meeting at Taxila because the city was Gondophares's capital. The name had a strange afterlife: in the legends gathered into John of Hildesheim's History of the Three Kings in the 1360s, Taxila became Silla, Egrisilla and Grisculla, and Martin Behaim's globe of 1492 marks Egrisilla, which Hildesheim made the island where the apostle lies buried. Taxila's part rests entirely on that identification.

• Court associationGondophares

  In the Acts of Thomas the apostle is sold as a carpenter to a merchant of king Gudnaphar and set to build the king a palace; he gives the money to the poor instead, and the king and his brother are converted. Scholars such as M. Reinaud identified Gudnaphar with Gondophares, and A. D. H. Bivar judged the reign dates of the Takht-i-Bahi Gondophares consistent with a voyage soon after the Crucifixion. The meeting is legend; a king of that title is historical.

• Relic distributed toEdessa / Urfa

  Ephrem the Syrian, writing in the fourth century, said that Thomas was put to death in India and that a merchant brought his bones to Edessa; this is the earliest known record of his death. Egeria prayed at the apostle's church and memorial there in 384, Bishop Cyrus moved the bones from the martyrium outside the walls into a city church on 22 August 394, and a silver coffin followed in the 440s. The relic cult is documented; whose bones they were is tradition.

• Relic distributed toOrtona — Basilica of St Thomas

  Relics venerated as Thomas's reached Ortona on 6 September 1258, when galleys of the town under Leone Acciaiuoli carried them off from a church on Chios, together with the carved gravestone. The story is told by the sixteenth-century Ortona physician Giambattista De Lectis and backed by a parchment drawn up at Bari in 1259. Thomas is the town's patron, and its basilica is counted with Mylapore and Palayur among the apostle's major shrines.

• AnalogueAdam's Peak / Sri Pada

  The footprint in the summit rock of Adam's Peak in Sri Lanka is read as the Buddha's, Shiva's or Adam's, and in some Christian tradition as Thomas's; the Encyclopaedia Britannica of 1911 noted Portuguese Christians divided between Thomas and the eunuch of the Ethiopian queen Kandake. The same reading of a mark in rock appears at Malayattoor in Kerala, where tradition says the apostle left his footprint while praying. The early church of Sri Lanka also names Thomas as its first evangelist.

• Canonised by textActs of Thomas

  The Acts of Thomas, written in Syriac probably at Edessa before 240, is the main early source for the apostle's Indian mission and the earliest known text to send him to India. It calls him Judas Thomas, Judas the Twin, and ends with his martyrdom: four soldiers spear him on a hill on the orders of king Misdaeus, whose wife, son and kinswomen he had converted. Two centuries lie between the apostle and the text, which is why its authenticity is doubted.

• Teaching lineageSaint Thomas Christians

  The community takes its name from the apostle and traces its origin to his conversion of thirty-two Brahmin families, among them Pakalomattom, Sankarapuri, Kalli and Kaliyankal, a tradition found in the Thomma Parvam of 1601. Its medieval metropolitans were styled bishops of the seat of Saint Thomas, its churches carry the Mar Thoma Sleeva or St Thomas cross, and Thomas remains a favourite name in Kerala. Robert Frykenberg judges the traditions of dubious historicity but of great antiquity and popular appeal.

• AnalogueThomas of Cana

  Kerala's Christians remember two founding Thomases. The apostle, in tradition, converted the first families in the first century; Thomas of Cana, a Syriac merchant said to have arrived in 345 or later, brought settlers, clergy and royal privileges. Portuguese writers recorded the resulting division between Northists, who claim the apostle's converts, and Southists or Knanaya, who claim the merchant, and the Nasranis of Kodungallur venerated him too as a saint. The Syriac Orthodox patriarch canonised him in 1990.

Sources

Wikipedia, "Thomas the Apostle", "Saint Thomas Christians" and "Seven churches of Saint Thomas". A. E. Medlycott, India and the Apostle Thomas (1905); Robert Eric Frykenberg, Christianity in India: from Beginnings to the Present (2008); Stephen Neill, A History of Christianity in India (2004).

• Wikipedia — Thomas the Apostle
• Wikipedia — Saint Thomas Christians
• Wikipedia — Seven churches of Saint Thomas
• Medlycott, India and the Apostle Thomas (1905), Internet Archive