Thomas the Apostle

• 1. Introduction

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  Thomas the Apostle, one of the Twelve Apostles of Jesus according to the New Testament, has bones that came close to being sold. In late December 1943, the Italian town of Ortona became a battlefield. The basilica there was blown up because its belfry was thought to serve as a lookout point for the Allies. German forces intended to sell the relics, together with the treasure of Saint Thomas. The monks hid them instead. They entombed the relics inside the bell tower, the only part of the semi-ruined church left standing.

  Why would an Italian town guard the remains of a man whose story begins in the Gospels? The traditions about him stretch far beyond Judea. Some send him to southern India, some to Upper Mesopotamia, and a few even to China and Paraguay. This documentary follows those traditions, the early writers who recorded them, and the strange books that circulated under his name.

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• 2. Three Scenes in John

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  Three times in the Gospel of John, Thomas steps out of the group of apostles and speaks. The first comes in John 11:16, soon after Lazarus has died. The apostles do not want to go back to Judea. Thomas answers with grim loyalty: "Let us also go, that we may die with him."

  The second scene is John 14:5. Jesus has just explained that he is going away to prepare a heavenly home, and that his followers will one day join him there. Thomas reacts by asking, "Lord, we know not whither thou goest; and how can we know the way?"

  The third scene, John 20:24-29, made him famous. The other apostles tell Thomas that Jesus has risen from the dead and appeared to them. Thomas is skeptical. He says he must see "on his hands the print of the nails," and put his finger there. Only then, he says, "I will not believe."

  When Jesus appears again, he invites Thomas to touch the wounds and look at him. Thomas answers, "My Lord and my God." Jesus replies, "Thomas, because thou hast seen me, thou hast believed: blessed are they that have not seen, and yet have believed." From this moment comes the phrase "doubting Thomas," meaning a skeptic who refuses to believe without direct personal experience.

  The name Thomas carries its own meaning. It comes from the Aramaic Tʾōmā, which means "the twin" and is related to the Hebrew tʾóm. The Greek word for twin, Didymos, also appears in the New Testament. That meaning set off a long run of later speculation about whose twin he might have been.

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• 3. Landing at Muziris

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  The ancient port of Muziris, identified with sites such as Pattanam on the Malabar Coast, was a major center of maritime trade with the Roman Empire. It lay inside the Chera domain, one of three major Tamil polities in the far south of the subcontinent. The Cheras ruled the Kerala region, the Cholas held parts of eastern Tamil Nadu, and the Pandyas governed the southern Tamil region. Early Tamil was the main language of administration and literature across all three.

  According to the traditional accounts of the Saint Thomas Christians of India, Thomas landed at Muziris, also called Cranganore, in AD 52. The same accounts say he was martyred in Mylapore, near Madras, in AD 72. Historians still dispute whether the visit happened at all.

  The tradition has a route as well. Thomas is said to have left northwest India when an attack threatened. He then traveled by vessel to the Malabar Coast, possibly stopping in southeast Arabia and Socotra. He landed around the year 50 in the company of a Jewish merchant called Abbanes or Habban. From there he preached along the coast. The churches he founded stood mainly on the Periyar River and its tributaries, and along the shore where Jewish colonies lay.

  The tradition names communities at places including Kodungallur, Palayoor, Niranam and Kollam. It says Thomas baptized several families, and many families today claim origins almost that far back. The religious historian Robert Eric Frykenberg wrote: "Whatever dubious historicity may be attached to such local traditions, there can be little doubt as to their great antiquity or to their great appeal in the popular imagination."

  The churches of Kerala also produced a distinctive symbol. In his 16th-century work Jornada, Antonio Gouvea describes ornate crosses now called Saint Thomas Crosses. They are also known as the Nasrani Menorah, the Persian Cross, or Mar Thoma Sleeva. Tradition dates them to the 6th century, and they appear in churches in Kerala, Mylapore and Goa.

  Interpretations of the design differ. One reading sees the shape of a Jewish menorah, the seven-branched lampstand. Another reads the flowery arms as joyfulness and the lotus beneath the cross as Christianity planted in the land of Buddha. Three steps stand for Calvary. Gouvea also writes of the veneration of the cross at Cranganore, which he calls the "Cross of Christians."

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• 4. Early Witnesses

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  Upper Mesopotamia, in what is now southeastern Turkey, is where early Christian tradition says Thomas first worked. He is said to have started the Church of the East around the Van Province, Edessa and Hakkari. The date is given as presumably between the mid-to-late 30s and 45. He spent many years there preaching to Jews and non-Christians before heading further east in the late 40s.

  The oldest surviving statements about his field of work come from Origen, who taught in Alexandria and then in Caesarea. Outside the Acts of the Apostles, Origen is the earliest known writer to record the apostles casting lots for their territories. His original work is lost. Eusebius preserved the line: "Thomas, so the tradition has it, obtained as his portion Parthia." Eusebius also pairs Thomas with Bartholomew, assigned to Parthia and northwest India.

  Eusebius adds a legend about King Abgar of Edessa. In it, Judas, who is also called Thomas, sends Thaddaeus to preach in Edessa after the Ascension. A text called the Didascalia, from the end of the 3rd century, says that India and all the countries bordering it received the apostolic ordinances from Judas Thomas, a guide and ruler in the church he built.

  Ephrem the Syrian, a doctor of Syriac Christianity, wrote in the forty-second of his Carmina Nisibina that the Apostle was put to death in India. He says an unnamed merchant carried the remains to Edessa. His hymns repeat the idea. One line reads "The bones the merchant hath brought," and in another the devil speaks of "the Apostle I slew in India."

  Writers in the Greek and Latin worlds agreed. Gregory of Nazianzus, born in AD 330, asked whether the apostles had not been strangers in the nations they entered, and he named Thomas with India. Ambrose of Milan, who knew the classics and had some knowledge of India, wrote that India became accessible to Thomas and Persia to Matthew. Gregory of Tours reported that Thomas suffered in India. He said a monastery and a church of striking dimensions stand where his remains first rested, and a man named Theodore who visited the place told him so.

  In 522, Cosmas Indicopleustes visited the Malabar Coast. He is the first traveler to mention Syrian Christians there. In his book Christian Topography, he describes a bishop at the town of Kalliana, meaning Quilon or Kollam, who had been consecrated in Persia.

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• 5. Beyond India

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  A Malayalam ballad called Thoma Ramban Pattu, or The Song of the Lord Thomas, carries Thomas to China. Its earliest manuscript dates from the 17th century. The ballad has him come to India, travel on to China, and return to India, where he died. Saint Thomas Christians in India preserve this account in their books and church traditions.

  Outside India, the Chinese tradition appears in older sources. Ibn al-Ṭayyib, a Nestorian theologian and physician who died in 1043 in Baghdad, recorded it in his Law of Christianity. Abdisho bar Berika, metropolitan of Nisibis and Armenia, who died in 1318, wrote it into his Nomocanon. The breviary of the Chaldean Church has it too. One line reads: "Through St. Thomas the Chinese and Ethiopians were converted to the truth." Another says that through him the Kingdom of Heaven "took wing and ascended to China."

  The Zuqnin Chronicle, from AD 775, holds the earliest form of this tradition, which may date to the late Sasanian period. It may even descend from a 3rd-century text in which Thomas converts the Magi of the Gospel of Matthew. They lived in the land of Shir, the land of the Seres in the Tarim Basin. Arnobius of Sicca, active shortly after 300, also says that the Christian message had reached India and the Seres, along with Persians, Medians and Parthians.

  Kurt E. Koch suggested that Thomas possibly went on into Indonesia through India, traveling with Indian traders.

  The strangest tradition crosses an ocean. The Guaraní tribes of Paraguay hold an old oral tradition of a holy man who preached to them under the name Pa'í Sumé or Avaré Sumé. In Peru he was called Tumé. The Jesuit missionary Antonio Ruiz de Montoya recorded the story almost 150 years before another Jesuit, Dobrizhoffer, arrived. Montoya wrote that the man, called Paí Thome, wandered among them carrying a wooden cross on his back. Dobrizhoffer described a cross of three large stones, twenty leagues from Asumpcion. The natives venerated it, believing the Apostle once sat on those stones as on a chair to preach.

  The only recorded research came after Paraguay's independence, during the reign of José Gaspar Rodríguez de Francia. The Austro-Hungarian engineer Franz Wisner von Morgenstern reported that miners in the Caaguazú Department found stones carved with ancient letters. Francia sent his finest experts, who judged the symbols Hebrew-like. They could neither translate them nor date them, and no further investigation is recorded.

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• 6. A Spear on a Hill

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  On the 3rd of July 72 AD, according to Syrian Christian tradition, Thomas was killed with a spear at St. Thomas Mount in Chennai. His body was interred in Mylapore. Latin Church tradition instead holds the 21st of December as the date of his death.

  The main source for the killing is the apocryphal Acts of Thomas, sometimes titled The Acts of Judas Thomas and written circa 180-230 AD. Most Christian churches regard it as apocryphal or even heretical. The two centuries between the apostle's life and the writing cast doubt on its accuracy.

  In the Acts, King Misdeus, also written Mizdeos, is infuriated when Thomas converts his queen Tertia and his son Juzanes. Thomas also converts the king's sister-in-law, Princess Mygdonia, and her friend Markia. Misdeus leads Thomas outside the city. He orders four soldiers to take him to a nearby hill, where they spear him. After the death, the surviving converts elect Syphorus the first presbyter, and Juzanes becomes the first deacon. These names suggest Greek descent or cultural influence, and Greek traders had long visited Muziris.

  The date of the feast depends on the church. The feast of Saint Thomas entered the Roman calendar in the 9th century, assigned to the 21st of December. The Martyrology of St. Jerome mentioned him on the 3rd of July, the date to which the Roman celebration moved in 1969, so that it would stop interfering with the major weekdays of Advent. Traditionalist Roman Catholics, Lutherans and many Anglicans still keep the 21st of December. Most modern calendars prefer the 3rd of July, which Indian Christians celebrate as Indian Christians' Day.

  The Eastern Orthodox have several days for him. The 6th of October is his primary feast. The Sunday of Thomas, on the first Sunday after Easter, remembers the moment his doubts ended. The Malankara Orthodox Church keeps three days. The 3rd of July marks the relics' move to Edessa, now Şanlıurfa. The 18th of December marks the day he was lanced, and the 21st of December marks his death.

  In the early 16th century, the traveler Barbosa recorded that the tomb in Mylapore was maintained and that a lamp burned there.

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• 7. Bones Across Borders

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  In 232, according to tradition, an Indian king sent the greater part of Thomas's relics from India to Edessa in Mesopotamia. Syriac sources name that king Mazdai. Greek and Latin sources call him Misdeos or Misdeus. The name has been connected to Bazdeo on the coinage of the Kushan ruler Vasudeva I, since the sounds M and B often swap in classical renderings of Indian names. The martyrologist Rabban Sliba gave a special day to the Indian king, his family and Saint Thomas.

  In the 4th century, a martyrium raised over the burial place drew pilgrims to Edessa. In the 380s, the pilgrim Egeria described her visit in a letter to her community of nuns at home. She called the church "very great, very beautiful and of new construction," and she stayed three days. According to Theodoret of Cyrrhus, Cyrus I, Bishop of Edessa, moved the bones on the 22nd of August 394 to a church in the south-west corner of the city. In 441, Anatolius, the Magister militum per Orientem, donated a silver coffin to hold them. In 1144, the Zengids conquered the city and destroyed the shrine.

  The relics remained at Edessa until they were moved to Chios in 1258. The story of what happened next comes from Giambattista De Lectis, a 16th-century physician and writer of Ortona. Three galleys from Ortona, led by General Leone Acciaiuoli, reached Chios. Leone prayed in the main church and was drawn to a chapel lit by many lights. An elderly priest, speaking through an interpreter, told him the body of Saint Thomas was venerated there.

  Leone took a bone from the largest hole in the tombstone. The tombstone bore Greek letters and a carved bishop shown from the waist up. The next night, with a fellow named Ruggiero Grogno, he lifted the heavy stone, wrapped the relics in snow-white cloths and laid them in a wooden box. They carried the box aboard the galley. The admiral moved all the Muslim sailors onto other ships and set course for Ortona.

  The galley landed at Ortona on the 6th of September 1258. A parchment from 1259, written in Bari before five witnesses and kept in Ortona's Diocesan Library, confirms the account. The relics survived a Saracen looting in 1566. The tombstone lies in the crypt behind the altar, and its Greek inscription reads 'osios thomas, meaning Saint Thomas. Scholars date it to the 3rd-5th century. The urn holding the bones sits under the altar.

  Other places claim pieces as well. The skull is said to rest at the Monastery of Saint John the Theologian on the Greek island of Patmos. Traditional accounts say a few relics are kept at San Thome Basilica in Mylapore, in Chennai. Finger bones said to belong to Thomas were found in 1964 during restoration work at the Church of Saint Thomas in Mosul, Iraq. After the Fall of Mosul, they were moved to the Monastery of Saint Matthew on the 17th of June 2014.

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• 8. Books Under His Name

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  "These are the secret sayings that the living Jesus spoke and Didymus, Judas Thomas, recorded." So begins the Nag Hammadi copy of the Gospel of Thomas. The double name matches early Syrian traditions, which give the apostle's full name as Judas Thomas.

  Some readers have seen in the Acts of Thomas an identification of Thomas with the apostle Judas, son of James. Yet the Acts' first sentence follows the Gospels in treating them as two men. James Tabor argues instead that Thomas is Jude, the brother of Jesus mentioned by Mark. In the Book of Thomas the Contender, part of the Nag Hammadi library, he is said to be Jesus's twin: "Now, since it has been said that you are my twin and true companion, examine yourself."

  It is unclear why Thomas was seen as an authority for doctrine, though Gnostic groups held this belief as early as the Pistis Sophia. In that work, Mary Magdalene recalls Jesus naming Philip, Thomas and Matthew as the three witnesses chosen to write every word of the Kingdom of the Light.

  The Infancy Gospel of Thomas, probably written in the later 2nd century and probably in Syria, tells of Jesus's boyhood miracles. It gives the first telling of the familiar legend of the twelve sparrows. At the age of five, on the Sabbath, Jesus fashioned them from clay, and they took wing and flew away. Its earliest manuscript is a 6th-century Syriac one, and Irenaeus is the first to refer to it.

  The best known of these books today is the Gospel of Thomas, a collection of sayings whose date is disputed. A Coptic translation turned up in 1945 at the Egyptian village of Nag Hammadi, near the monastery of Chenoboskion. Scholars then realized that an earlier Greek version existed in papyrus fragments found at Oxyrhynchus in the 1890s. Because it may be very early, the text has played a substantial role in New Testament studies. Not everyone welcomed it. One old warning reads: "Let none read the gospel according to Thomas, for it is the work, not of one of the twelve apostles, but of one of Mani's three wicked disciples."

  Pope Gelasius I judged another text, The Passing of Mary, heretical in 494. It names Joseph of Arimathea as its author and makes Thomas the only witness of the Assumption of Mary into heaven. The other apostles are miraculously carried to Jerusalem to see it. Thomas, left in India, is instead brought to her tomb, where he sees her rise bodily and drop her girdle. Here the old story of Thomas's doubt is turned around. The other apostles doubt his account until they see the empty tomb and the girdle. Medieval and Renaissance artists before the Council of Trent commonly painted the moment Thomas received that girdle.

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