Thomas the Apostle

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Thomas the Apostle is one of the twelve disciples of Jesus named in the New Testament Gospels, known in later tradition by three things that the canonical text barely connects: a moment of doubt, a gospel that bears his name, and a mission to India. The historical man behind them is almost entirely out of reach; what survives is the figure the early churches built around the name.

In the Synoptic Gospels he is only a name on the list of the Twelve. The Gospel of John gives him his character. There he is called Didymus, “the twin,” and it is John who reports the scene that fixed his reputation: told by the others that the risen Jesus had appeared, Thomas refuses to believe unless he can put his finger in the wounds, and is answered a week later by Jesus offering him exactly that. The phrase “doubting Thomas” descends from this passage, though the text itself ends not in reproach but in his confession, “My Lord and my God.” How much of the episode is historical report and how much is the evangelist’s theology of belief is precisely what scholarship cannot settle.

Two bodies of writing later attached themselves to the name. The Gospel of Thomas, recovered in Coptic among the Nag Hammadi codices in 1945, is a collection of sayings ascribed to Jesus, several of them close to the canonical gospels and several without parallel; its date and its relation to Gnostic currents remain disputed, and most scholars hold that the apostle did not write it. The Acts of Thomas, a third-century romance composed in Syriac, narrates his missionary journey to India and carries some of the most striking devotional poetry of early Christianity, the Hymn of the Pearl among it — a strand of that literature treated in the library’s text on the uncanonical Acts.

The Indian tradition is older than these texts and held with more conviction. The Saint Thomas Christians of the Malabar coast in Kerala have for many centuries believed that the apostle himself founded their churches, preached in the first century, and was martyred near Mylapore on the southeastern coast. Historians regard a first-century apostolic mission to India as possible but unproven; what is documented is an ancient, continuous Christian community in South India with deep links to the Church of the East. The community’s own memory does not wait on that verdict — for them the descent of their faith from Thomas is not a hypothesis but an inheritance. The man stays hidden behind the name; the name kept gathering meaning long after he was gone.

→ In the library: Mead — Fragments of a Faith Forgotten (1906): the uncanonical Acts

→ Related: Gnosis · Bride Of Christ