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 a list. Matthew, Mark, and Luke, together with the catalog at the opening of the Acts of the Apostles, record him among the Twelve and say nothing further — Thomas appears between names that carried whole histories, Simon Peter and Andrew and Philip, and the narrative moves past him without a line of speech or a single deed. He is one of the twelve who followed and no more. Everything that gives the name a face comes from the fourth gospel.

John’s Thomas

The Gospel of John gives him his character, and gives it in three scenes. He is called Didymus — the Greek for twin — doubling the Aramaic Tˀōmā that itself means twin, so that the name is in effect repeated in two languages, a tautology that has led some readers to suspect the man’s actual given name has dropped out of the record. (The Syriac tradition supplies one: Judas Thomas, Jude the Twin.) Whose twin he was the gospels never say, and a later strand of Eastern legend would make him, scandalously, the twin of Jesus.

His first words come at the raising of Lazarus, when Jesus resolves to return to hostile Judea and Thomas, grimly loyal, tells the others they may as well go and die with him. At the Last Supper he interrupts the farewell discourse with the flat, practical objection that the disciples do not know where Jesus is going and so cannot know the way — drawing the answer that Jesus is himself the way. Then comes the scene that fixed his reputation. Told by the others that the risen Jesus had appeared while he was absent, Thomas refuses to believe unless he can put his finger into the print of the nails and his hand into the wound in the side. A week later Jesus returns and offers him precisely that, and Thomas answers with the highest confession in the gospel, addressing the crucified man as God outright: My Lord and my God. Jesus closes the exchange by pronouncing blessed those who have not seen and yet have believed.

The phrase doubting Thomas descends from this passage, and it has traveled far from what the text does with him. The episode ends not in reproach but in worship; the demand to touch yields the gospel’s clearest declaration of the risen Christ’s divinity, set as the seal of the book a verse before its first ending. How much of the scene is historical report and how much is the evangelist’s theology of belief is precisely what scholarship cannot settle — the narrative is built to instruct a later church that would never see the wounds, and the doubter is the device by which it is told that seeing was never the point. The man and the lesson are, in John, inseparable.

The two textual attachments

Two bodies of writing later attached themselves to the name, and neither comes from the apostle’s hand.

The first is the Gospel of Thomas, a collection of one hundred and fourteen sayings ascribed to Jesus, recovered complete in a Coptic manuscript among the Nag Hammadi codices in Upper Egypt in December 1945, with three earlier Greek fragments long since known from Oxyrhynchus. Several of its sayings stand close to the canonical gospels and several have no parallel anywhere; its date, its relation to Gnostic currents, and the gnosis it presses toward remain disputed, with the working consensus placing its composition somewhere in the second century. On one point the scholarship is nearly unanimous: the disciple Thomas did not write it. The attribution is the text’s claim to authority, not its provenance — the sayings work itself, and the long argument over it, belong to its own account.

The second is the Acts of Thomas, a romance composed in Syriac in the third century, most likely at Edessa, the city that would make Thomas its own. It is the only one of the major apocryphal apostle-acts to survive complete in its original tongue, and it falls into thirteen praxeis — acts — followed by a martyrdom. The book is openly encratite: its drama turns again and again on Thomas persuading the married to renounce the marriage bed, and the conflicts that follow drive the plot to its end. He is sold as a slave-carpenter to an Indian merchant, Habban, and carried to the court of the king Gundaphar, who commissions a palace; Thomas spends the building-fund on the poor and tells the furious king he has built him a palace in heaven instead. That king is no invention. An Indo-Parthian ruler named Gondophares is attested on his own coins and in a stone inscription from Takht-i-Bahi near Peshawar, reigning in the first century in the northwest — a detail that has kept the question of an Indian mission from being dismissed outright. The Acts end with Thomas put to death by four soldiers’ spears at the order of another king, Mazdai, for turning the royal women to chastity.

Folded into the Acts is the Hymn of the Pearl, sung by Thomas in prison and preserved in only one Syriac and one Greek witness — a sign that it may be older than the romance that frames it. A king’s son is sent from the East down into Egypt to fetch a single pearl guarded by a serpent; he forgets his errand and his royal birth, eats the food of the country, and falls asleep, until a letter from his parents wakes the memory of who he is, and he takes the pearl and returns to the robe of glory he had left behind. It is among the most luminous poems of early Christianity, read as a parable of the soul exiled into matter and recalled to its origin — a theme that runs deep in Syriac Christian mysticism and shades toward the gnostic. The strand of this literature is the subject of a held text on traces of the gnosis in the uncanonical Acts: Mead’s Fragments of a Faith Forgotten.

The patristic testimony

Behind the romances lies an older and soberer line of report. Eusebius of Caesarea, writing his church history early in the fourth century, quotes the earlier Alexandrian Origen to the effect that when the apostles drew lots for the inhabited world, Thomas was allotted Parthia — the Iranian empire east of Rome. Where Paul had turned the church westward into the Mediterranean, this tradition turns Thomas the opposite way, into the east beyond the imperial frontier. India lay one step further east again, and it is there that the fuller tradition sends him. At Edessa, where his bones were said to rest, the poet Ephrem the Syrian wrote in the fourth century a hymn in which the Devil laments that the apostle he had killed in India has come to strike him again in Edessa: the relics themselves, carried west by a merchant, worked the apostle’s vengeance. The translation of his remains from India to Edessa is dated in the records to the third century; from Edessa they passed in time to the Greek island of Chios, and in 1258 to Ortona on the Italian Adriatic, where they rest in the Basilica of San Tommaso. The bones moved across half the world; the question of where the living man went moved with them.

The Indian inheritance

The Indian tradition is older than the Syriac Acts and held with more conviction than any text. The Saint Thomas Christians of the Malabar coast in Kerala have for many centuries traced their churches to the apostle himself, who in their account came ashore at Muziris near Cranganore in the year 52, founded a set of foundational communities along the coast, and was martyred near Mylapore on the southeastern shore, where his tomb is kept to this day. They call themselves Nasranis, the people of the Nazarene, and reckon their descent from Thomas not as a hypothesis but as an inheritance.

What the documented record establishes is distinct from, and runs alongside, that memory. There is in South India an ancient and continuous Christian community whose existence in the early centuries is beyond dispute, organized under the Church of the East — the East Syriac church centered in Persia — served for generations by metropolitan bishops sent from Mesopotamia and by a local archdeacon, and worshiping in Syriac. That structure held until the Portuguese arrived in force. At the Synod of Diamper in 1599 the Latin church under the Padroado compelled the Malabar clergy to renounce their patriarch at Babylon and Latinize their rite; in 1653 the community broke from Rome at the Coonan Cross Oath, swearing on a great stone cross that they would not submit, and split into the lines that survive as distinct churches today. Through all of it the East Syriac liturgical inheritance ran unbroken back into the first Christian centuries — which is the bedrock fact, whatever became of the apostle.

On the apostolic mission itself the historians return a careful verdict: a first-century journey to India is possible and unproven. The sea lanes between the Roman East and the Malabar pepper coast were open and busy in the first century, an apostle could in principle have sailed them, and no document closes the question either way. The community’s own memory does not wait on that adjudication. For the Nasranis the descent of their faith from Thomas is the ground they stand on, the reason their churches face the tomb at Mylapore, the inheritance carried in the name they bear.

The texts and the scholarship

The critical study of Thomas runs along the seams between four distinct documentary fields. The Acts of Thomas was set on a modern footing by A. F. J. Klijn, whose Acts of Thomas: Introduction, Text, and Commentary — first issued in 1962 and reworked for its second Brill edition in 2003 — supplies the standard English text and the running commentary against which the Syriac and Greek witnesses are read; the foundational nineteenth-century edition of the Syriac remains William Wright’s Apocryphal Acts of the Apostles (1871). Günther Bornkamm’s treatment in the Schneemelcher collection of New Testament Apocrypha fixed the encratite and proto-gnostic reading of the work for a generation. The NASSCAL e-Clavis entry on the Acts of Thomas gathers the manuscript witnesses, the dating arguments, and the bibliography in current form. For the Indo-Parthian king the Acts names, the historical groundwork is laid out in the Encyclopaedia Iranica article on Gondophares, which sets the coins and the Takht-i-Bahi inscription beside the legend. The South Indian community and its documented Church of the East connection are treated at length in Robert Eric Frykenberg’s Christianity in India: From Beginnings to the Present (2008), a survey worked through in honor of which a later volume of essays — Richard Fox Young’s India and the Indianness of Christianity (2009) — gathers the historical and textual debate over the apostolic claim. The patristic line behind it all runs through Eusebius of Caesarea’s Ecclesiastical History, which preserves Origen’s notice that Thomas was allotted Parthia, and through the Edessene hymns ascribed to Ephrem the Syrian that bind the apostle’s relics to that city.

So the three legacies sit one beside another, joined only by a word. The doubter of John, the sayings ascribed in a second-century gospel, the missionary of the Syriac Acts and the Malabar coast — each a different Thomas, each fastened to the same five letters. 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 · Christianity · New Testament · Gospel · Jesus Christ · Acts Of The Apostles · Gospel Of Thomas · Nag Hammadi Library · Gnosticism · Syriac Christian Mysticism · Church Of The East East Syrian Christianity · St Peter · Andrew The Apostle · Philip The Apostle · Paul The Apostle