Did the apostle Thomas go to India? What history says.

What the tradition says

The tradition of the churches of Kerala says that the apostle Thomas landed at Muziris, on the Malabar coast, in AD 52, founded communities in seven places and died a martyr at Mylapore, near present-day Chennai, in AD 72. These Christians are known as Saint Thomas Christians. Britannica estimates about 4 million Saint Thomas Christians in India in the early twenty-first century, most of them in Kerala. India's 2011 census counted 6.1 million Christians in Kerala, more than in any other state, as the page on how many Christians there are in India and where they live shows.

Encyclopaedia Britannica treats the arrival in AD 52 as a tradition whose historicity is not proven, and adds that there are signs of Christians on the Malabar coast from the second or third century.

The oldest text: the Acts of Thomas

The oldest document linking Thomas to India is the Acts of Thomas, an apocryphal writing composed in Syriac, probably in Edessa, in the early third century. It is not part of the canon and mixes edifying narrative with legend. In it, Thomas is sold as a slave to a merchant named Abbanes and taken to the court of a king named Gondophares.

One detail matters for anyone who knows only the Kerala version: in the Acts, Thomas's India is the northwest of the subcontinent, the region of present-day Pakistan and Punjab, and not the Malabar coast.

Gondophares existed: coins and an inscription

The Encyclopaedia Iranica describes Gondophares as an Indo-Parthian king who ruled regions between Drangiana, Arachosia and the Punjab, with a reign dated AD 20 to 46. He is known from silver and copper coins.

The most cited piece is the Kharoshthi inscription of Takht-i-Bahi, in present-day Pakistan. It mentions the “great king Gondophares” and carries two dates: the 26th year of his reign and the year 103 of an era. If that era is the Vikrama, which begins in 57 BC, year 103 corresponds to AD 46, which puts the start of the reign around AD 20. That chronology is compatible with a meeting between Thomas and the king in the AD 30s or 40s.

The two sides of the debate:

It is worth noting that the inscription does not mention Thomas. It confirms the historical setting of the account, but not the account itself.

Pantaenus, Bartholomew and other witnesses

The historian Eusebius of Caesarea, in the fourth century, reports (as news that reached him) that Pantaenus, a Christian teacher of Alexandria, was sent to India as early as the second century. According to Eusebius, Pantaenus found there Christians who already had the Gospel of Matthew in Hebrew, left, the text says, by the apostle Bartholomew. Eusebius, then, does not name Thomas in this passage. What he records is that the idea of Christians in India in the second century was already circulating.

For the following centuries there are records of churches of Syriac tradition. Cosmas Indicopleustes, in the sixth century, describes Christians in Ceylon and India. The Tharisapalli copper plates, from the ninth century, record a royal grant to a Christian merchant of Syriac tradition in Kerala. Britannica (the entry by Robert Frykenberg) recalls that Syriac-speaking Christian refugees from Mesopotamia later reached the Malabar coast, in a migration that local tradition places in the fourth century.

Tradition and evidence, side by side

What can honestly be said

An ancient Christian church of Syriac language has existed in Kerala for many centuries, and that is historical fact. The apostolic origin of that church, through Thomas, is a respectable tradition that research can neither prove nor rule out. For the Christian reader, it is worth remembering that faith does not depend on this answer: the New Testament mentions no journey of Thomas to India.

What history supports without difficulty is that the gospel reached India long before the Portuguese, who landed in 1498, and before the Protestant missionaries, such as William Carey and Henry Martyn. When Carey arrived in Bengal in 1793, the churches of Kerala had already existed for centuries.