The Mission to India

The tradition that Thomas evangelized India is narrated chiefly by the third-century Acts of Thomas, which has the apostle sold as a slave-carpenter to a merchant of King Gundaphar, building the king a “palace in heaven” by his almsgiving, converting the royal household, and journeying south to martyrdom. This file reports that narrative as the Acts’ own story, flagged as apocryphal, while noting the one external datum — the historical Indo-Parthian king Gondophares — that gives the legend an unexpected anchor; the historical assessment is reserved for Section 09.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Apostle)

The Apostolic Allotment

The framing of the India mission, in the tradition, is the division of the world among the apostles after Pentecost. The Acts of Thomas opens with the apostles in Jerusalem casting lots for the regions they will evangelize, and “India fell to the lot of Judas Thomas” — who at first refuses, pleading weakness and that, being a Hebrew, he cannot go among the Indians, until the Lord Himself overrules him (Acts of Thomas 1; trans. Klijn 2003). This motif of the apostolic lot is older and wider than the Acts: it is the same scheme by which Origen, a generation before the Acts, assigned Parthia to Thomas (Origen in Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History 3.1; see The Eastern Mission Traditions). The Acts take the eastern allotment and give it the specific shape of a journey to India by sea.

Sold as a Slave

The narrative’s opening is its most famous scene. The Lord, the Acts relate, appears to a merchant named Abban, who has come from King Gundaphar of India seeking a skilled carpenter, and sells Thomas to him as a slave — “I have a slave that is a carpenter and I will sell him to thee” — drawing up a deed of sale, for Thomas, like the Lord, was a worker in wood (Acts of Thomas 2; trans. Klijn 2003). Thomas accepts the strange providence and sails with Abban to India. The detail of the carpenter-trade is part of the Acts’ literary art, assimilating Thomas to his Master, the carpenter’s son; it is not independently attested and belongs to the apocryphon’s own narrative world (Klijn 2003, introduction; Bornkamm 1992).

The Palace in Heaven

Brought before King Gundaphar, Thomas is commissioned to build the king a magnificent palace, and is given much gold for the purpose. Instead of building, the apostle distributes the money to the poor and the afflicted, preaching the Gospel as he goes; when the king demands to see the palace, Thomas answers that it is built but cannot be seen now — “thou canst not see it now, but when thou departest this life, then thou shalt see it” (Acts of Thomas 18–21; trans. Klijn 2003). The king imprisons Thomas in fury, intending his death. But the king’s brother Gad dies, and in heaven is shown a glorious palace built of the king’s alms — the very palace Thomas had been raising by his charity — and, permitted to return to life, tells the king, who is converted, releases and is baptized by Thomas along with his brother (Acts of Thomas 21–27; trans. Klijn 2003). The “palace in heaven” parable, with its teaching that almsgiving builds an eternal dwelling, became the most celebrated episode of the India mission and the basis of Thomas’s later patronage of builders and architects.

The Gundaphar / Gondophares Coincidence

The name of the king is the single point at which the apocryphal narrative touches verifiable history, and it is genuinely striking. “Gundaphar” (Greek Goundaphoros) corresponds to Gondophares, a historical Indo-Parthian king who ruled in the region of the Punjab and Kandahar in the first century A.D. — attested by his own coinage and, most precisely, by the Takht-i-Bahi inscription, dated to his reign and placing him in the period that would overlap a mid-first-century apostolic mission (the inscription gives a regnal date corresponding to c. A.D. 46) (Medlycott 1905; Mundadan 1984). Gondophares was unknown to modern scholarship until his coins and the inscription were recovered in the nineteenth century, long after the Acts of Thomas had named him; that an obscure first-century king, forgotten for eighteen centuries, should appear by name in a third-century Christian romance is a coincidence that even cautious historians find arresting (the significance and limits of this datum are weighed in The India Mission Assessed). The coincidence does not prove the mission, but it shows that the Acts preserve a real memory of the Indo-Parthian world into which a northern mission would have gone.

The Conversions and the Journey South

Beyond the Gundaphar cycle the Acts narrate a series of episodes — the talking colt, the dragon, the speaking ass’s-colt, the wild asses, and above all the conversions of noble women and the disruption of marriages — that carry the apostle through India, preaching continence (enkrateia), baptism, and the Eucharist (Acts of Thomas 28–158; trans. Klijn 2003). These episodes are saturated with the encratite and gnostic-tinged spirituality of the text (assessed in The Acts of Thomas) and are reported here only as the apocryphon’s narrative, not as history. The geography moves, in the latter part of the Acts, into the kingdom of a King Misdaeus (Syriac Mazdai), where the conversions of the queen Tertia and the king’s son Vizan, and of the noblewoman Mygdonia, provoke the wrath that leads to the apostle’s martyrdom (Acts of Thomas 82–170; see The Martyrdom at Mylapore). The Indian tradition of the Saint Thomas Christians locates the southern mission and the death on the Coromandel coast near Mylapore (see The Indian Church Tradition).

Two Indias

A persistent difficulty in the tradition is that “India” in antiquity was elastic, sometimes denoting the subcontinent and sometimes South Arabia, Ethiopia, or any distant eastern land (Mundadan 1984). The Acts themselves seem to combine a northern, Indo-Parthian setting (Gundaphar’s kingdom in the northwest) with a southern martyrdom (the Mylapore tradition on the southeast coast), and scholars debate whether this reflects two stages of a single mission, two distinct traditions fused, or simply the loose geography of a romance (the question is taken up in The India Mission Assessed). For the present file the point is descriptive: the Acts present a mission that begins in the Indo-Parthian northwest and ends in martyrdom in the south, and the living Indian tradition attaches itself to the southern end.

How the Church Holds the Narrative

The Orthodox Church venerates Thomas as the apostle of India and the East, and the iconography and hymnography reflect the mission tradition; but the detailed narrative comes from an apocryphon the Church never received as Scripture, and an Orthodox reader holds it accordingly. The fact of an eastern, and very probably Indian, apostolate is supported by a convergence of early notices (Origen, the Syriac tradition) and a living Church (the Mar Thoma Christians); the details — the slave-sale, the palace, the talking animals — are the Acts’ own, and are reported as such, not asserted as history (METHODOLOGY §3.5). The careful reader keeps the venerable tradition of “Thomas, apostle of India” distinct from the apocryphal romance that elaborated it.

See Also

References

  • The Acts of Thomas. Trans. A. F. J. Klijn, The Acts of Thomas: Introduction, Text, and Commentary. 2nd rev. ed. Leiden: Brill, 2003. (The apostolic lot, the slave-sale, the palace in heaven, the Gundaphar cycle, the journey, and Misdaeus.)
  • Eusebius of Caesarea. The Ecclesiastical History 3.1. Trans. NPNF II/1. (Origen on Parthia.)
  • Medlycott, A. E. India and the Apostle Thomas. London: David Nutt, 1905. (The Gondophares coinage and the Takht-i-Bahi inscription.)
  • Mundadan, A. Mathias. History of Christianity in India, Vol. I. Bangalore: Church History Association of India, 1984. (The two-Indias problem and the historical setting.)
  • Bornkamm, Günther. “The Acts of Thomas.” In New Testament Apocrypha, ed. W. Schneemelcher, vol. 2. Cambridge: James Clarke, 1992.