The Acts of Thomas

The Acts of Thomas is a third-century apocryphon, composed in Syriac at Edessa (and surviving also in Greek), narrating the apostle’s mission to India, his miracles, his conversions, and his martyrdom — and embedding within it the Hymn of the Pearl. It is the chief source for the whole India tradition, and it is also a markedly encratite, gnostic-tinged work the Church never received as Scripture. This file sets out what the Acts are and what they claim, and how an Orthodox reader holds a text at once foundational to the tradition and doctrinally suspect — reported, assessed, never endorsed.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Apostle)

Origin and Form

The Acts of Thomas (Greek Praxeis Thōma, Syriac Acts of Judas Thomas) is generally dated by scholars to the first half of the third century and located in Edessa, the great center of Syriac Christianity in northern Mesopotamia (Klijn 2003, introduction; Bornkamm 1992). It is the only one of the major apocryphal Acts of apostles to survive complete, and it is preserved in two principal forms — a Syriac version and a Greek version — with the question of which is closer to the original much debated; the consensus leans toward a Syriac original, with the Greek a translation, though both have undergone editing (Klijn 2003; Bornkamm 1992). The work belongs to the family of the apocryphal Acts (of Peter, Paul, John, Andrew, Thomas) that flourished in the second and third centuries, romance-like narratives of apostolic travel, miracle, preaching, and martyrdom composed for edification and entertainment outside the canon (Elliott 1993, introduction to the apocryphal Acts).

The Narrative

The Acts are structured as thirteen “acts” and a concluding martyrdom. They open with the apostolic lot falling to Thomas for India, his reluctance, and his sale by the Lord as a carpenter-slave to the merchant Abban (Acts of Thomas 1–3; trans. Klijn 2003; see The Mission to India). There follows the Gundaphar cycle and the “palace in heaven” (acts 2–3), and then a long series of episodes — a wedding at which the apostle preaches continence; the talking colt; the dragon and the youth; the four episodes involving the wild asses; and above all the conversions of noble women, Mygdonia and the queen Tertia, and the king’s son Vizan, in the realm of King Misdaeus (Mazdai) (Acts of Thomas 4–158; trans. Klijn 2003). The narrative is punctuated by five great prayers or hymns — including the Hymn of the Pearl and the epicleses over the oil, bread, and cup at the baptisms and Eucharists the apostle celebrates (see The Hymn of the Pearl). It closes with the martyrdom: Misdaeus, enraged that the apostle has turned his wife and son to continence, has Thomas led out and speared to death (Acts of Thomas 159–170; see The Martyrdom at Mylapore).

The Encratite and Gnostic-Tinged Character

The doctrinal character of the Acts is the reason the Church never received them, and it must be stated plainly. The work is thoroughly encratite: it preaches enkrateia, a radical sexual continence, as essential to salvation, so that the apostle’s chief work is repeatedly to persuade married converts to abstain from marital relations and to consecrate themselves to a virginal life — the conversions of Mygdonia and Tertia, which break their marriages, are presented as the height of the Gospel, and the resulting royal wrath is the cause of the martyrdom (Acts of Thomas 12–13, 82–170; Bornkamm 1992; Klijn 2003). Beyond encratism, the Acts are tinged with the dualist and gnostic spirituality of their Syriac milieu: a strong opposition of soul and body, of the heavenly and the earthly; language of the soul as exiled in the world and called to awaken and return (most fully in the Hymn of the Pearl); and prayers addressed in modes that reflect Syriac-gnostic and Bardaisanite currents (Bornkamm 1992; Klijn 2003). The Acts were in fact prized by Manichaeans and other groups outside the Great Church, which is part of why they were viewed with suspicion (Klijn 2003).

How the Church Received — and Did Not Receive — the Acts

The Acts of Thomas were not received into the canon of Scripture and were not adopted as the Church’s teaching; they belong to the apocrypha, useful for the historian and the devout reader who knows what they are, but not authoritative (Elliott 1993; Bornkamm 1992). At the same time, the Church did not simply discard them: elements of the narrative — the India mission, the carpenter-trade, the palace in heaven, the martyrdom by the spear — passed into the broader tradition, the iconography, and the synaxaria, sifted from the encratite and gnostic frame that produced them. The discernment the tradition exercised is itself instructive: the Church drew from the Acts the memory of an apostle of India martyred by the spear, while leaving behind the dualist theology and the rejection of marriage that the Acts preach. An Orthodox reader holds the Acts in the same way: as the earliest extended narrative of Thomas’s eastern mission, valuable as a witness to third-century Syriac Christianity and to the Thomas tradition, but reported and assessed — never treated as Scripture, never as history, never as sound doctrine (METHODOLOGY §3.5; see The Gospel of Thomas and Reception for the distinct gnostic Gospel not to be confused with these Acts).

What the Acts Are Good For

Read with this discernment, the Acts have real uses. They are a primary source for the Thomas-of-India tradition, the seedbed from which the later Indian, Edessene, and Western traditions grew (see The Eastern Mission Traditions). They preserve, in the name Gundaphar, a genuine memory of the Indo-Parthian world (see The Mission to India). They are an invaluable window onto third-century Syriac Christianity — its liturgy (the baptismal and eucharistic prayers, the anointing with oil), its hymnody, its asceticism, and its theological currents (Klijn 2003). And they transmit the Hymn of the Pearl, a poem of enduring beauty whose allegory of the soul the Church has been able to receive even while holding the Acts’ frame at arm’s length (see The Hymn of the Pearl). The Acts of Thomas are thus a document to be read carefully and critically: indispensable to the study of the apostle’s tradition, and exactly the kind of source the repository methodology exists to handle — reported with its provenance and character named, neither suppressed nor endorsed.

See Also

References

  • Klijn, A. F. J. The Acts of Thomas: Introduction, Text, and Commentary. 2nd rev. ed. Supplements to Novum Testamentum 108. Leiden: Brill, 2003. (Critical introduction, text, and commentary; date, provenance, Syriac/Greek forms, encratism.)
  • Bornkamm, Günther. “The Acts of Thomas.” In New Testament Apocrypha, ed. W. Schneemelcher, trans. R. McL. Wilson, vol. 2. Cambridge: James Clarke, 1992, 322–411.
  • Elliott, J. K., ed. The Apocryphal New Testament. Oxford: Clarendon, 1993. (Introduction to the apocryphal Acts; translation of the Acts of Thomas.)