Thomas the Apostle

Origins and early life

The name Thomas is not Greek but Aramaic — tāʾmā, "twin" — and the fourth Gospel three times glosses it for its Greek readers: "Thomas, called Didymus" (John 11:16, 20:24, 21:2), Didymos being simply the Greek for the same thing. Whose twin he was, no canonical text says, and the sober tradition of the Church leaves the question open. Like most of the Twelve he was a Galilean; the later Russian lives, followed by the OCA synaxarion, name his birthplace as Pansada (Paneada), a Galilean town, and make him a fisherman — details not found in the earlier sources but consistent with his appearance among the fishermen of John 21. Hearing the preaching of Christ, he left everything and followed him, and was numbered among the Twelve (Matthew 10:3; Mark 3:18; Luke 6:15), where the synoptic lists pair him with Matthew, and Acts 1:13 with Philip.

The Syriac-speaking East knew him under a fuller name, "Judas Thomas" — Judas the Twin — as though "Thomas" were not a name at all but the epithet that distinguished this Judas from Iscariot and from Judas the brother of James; the old Syriac version of John 14:22 actually reads "Judas Thomas, not Iscariot," and the Edessene Doctrine of Addai and the apocrypha of the Thomas cycle use the double name throughout. The usage is ancient and probably preserves a genuine memory, though the further step taken by the apocryphal Acts of Thomas — which makes him the twin of the Lord himself — is a flourish the Church has always rejected.

The Gospel record

The synoptics give Thomas nothing but his place in the lists; it is John's Gospel that draws his portrait, in three scenes so consistent in character that they read like studies of one temperament: a devoted, literal, melancholy mind that must see the worst — or see the thing itself — before it can rest.

The first is at the raising of Lazarus. When the Lord, who had withdrawn beyond Jordan from those who sought to stone him, announced that he was returning to Judea, the disciples protested the danger; it was Thomas who ended the argument: "Let us also go, that we may die with him" (John 11:16). The saying is at once pessimism and perfect loyalty — he expects death and goes anyway — and the Fathers loved it as the measure of the man: no illusions, and no desertion.

The second is at the mystical Supper, in the Farewell Discourse. To the Lord's "whither I go ye know, and the way ye know," Thomas objected with characteristic bluntness: "Lord, we know not whither thou goest; and how can we know the way?" (John 14:5). The question of the literalist drew from Christ one of the supreme sayings of the Gospel: "I am the way, the truth, and the life: no man cometh unto the Father, but by me." As with his doubt after Pascha, the Church has always noted that Thomas's slowness became the occasion of revelation for everyone else.

The third scene is the one from which he is named in every language. On the evening of the Resurrection, when the risen Lord came through the shut doors and stood among the disciples, "Thomas, one of the twelve, called Didymus, was not with them when Jesus came" (John 20:24). To the others' "We have seen the Lord" he answered with the demand that has made him the patron of every honest doubter since: "Except I shall see in his hands the print of the nails, and put my finger into the print of the nails, and thrust my hand into his side, I will not believe." Eight days later — the Church hears in that "eighth day" the first Sunday after the Sunday of Pascha, and keeps it so — the doors again being shut, the Lord stood in the midst and addressed him directly, taking up his own words: "Reach hither thy finger, and behold my hands; and reach hither thy hand, and thrust it into my side: and be not faithless, but believing." And Thomas answered, "My Lord and my God" (John 20:26–28).

The confession is the summit of the fourth Gospel and of its theology. The Gospel that opens "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was God" closes with a man addressing the crucified and risen Jesus, flesh and wounds before him, as "my God" — the only direct, unqualified confession of Christ's divinity spoken by anyone in the four Gospels, and the deliberate answering bracket to the prologue. It is no accident that the evangelist places immediately after it both the Lord's beatitude on all subsequent believers — "because thou hast seen me, thou hast believed: blessed are they that have not seen, and yet have believed" — and the Gospel's own statement of purpose: "these are written, that ye might believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God" (John 20:29–31). Thomas's journey from refusal to worship is the journey the Gospel was written to produce in its reader. Whether he in fact touched the wounds the text does not say — only the invitation and the confession are recorded — but the tradition, the hymns, and the icon of the feast (the Psēlaphēsis, "the Touching") understand that he did, and John Chrysostom, whom the synaxaria follow, drew the abiding moral: the disciple who was weakest in faith became, by the grace of God, the most tireless of them all, running through nearly the whole earth and never fearing to preach the Word to savage nations.

Thomas appears once more, among the seven who fished all night on the Sea of Tiberias and to whom the Lord appeared at dawn (John 21:2), and then in the upper room with the Eleven awaiting Pentecost (Acts 1:13), where the Scriptural record of him ends.

The mission to the East and India

When the apostles divided the world by lot, the tradition — as old as Origen, whom Eusebius quotes — assigned Parthia to Thomas; the Syriac tradition, embodied in the Acts of Thomas, says India, and the two are less contradictory than they sound, since the route to north-west India lay through the Parthian world and the dynasty then ruling the Indus lands was itself Parthian. Eusebius adds a further Edessene memory: it was "Judas, who is also Thomas" who sent Thaddeus, one of the Seventy, to king Abgar of Edessa — the beginning of the church in the city that would later hold the apostle's bones.

The Acts of Thomas, composed in Syriac at or near Edessa early in the third century, tells the mission-story that all later accounts embroider. Thomas, whose lot was India, shrank from it — "how can I, a Hebrew, preach among the Indians?" — until the Lord himself, in the boldest scene of the book, sold him as a slave to Habban (Abbanes), the merchant of the Indian king Gundaphorus, who was seeking a carpenter. Brought to the king, Thomas was commissioned to build him a palace, and spent the money on the poor; threatened with death, he was saved when the king's dead brother Gad, restored to life, testified that he had seen in heaven the palace Thomas's alms had built there. Gundaphorus and Gad believed and were baptized. The book then carries the apostle through a cycle of wonders and conversions to another kingdom, that of king Mazdai (Misdaeus in the Greek), where the conversion to continence and Christ of the noblewomen Mygdonia and Tertia and of the king's son Vizan brought down the royal wrath, and the apostle was led up a hill outside the city and dispatched by four soldiers with spears.

For centuries king "Gundaphorus" was cited as proof of the book's worthlessness — no such Indian king was known to any historian. The nineteenth century reversed the verdict: coins turned up in the Punjab and Afghanistan in great numbers bearing the name Gondophares (Guduvhara), founder of the Indo-Parthian kingdom that ruled Taxila and the Indus country, and the Takht-i-Bahi inscription fixed his reign in the first half of the first century — precisely the right man, in the right place, at the right time for an apostolic visitor, and a name that no late romancer could have invented after the dynasty had vanished from memory. The vindication of the name does not prove the mission; it does prove that the Thomas tradition, whatever its legendary dress, reaches back to authentic first-century knowledge of north-west India.

The Christians of South India tell the story differently, and of themselves. Their tradition — continuous, unwritten for centuries, sung in their old Syriac-rite communities long before the Portuguese reached them in 1498 — holds that Thomas landed at Muziris (Cranganore, modern Kodungallur) on the Malabar coast in AD 52, preached to the Jewish trade colonies and the high families of the coast, founded seven churches, and ordained ministers for them; that he then crossed to the east coast, to the country round Mylapore; and that they themselves, the Mar Thoma Nasrani — the "St Thomas Christians" of Kerala — are the heirs of that preaching. Nothing in the first-century record makes this impossible: the monsoon sea-route from Egypt to Muziris was a highway of Roman commerce in exactly that generation, better travelled than many roads the other apostles took. The historian can say no more than that the tradition is ancient, geographically credible, and unverifiable; the fourth-century Fathers — Ephrem the Syrian, Gregory the Theologian, Ambrose, Jerome — already speak of Thomas and India as of a thing everyone knew.

Martyrdom at Mylapore

The traditions agree on the manner of the apostle's end — the spear — and the Indian tradition supplies the place: a hill outside Mylapore, near modern Chennai (Madras), still called St Thomas Mount, with a second site, Little Mount, shown as his refuge. Pierced by the spears of the king's soldiers — the Acts say four soldiers, the Russian synaxarion tradition five spears, the hymns of the Church simply "the spear" answering the spear he had sought in his Master's side — he was buried with honour at Mylapore, and the Indian church keeps AD 72 as the traditional year. The Greek stichos of the feast catches what every Orthodox account of his death has seen in it: "He who once sought to put his hand into Thy side, O Word, is pierced in the side for Thy sake." The doubter who demanded to touch the wounds of Christ was granted, in the end, the same wounds.

Relics and translations

The Acts of Thomas itself already knows that the bones did not stay in India: one of the brethren, it says, secretly carried them away "to the West," to Mesopotamia. By the middle of the fourth century they were at Edessa, enshrined in the martyrium that made the city, with its Abgar legend and its school, the capital of Syriac Christendom: Ephrem the Syrian (d. 373) sings in the Carmina Nisibena of the merchant who brought the bones and of the devil's complaint that the apostle slain in India now drove him out of Edessa; the pilgrim Egeria, about 384, prayed at the martyrium and was given the Acts to read on the spot; John Chrysostom counts the tomb of Thomas at Edessa among the only four apostles' tombs then known on earth (with Peter, Paul, and John). The relics survived the city's disasters until the age of the Crusades; after the fall of the county of Edessa the tradition follows them to the island of Chios in the Aegean, and from Chios, on September 6, 1258, the Ortonese captain Leone degli Acciaiuoli, returning from a Genoese-Venetian war raid, carried the bones and the ancient tombstone to Ortona on the Abruzzo coast of Italy, where they rest today in the basilica of San Tommaso Apostolo — a translation the Ortonese keep with their own feasts, and which the Orthodox East records without ever having formally celebrated.

Mylapore, for its part, never surrendered the honour of the empty tomb: the Portuguese built over it, and the present San Thome basilica in Chennai stands upon the traditional grave, to which a portion of relics has in modern times been restored; the Malabar churches keep relic traditions of their own at Kodungallur. The OCA synaxarion adds that portions of the apostle's relics are found in India, in Hungary, and on Mount Athos; a skull of the apostle is claimed both at Ortona and by the monastery of St John the Theologian on Patmos. As with most apostles, the plurality of claims is itself the record of the breadth of his cultus, and this entry records the claims without adjudicating them.

Veneration and later cultus

Two great streams carried the apostle's memory. The first is Edessene and Syriac: Edessa's martyrium made Thomas the apostle-patron of the whole Syriac world, East and West; the Church of the East carried his name along the trade routes into Persia, Central Asia, and China, and its daughter churches in India — the one apostolic Christianity of the subcontinent — call themselves by no other name than his. The "St Thomas Christians" survived isolation, the Portuguese, and schism, and their modern descendants (Syro-Malabar, Malankara, Mar Thoma, and the rest), whatever their present communion, are united in the claim their name asserts. The Syriac churches keep his great day, the Dukhrana (commemoration), on July 3, the date of the translation to Edessa — the date the Roman church also adopted for him in 1969, having kept him on December 21 for the previous millennium.

The second stream is Byzantine and liturgical: the annual reliving of the doubt and confession on Thomas Sunday, the first Sunday after Pascha (see Feast and commemoration below), which planted the apostle's story in the paschal experience of every Orthodox generation; and the fixed feast of October 6 with its proper service. In the Russian tradition the name of the apostle is further attached to the Arabian (Arapet) icon of the Mother of God (September 6), which tradition associates with his preaching in the East — an association the OCA synaxarion records.

A tender Byzantine tradition joins Thomas to the Dormition of the Theotokos: as once before, he was absent — detained, the story says, in India — and arrived on the third day, weeping to have missed her burial; and when the tomb at Gethsemane was opened for his sake, it was found empty of her body. Thus the doubter's late arrival became, a second time, the occasion of proof, and the Church's knowledge that the Mother of God was translated bodily rests, in the telling of the synaxaria, on Thomas's tears. The Athonite tradition of the Holy Girdle at Vatopedi adds that the Theotokos, being taken up, let fall her girdle to Thomas as testimony. These traditions are late and devotional, transmitted by the synaxaria and the festal homilies rather than by early sources, and are recorded here as such.

Miracles and traditions

The Acts of Thomas surrounds the mission with a cycle of wonders — the heavenly palace of Gundaphorus, the speaking colt, the serpent slain, the young man raised — which belong to the romance and are recorded as legend; but the palace built in heaven by alms became one of the most fruitful images in Christian moral teaching, East and West, and the hymns of October 6 draw on the cycle freely, singing the apostle as the enlightener of "the Indians darkened in soul." The Indian church's own traditions — the seven churches of Malabar, the brahmin conversions, the carved "Persian crosses" of Mylapore and the hills — form a parallel cycle, the living folklore of an apostolate. Later Byzantine piety knew him chiefly through Thomas Sunday, and the paradox the Fathers never tired of turning: that the Church owes more certainty to Thomas's doubt than to the ready faith of the others — "the unbelief of Thomas," as the hymns put it, "gave birth to sure faith."

Hymnographic and literary legacy

No canonical writing bears Thomas's name, but a whole apocryphal literature does — the fruit of the Syriac "Judas Thomas" tradition and, in part, of circles the Church condemned: the Gospel of Thomas (the Coptic collection of one hundred and fourteen sayings found at Nag Hammadi, a second-century compilation with gnosticizing colour, not the work of the apostle), the Book of Thomas the Contender, the Infancy Gospel of Thomas, the Apocalypse of Thomas, and the Acts of Thomas already described — this last the only one the Church's tradition has used, cautiously, as the vehicle of the India story. The attachment of so much literature to his name is itself evidence of the weight of his memory in the East.

In the Church's own books his legacy is the hymnography of the "good unbelief." The canon of October 6 is the work of Theophanes the Branded (Graptos), in Tone 4, with the acrostic "I shall marvel at Thomas who is full of marvels"; the stichera of the feast turn the paradox over and over — "by thy faithful unbelief thou didst confirm the faithful"; "Thomas the wonderful opened the fountain of doctrines, for, feeling Thy side, he was initiated into the twofold energy of the two natures, and cried: Thou art my God and Master, Thou the Lord of glory, who for me becamest flesh" — a whole dyophysite Christology drawn from one probing hand. The services of Thomas Sunday, in the Pentecostarion, carry the same theology onto the greater stage of Pascha, and gave the tradition its most famous exclamation: "O good unbelief of Thomas, which hath led the hearts of the faithful to knowledge!"