THREE LEGENDS OF ST. THOMAS. St.Thomas 231 St. Thomas the Apostle converted many countries of Asia, and 52 to 68 A. D. (?) found a martyr's death in India. The meagre tradition of the early Church was expanded by the Catholic writers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The abstract by Vincenzo Maria makes the Apostle commence his work in Mesopotamia, First and includes Bactria, Central Asia, China, 'the States of the Legend: Great Mogul,' Siam, Germany, Brazil, and Ethiopia, in the the circle of his missionary labours. The apostolic traveller then Apostle (68 A.D.). sailed east again to India, converting the island of Socotra on the way, and after preaching in Malabar, ended his labours on the Coromandel coast. The final development of the tradition fills in the details of his death. It would appear that on the 21st December 68 A.D., at Mailapur, a suburb of Madras, the Brahmans stirred up a tumult against the Apostle, who, after being stoned by the crowd, was finally thrust through with a spear upon the spot now known as St. Thomas' Mount. Thomas Thomas The second legend assigns the conversion of India to Second Thomas the Manichæan, or disciple of Manes, towards the Legend: end of the third century. Another legend ascribes the honour the Manito an Armenian merchant, Thomas Cana, in the eighth century, chæan (277 A. D.). The story relates that Mar Thomas, the Armenian, settled in Malabar for purposes of trade, married two Indian ladies, and Third grew into power with the native princes. He found that such Legend : Christians as existed before his time had been driven by the Arpersecution from the coast into the hill-country. Mar Thomas menian (780 A.D.2) secured for them the privilege of worshipping according to their faith, led them back to the fertile coast of Malabar, and became their archbishop. On his death, his memory received the gradual and spontaneous honours of canonization by the Christian communities for whom he had laboured, and his name became identified with that of the Apostle. examined; Whatever may be the claims of the Armenian Thomas as the The three re-builder of the Church in Southern India, he was certainly Legends not its founder. Apart from the evidence of Patristic literature, there is abundant local proof that Christianity flourished in Southern India long before the eighth century. In the sixth the third; century, while Buddhism was still at the height of its power, Kalyán, on the Bombay coast, was the seat of a Christian bishop from Persia.2 1 The Book of Ser Marco Polo the Venetian. Colonel Yule's second edition, vol. ii. p. 343, note 4 (1875). 2 Gazetteer of the Bombay Presidency, vol. xiii. part i., Thána District, pp. 66, 200, etc. It is not necessary to dispute whether the seat of this bishopric was the modern Kalyán or Quilon (Coilam), as the coast from Bombay southwards to Quilon bore indefinitely the name of Caliana. the second legend; and the first. . The claims of Thomas the Manichæan have the European support of the Church historians, La Croze,1 Tillemont, and others. The local testimony of a cross dug up near Madras in 1547, bearing an inscription in the Pehlvi tongue, has also been urged in his favour. The inscription is probably of the seventh or eighth century A.D., and, although somewhat variously deciphered, bears witness to the sufferings of Christ.2 For the claims of St. Thomas the Apostle, a longer and more ancient series of authorities are cited. The apocryphal history of St. Thomas, by Abdias, dating perhaps from the end of the first century, narrates that a certain Indian king, Gondaphorus, sent a merchant called Abban to Jesus, to seek a skilful architect to build him a palace. The story continues that the Lord sold Thomas to him as a slave expert in that art.3 The Apostle converted King Gondaphorus, and then journeyed on to another country of India, under King Meodeus, where he : 1 Histoire du Christianisme des Indes, 2 vols. 12mo (The Hague, 1758). "Professor Haug reads it thus: 'Whoever believes in the Messiah, and in God above, and also in the Holy Ghost, is in the grace of Him who bore the pain of the cross.' Dr. Burnell deciphers it more diffidently :'In punishment [?] by the cross [was] the suffering of this [one]: [He] who is the true Christ and God above, and Guide for ever pure.' Yule's Marco Polo, 2nd ed., p. 345, vol. ii.; also p. 339, where the cross is figured. 3 This legend forms the theme of the Hymnus in Festo Sancti Thomae Apostoli, ad Vesperum, in the Mozarabic Breviary, edited by Cardinal Lorenzana in 1775. Its twenty-one verses are given as an appendix in Dr. Kennet's Madras monograph. Three stanzas will here suffice : 'Nuncius venit de Indis Quaerere artificem : Habeo servum fidelem, Esse hunc artificem : Abbanes videns, et gaudens, Suscepit Apostolum.' The hymn assigns the death of the Apostle to the priest of a sun temple which had been overthrown by St. Thomas : Tunc sacerdos idolorum Furibundus astitit, Gladio transverberavit Sanctum Christi martyrem. Glorioso passionis Laureatum sanguine.' THE INDIA' OF THE FATHERS. 233 was slain by lances.1 The existence of a King Gondaphorus has been established by coins, which would place him in the last century B.C., or within the first half of the first century of our era. But, apart from difficulties of chronology, it is clear that the Gondaphorus of the coins was an Indo-Scythic monarch, reigning in regions which had no connection with Malabar. His coins are still found in numbers in Afghánistán and the Punjab, especially from Peshawar to Ludhiana. He was essentially a Punjab potentate. The mention of St. Thomas the Apostle in connection with Wide India by the Fathers, and in the Offices of the Church, does meaning of 'India,' not bring him nearer to Malabar, or to the supposed site of his martyrdom at Madras. For the term 'India,' at the period to which these authorities belong, referred to the countries beyond Persia, including Afghánistán and the basins of the Upper Oxus, Indus, and Ganges, rather than to the southern half of the peninsula. In the early accounts of the labours of in the St. Thomas, the vague term India is almost always associated Fathers, with Persia, Media, or Bactria. Nor does the appellation of St. Thomas as the Apostle of India in the Commemorations of the Church, help to identify him with the St. Thomas who preached on the Malabar and Coromandel coasts. For not only does the indeterminate character of the word still adhere to their use of 'India,' but the area assigned to the Apostle's labours is so wide as to deprive them of value for the purpose of local identification. Thus, the Chaldæan Breviary of the Malabar Church itself states that 'by St. Thomas were the 1 Colonel Yule's Marco Polo, second edition, vol. ii. p. 243. Dr. Kennet, in an interesting monograph entitled St. Thomas, the Apostle of India, p. 19 (Madras, 1882), says :-'The history of Abdias was published for the first time by Wolfgang Lazius, under the title of Abdia Babyloniæ, Episcopi et Apostolorum Discipuli, de Historia certaminis Apostolici, libri decem; Julio Africano Interprete. Basiliæ, 1532.' * For the various dates, see Colonel Yule's Marco Polo, second edition, vol. ii. p. 343. Colonel Yule's Cathay deals with the Chinese and Central Asian aspects of the legend of St. Thomas (2 vols. 1866). 3 Thus the Paschal Chronicle of Bishop Dorotheus (born A. D. 254) says: 'The Apostle Thomas, after having preached the gospel to the Parthians, Medes, Persians, Germanians [an agricultural people of Persia mentioned by Herodotus, i. 125], Bactrians, and Magi, suffered martyrdom at Calamina, a town of India.' Hippolytus, Bishop of Portus (circa 220 A.D.), assigns to St. Thomas, Parthia, Media, Persia, Hercania, the Bactri, the Mardi, and, while ascribing the conversion of India to St. Bartholomew, mentions Calamina, a city of India, as the place of St. Thomas' martyr. dom. The Metropolitan Johannes, who attended the Council of Nicæa in 325, subscribed as Bishop of India Maxima and Persia.' Dr. Kennet's monograph (Madras, 1882); Hough, i. pp. 30 to 116. and Church First Indian circa 190 A. D. Chinese and the Ethiopians converted to the Truth,' while one of its anthems proclaims: 'The Hindus, the Chinese, the Persians, and all the people of the Isles of the Sea, they who dwell in Syria and Armenia, in Javan and Roumania, call Thomas to remembrance, and adore Thy Name, O Thou our Redeemer !' Candid inquiry must therefore decline to accept the conglimpse at nection of St. Thomas with the 'India' of the early Church Christians, as proof of the Apostle's identity with Thomas, the missionary to Malabar. Nevertheless, there is evidence to indicate that Christianity had reached Malabar before the end of the second century A.D., and nearly a hundred years previous to the supposed labours of Thomas the Manichæan (circa 277 A.D.). In the 2nd century a Roman merchant fleet of one hundred sail steered regularly from Myos Hormus on the Red Sea, to Arabia, Ceylon, and Malabar. It found an ancient Jewish colony, the remnants of which still remain to this day as the Beni-Israels,1 upon the Bombay coast. Whether these Jews emigrated to India at the time of the Dispersion, or at a later period, their settlements probably date from before the second century of our era. The fleet from Jew settle ments The Red Sea fleet from Myos Hormus, which traded with this Jewish settlement in India, must in all likelihood have in ancient brought with it Jewish merchants and others acquainted with the new religion of Christ which, starting from Palestine, had penetrated throughout the Roman world. Part of the fleet, moreover, touched at Aden and the Persian Gulf, themselves early seats of Christianity. Indeed, after the direct sea-course to Malabar by the trade winds was known, the main navigation to India for some time hugged the Asiatic coast. Christian merchants from that coast, both of Jewish and other race, would in the natural course of trade have reached Malabar within the second century A.D.2 The Buddhist polity then supreme in Southern India was favourable to the reception of a faith whose moral characteristics were humanity and selfsacrifice. Earlier Jewish settlers had already familiarized the native mind with the existence of an ancient and imposing 1 For their present numbers and condition, see the Bombay Gazetteer, by Mr. J. M. Campbell, LL.D., of the Bombay Civil Service, vol. xi. pp. 85 and 421; vol. xiii. p. 273. 2 The Roman trade with the southern coast of India probably dates from, or before, the Apostolic period. Of 522 silver denarii found near Coimbatore in 1842, no fewer than 135 were coins of Augustus, and 378 of Tiberius. Another find near Calicut about 1850 contained an aureus of Augustus, with several hundred coins, none later than the Emperor Nero. INDIAN CHRISTIANS, 190 A.D. 235 religion in Palestine. When that religion was presented in its new and more attractive form of Christianity, no miraculous intervention was probably required to commend it to the tolerant Buddhist princes of Southern India. About 190 A.D., rumours, apparently brought back by the Malabar Christians, Red Sea fleet, of a Christian community on the Malabar coast, circ. 190 fired the zeal of Pantænus of Alexandria. Pantænus, in his a.d. earlier years a Stoic philosopher, was then head of the cele- Pantænus. brated school which formed one of the glories of his city. He started for India; and although it has been questioned whether he reached India Proper, the evidence seems in favour of his having done so. He found his own arrival anticipated by some who were acquainted with the Gospel of Matthew; to whom Bartholomew, one of the apostles, had preached; and had left them the same Gospel in the Hebrew, which also was preserved until this time.' His mission may be placed at the end of the 2nd century. Early in the 3rd century, St. HippolyHippolytus, Bishop of Portus (circ. 220 A.D.), also assigns the tus, circ. conversion of India to the Apostle Bartholomew. To Thomas he ascribes Persia and the countries of Central Asia, although he mentions Calamina, a city of India, as the place where Thomas suffered death. Indeed, the evidence of the early Christian writers, so far as it goes, tends to connect St. Thomas with the India of the ancient world, that is to say, with Persia and Afghánistán,— and St. Bartholomew with the Christian settlements on the 220 A.D. Indico Malabar coast. Cosmos Indicopleustes writes of a Christian Cosmos Church in Ceylon, and on the Callian or Malabar seaboard pleustes, (circ. 547 A.D.). But he makes no mention of its foundation circ. 547 by St. Thomas, which, as an Alexandrian monk, he would have A.D. been almost sure to do had he heard any local tradition of the circumstance. He states that the Malabar Bishop was consecrated in Persia; from which we may infer that the Christians of Southern India had already been brought within the Nestorian fold. There is but slight evidence for fixing upon the Malabar coast as the seat of the orthodox Bishop Frumentius, sent forth by Athanasius to India and the East, circ. 355 A.D. Church in Asia. The truth is, that the Christians of Southern India belonged Nestorian from their first clear emergence into history to the Syrian rite. If, as seems probable, Christianity was first brought to Malabar by the merchant fleet from the Persian Gulf, or the 1 Dr. Kennet, quoting Eusebius, in his monograph on St. Thomas, the Apostle of India, p. 9 (Madras, 1882). |