St. Thomas the Apostle- The Twin
Little is recorded of St. Thomas the Apostle, nevertheless thanks to
the fourth Gospel his personality is clearer to us than that of some
others of the Twelve. His name occurs in all the lists of the Synoptists
(Matthew 10:3; Mark 3:18; Luke 6, cf. Acts 1:13), but in St. John he
plays a distinctive part. First, when Jesus announced His intention of
returning to Judea to visit Lazarus, “Thomas” who is called Didymus [the
twin], said to his fellow disciples: “Let us also go, that we may die
with him” (John 11:16). Again it was St. Thomas who during the discourse
before the Last Supper raised an objection: “Thomas saith to him: Lord,
we know not whither thou goest; and how can we know the way?” (John
14:5). But more especially St. Thomas is remembered for his incredulity
when the other Apostles announced Christ’s Resurrection to him: “Except I
shall see in his hands the print of the nails, and put my finger into
the place of the nails, and put my hand into his side, I will not
believe” (John 20:25); but eight days later he made his act of faith,
drawing down the rebuke of Jesus: “Because thou hast seen me, Thomas,
thou hast believed; blessed are they that have not seen, and have
believed” (John 20:29).
The doubting St. Thomas. Painting by Duccio di Buoninsegna.
This exhausts all our certain knowledge regarding the Apostle but his
name is the starting point of a considerable apocryphal literature, and
there are also certain historical data which suggest that some of this
apocryphal material may contains germs of truth. The principal document
concerning him is the “Acta Thomae”, preserved to us with some
variations both in Greek and in Syriac, and bearing unmistakeable signs
of its Gnostic origin. It may indeed be the work of Bardesanes himself.
The story in many of its particulars is utterly extravagant, but it is
the early date, being assigned by Harnack (Chronologie, ii, 172) to the
beginning of the third century, before A. D. 220. If the place of its
origin is really Edessa, as Harnack and others for sound reasons
supposed (ibid., p. 176), this would lend considerable probability to
the statement, explicitly made in “Acta” (Bonnet, cap. 170, p.286), that
the relics of Apostle Thomas, which we know to have been venerated at
Edessa, had really come from the East. The extravagance of the legend
may be judged from the fact that in more than one place (cap. 31, p.
148) it represents Thomas (Judas Thomas, as he is called here and
elsewhere in Syriac tradition) as the twin brother of Jesus. The Thomas
in Syriac is equivalant to
didymos in Greek, and means twin.
Rendel Harris who exaggerates very much the cult of the Dioscuri, wishes
to regards this as a transformation of a pagan worship of Edessa but
the point is at best problematical. The story itself runs briefly as
follows: At the division of the Apostles, India fell to the lot of
Thomas, but he declared his inability to go, whereupon his Master Jesus
appeared in a supernatural way to Abban, the envoy of Gundafor, an
Indian king, and sold Thomas to him to be his slave and serve Gundafor
as a carpender. Then Abban and Thomas sailed away until they came to
Andrapolis, where they landed and attended the marriage feast of the
ruler’s daughter. Strange occurences followed and Christ under the
appearence of Thomas exhorted the bride to remain a Virgin. Coming to
India Thomas undertook to build a palace for Gundafor, but spend the
money entrusted to him on the poor. Gundafor imprisoned him; but the
Apostle escaped miraculously and Gundafor was converted. Going about the
country to preach, Thomas met with strange adventures from dragons and
wild asses. Then he came to the city of King Misdai (Syriac Mazdai),
where he converted Tertia the wife of Misdai and Vazan his son. After
this he was condemed to death, led out of city to a hill, and pierced
through with spears by four soldiers. He was buried in the tomb of the
ancient kings but his remains were afterwards removed to the West.
Now
it is certainly a remarkable fact that about the year A.D. 46 a king
was reigning over that part of Asia south of Himalayas now represented
by Afghanistan, Baluchistan, the Punjab, and Sind, who bore the name
Gondophernes or Guduphara. This we know both from the discovery of
coins, some of the Parthian type with Greek legends, others of the
Indian types with the legends in an Indian dialect in Kharoshthi
characters. Despite sundry minor variations the identity of the name
with the Gundafor of the “Acta Thomae” is unmistakable and is hardly
disputed. Further we have the evidence of the Takht-i-Bahi inscription,
which is dated and which the best specialists accept as establishing the
King Gunduphara probably began to reign about A.D. 20 and was still
reigning in 46. Again there are excellent reasons for believing that
Misdai or Mazdai may well be transformation of a Hindu name made on the
Iranian soil. In this case it will probably represent a certain King
Vasudeva of Mathura, a successor of Kanishka. No doubt it can be urged
that the Gnostic romancer who wrote the “Acta Thomae” may have adopted a
few historical Indian names to lend verisimilitude to his fabrication,
but as Mr. Fleet urges in his severely critical paper “the names put
forward here in connection with St.Thomas are distinctly not such as
have lived in Indian story and tradition” (Joul. of R. Asiatic
Soc.,1905, p.235).
St. Thomas receiving the Our Lady’s girdle before Her Assumption into heaven.
On the other hand, though the tradition that St. Thomas preached in
“India” was widely spread in both East and West and is to be found in
such writers as Ephraem Syrus, Ambrose, Paulinus, Jerome, and, later
Gregory of Tours and others, still it is difficult to discover any
adequate support for the long-accepted belief that St. Thomas pushed his
missionary journeys as far south as Mylapore, not far from Madras, and
there suffered martyrdom. In that region is still to be found a granite
bas-relief cross with a Pahlavi (ancient Persian) inscription dating
from the seventh century, and the tradition that it was here that St.
Thomas laid down his life is locally very strong. Certain it is also
that on the Malabar or west coast of southern India a body of Christians
still exists using a form of Syriac for its liturgical language.
Whether this Church dates from the time of St. Thomas the Apostle (there
was a Syro-Chaldean bishop John “from India and Persia” who assisted at
the Council of Nicea in 325) or whether the Gospel was first preached
there in 345 owing to the Persian persecution under Shapur (or Sapor),
or whether the Syrian missionaries who accompanied a certain Thomas Cana
penetrated to the Malabar coast about the year 745 seems difficult to
determine. We know only that in the sixth century Cosmas Indicopleustes
speaks of the existence of Christians at Male (?Malabar) under a bishop
who had been consecrated in Persia. King Alfred the Great is stated in
the “Anglo-Saxon Chronicle” to have sent an expedition to establish
relations with these Christians of the Far East. On the other hand the
reputed relics of St. Thomas were certainly at Edessa in the fourth
century, and there they remained until they were translated to Chios in
1258 and towards to Ortona. The improbable suggestion that St. Thomas
preached in America (American Eccles. Rev., 1899, pp.1-18) is based upon
a misunderstanding of the text of the Acts of Apostles (i, 8; cf.
Berchet “Fonte italiane per la storia della scoperta del Nuovo Mondo”,
II, 236, and I, 44).
Besides
the “Acta Thomae” of which a different and notably shorter redaction
exists in Ethiopic and Latin, we have an abbreviated form of a so-called
“Gospel of Thomas” originally Gnostic, as we know it now merely a
fantastical history of the childhood of Jesus, without any notably
heretical colouring. There is also a “Revelatio Thomae”, condemned as
apocryphal in the Degree of Pope Gelasius, which has recently been
recovered from various sources in a fragmentary condition (see the full
text in the Revue benedictine, 1911, pp. 359-374).
Herbert Thurston (Catholic Encyclopedia)
