Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition/Thomas, St
THOMAS, St., one of the twelve apostles. The synoptical Gospels give only his name, associating him in their lists with Matthew (Mat. x. 3; Mark iii. 18; Luke vi. 15); in Acts i. 13 he is coupled with Philip. In the Gospel of John (xi. 16; xiv. 5; xx. 24 sq.; xxi. 2) he appears in a characteristic light, full of personal devotion and ready to die with his Master, but slow to grasp the true significance of the redeeming death of Jesus, and incredulous of the resurrection till direct evidence convinces him of its truth and at the same time of the Divinity of his risen Lord. John translates the Aramaic name or surname Thomas (חאזמא) by the Greek equivalent Didymus (twin). Tradition has it that he was the twin brother of a sister Lysia (his parents being Diophanes and Rhoa, and his birthplace Antioch; "XII. Apost. Patriæ," in Chron. Pasch., ii. 142), or of a brother Elieser (Hom. Clem., ii. 1), or, according to the Acta Thomæ, (ed. Bonnet, pp. 11, 23), of Jesus Himself. The last form of the tradition seems to be derived from the name Judas Thomas, which he bears in Edessene legend (cf. Eusebius, H. E., i. 13, 10), and implies the identification of Thomas with Judas, the brother of the Lord. The most ancient tradition makes Thomas the evangelist of Parthia (Eus., H. E., iii. 1, 1); and at Edessa, which claimed to possess his bones, it was related that their missionary Thaddæus (Eus., H. E., i. 13, 10), or Addai (Doctrine of Addai, ed. Phillips, 1876, p. 5), was sent to them by him. Later tradition, originating with the Gnostic Acta Thomæ, and accepted by catholic teachers from the middle of the 4th century, makes him proceed to India and there suffer martyrdom. The Indian king Gundaphorus of the Acta is, however, certainly identical with the historical Gondophares (see Persia, vol. xviii. p. 603), whose dynasty was Parthian, though his realm included regions loosely reckoned to India. The Parthian and Indian missions of Thomas may perhaps therefore be regarded as derived from a single tradition. Later authors, but not the Ada, give as the scene of his martyrdom the city of Calamine, which the modern Christians of St Thomas (see below) identify with Mylapur, but which Gutschmid would connect with the Calama of Nearchus, on the coast of Gedrosia, which was under the sceptre of Gondophares. Other names of his torical persons and places can be traced with more or less probability in the Ada, but these do not alter the utterly apocryphal character of the legend, which indeed is in many respects easier to understand if we accept the bold hypothesis of Gutschmid, that it was borrowed by the Gnostic author from a Buddhist story of the conversion of Arachosia (N. Rhein. Mus., xix. 161 sq.).
The Acta Thomæ, very imperfectly published by Thilo (1823) and Tischendorf (1851), have been edited in Greek, together with the Latin De Miraculis and Passio S. Thomæ, by Bonnet (Leipsic, 1883), and in Syriac, with an English translation, by W. Wright (Apocryphal Acts, 2 vols., London, 1871). See also Lipsius, Die apocryphen Apostelgeschichten, vol. i. (Brunswick, 1883), for these and other versions of the legend. The Acta are said by Photius to be a part of the Περίοδοι τών ἁποστόλων of the Gnostic Leucius Charinus, but this unknown personage is to be thought of as a collector of Gnostic "Acts of Apostles," rather than as the first author. In spite of extensive catholic revision, they form one of the most interesting monuments of early Gnosticism. Internal evidence assigns them with great probability to the school of Bardesanes, and the very ancient allegorical hymn about the soul which is inserted in the Syriac text (p. 274 sq., Eng. tr., p. 238 sq.) is perhaps by Bardesanes himself (cf. Nöldeke in Z. D. M. G., 1871, p. 676). It is one of the most remarkable pieces in Syriac literature.
Christians of St Thomas is a name often applied to the members of the ancient Christian churches of southern India, which claim him as their first founder, and honour as their second founder a certain Thomas of Jerusalem, who is said to have led a Christian colony to Malabar in 345 A.D.[1] According to their tradition, St Thomas went from Malabar to Mylapur, now a suburb of Madras, where the shrine of his martyrdom, rebuilt by the Portuguese in 1547, still stands on Mount St Thomas, and where a miraculous cross is shown with a Pahlavi inscription which may be as old as the end of the 7th century. We know from Cosmas Indopleustes that there were Christian churches of Persian (East-Syrian) origin, and doubtless of Nestorian creed, in Ceylon, in Malabar, and at Caliaua (north of Bombay) before the middle of the 6th century, and even then St Thomas, the reputed apostle of Persia, may have been their special saint. The ancient churches of southern India never died out or wholly lost their sense of connexion with their mother church, for we find them sending deputies in 1490 to the Nestorian patriarch Simeon, who furnished them with bishops (Assemani, Bib. Or., iii. 1, 590 sq.). Hard pressed by the Moslems, they welcomed the approach of the Portuguese, but proved by no means tractable to efforts to bring them within the Roman obedience. At length a formal union with Rome was carried through in the synod of Diamper (1599). Syriac was to remain the ecclesiastical language, but the service books were corrected and purified from error. A century and a half of foreign Jesuit rule followed, but the love of independence was not lost. A great schism took place in 1653, and of 200,000 Christians of St Thomas only 400 remained loyal to Rome, though many of their churches were soon won back by the Carmelites. Those who remained independent fell under the influence of the Jacobite Mar Gregorius, styled patriarch of Jerusalem, who reached Malabar in 1665 as an emissary from Ignatius, patriarch of Antioch. From his time the independent Christians have been Jacobites, the counter-efforts of the Nestorians under Mar Gabriel, bishop of Adharbaijan, having apparently come to nothing after his death in 1730. Since the visit of Claudius Buchanan, whose Christian Researches in Asia (1811) excited great interest, much has been done for the Christians of South India by English missionary effort, and Anglicans have cultivated friendly relations with the clergy of the independent native church, while discouraging dependence on the Jacobite patriarch of Antioch.
A valuable though tedious and ill-arranged history of the Christians of St Thomas has been written by W. Germann, Die Kirche der Thomaschristen, Gütersloh, 1877. See also La Croze, Histoire du Chnstianisme des Indes, The Hague, 1724; Alexius de Menezes, Historia Ecclesiæ Malalabaricæ, Latin by F. Raulin, Romy, 1745 (especially for the synod of Diamper); Paulinus a S. Burtholomæo, India Orientalis Christiana, 4to, Rome, 1794.
- ↑ See the sketch in Syriac of the history of the church of Malabar printed and translated by Land, Anecd. Syr., i. 24 sq. It was sent to Schaaf at Leyden in 1720 by Mar Gabriel, the last Nestorian bishop in Malabar (see Germann, p. 542).