by Tom Bissell
*4 Mark also includes a version of this scene, but the disciples Jesus sends on the errand are not named. A funny thing about both Mark’s and Luke’s take on this scene is whether Jesus is performing a miracle or demonstrating his capacity to plan ahead.
*5 A note about the homoerotics of the Beloved Disciple’s head resting in Jesus’s lap during the Last Supper: Christopher Marlowe is probably the most famous example of someone who wound up being tried for blasphemy by suggesting that the Beloved Disciple and Jesus were “bedfellows,” and some modern Christians address the matter with held breath. But there is no escaping the fact that a beardless youth learning from an older man would have made perfect Socratic sense to many in the ancient world. That is almost certainly not what is going on in the mind of the author of the Fourth Gospel, but there can be little doubt that images of the Beloved Disciple reclining in the lap of Jesus, as Christianity spread throughout the Greco-Roman world, had certain, inescapable redolence. Even Leonardo’s Last Supper skates awfully close to the forbidden line: while the painting’s composition did not allow for anyone’s head to be placed in the lap of Jesus, Leonardo portrayed John, whom he understood to be the Beloved Disciple, as the most beautiful woman who never was.
*6 An archaeological dig confirmed the existence of these five porticoes, which were long regarded as the product of John’s imagination.
*7 In a commentary written around 415, we find Augustine of Hippo mysteriously refer to 1 John as “the Epistle to the Parthians.” Why Augustine knew the work under this name is not known, though the name probably did not originate with him. Whatever the case, “Epistle to the Parthians” stuck to 1 John for centuries and even sprouted legends that had John traveling to Parthia to evangelize.
*8 Saint Mary’s Church is today a half-excavated ruin—an excavation that did not begin until the mid-1980s—but it was once considered important enough to have served as the site of the Council of Ephesus in 431, which formally condemned Nestorian Christians and, for the first time, endorsed the legend that Mary had once lived in Ephesus.
*9 And viciously at that. In 1922, the Turks burned the ancient city of Smyrna to the ground and killed or expelled every one of its Christian citizens. Smyrna was the last remaining bastion of Christianity left in Asia Minor, to which the faith first spread two thousand years before.
*10 One can see an apparent representation of this shadow tradition in Paris’s Notre Dame, where a mural of the Cana wedding scene features a groom wearing the type of halo normally reserved for an apostle.
*11 The Catholic Church takes no official position on whether Mary ever lived in Mary’s House.
THOMAS
* * *
Saint Thomas Basilica: Chennai, India
THOMAS CHRISTIANS • “JESUS IS VERY HINDU” • THE TWIN • THE LOCKED ROOM • INCIDENT AT PARANGI MALAI • THE NESTORIAN CHURCH • THE ACTS OF THOMAS • KING GONDAPHORUS • “BE PASSERSBY” • AROUND SANTHOME BASILICA • EUTYCHUS OF TROAS • THE FLOOD
I.
For the last two thousand years, Christianity’s distinguishing characteristic has been its remarkable ability to adapt to local cultural influences. It is simultaneously a Middle Eastern religion, an American religion, a European religion, an African religion, and an Asian religion, making it easily the most diverse form of monotheism on the planet. According to Plato, “To find the maker and father of this universe is difficult; but it is impossible, having found him, to proclaim him to all men.” Christianity has come closer than any other faith to disproving this maxim.
India’s Christians belong to one of the oldest, most deeply rooted Christian communities in the world. For centuries, they have existed in the bewildering matrix of the competing and, at times, hostile neighbor religions of Islam and Hinduism. While the Vedic religions we group under Hinduism are thousands of years old, Hinduism as a concept, religious identity, and tool of cultural organization arose partly in reaction to Indian Christianity in the late eighteenth century. Islam’s relationship to Indian Christianity is just as striking. Ritual prostration, Ramadan, prayer mats, and even minarets have all been plausibly traced back to the ancient Syriac church that first brought Christianity into India.
Many Western visitors are surprised to learn of the antiquity and complicated cultural position of Christianity in India, but this historical obliviousness has a long pedigree. When Portuguese merchants landed in western India in 1498, they were astonished to discover brown-skinned believers in an entrenched, long-thought-vanquished form of Christianity many of them regarded as heretical.
Although Indian Christianity was shaped and affected by Western colonialism, it is crucially not a product of Western colonialism. To simplify greatly, there are three types of Indian Christians. The first are the Christians variously known as Orthodox, Syrian, or Thomas Christians, who trace their lineage back to the apostle Thomas and the Syriac church he supposedly founded. There are Roman Catholic Christians, many of whom, beginning in the sixteenth century, either were forced or tactically chose to gather under the protective umbrella of Rome. There are also Protestant Indian Christians, who constitute the subcontinent’s most recently formed Christian community. As of 2010, there were anywhere from sixty to seventy million Christians living in India, giving it the seventh-largest Christian population on earth.
The first Thomas Christians were driven out of Syria and into Persia, Central Asia, and India by persecution, which was often fomented by their fellow Christians. Later, Zoroastrian persecution sent another wave of Thomas Christians to India. Muslim aggression led to yet another paroxysm, forcing Thomas Christians to variously disperse within India itself. Thomas Christians had little contact with mainstream Orthodox Christianity, whether Western or Eastern, until the end of the fifteenth century. Even the Syriac church that spawned the Thomas Christians gradually lost contact with its Indian flock. No other group of Christians of comparable size developed so independently.
II.
Anyone traveling to India will be warned about the likelihood of getting sick. I was, certainly, and thought nothing of it. I have had giardia in a war zone, been rushed to a French emergency room, and spent Christmas Day in a Vietnamese clinic. Travel is, for me, getting sick, being sick, or recovering from sickness. As long as I have a hotel room in which to burn away a sick day (or four) and a good book, I know I can and will endure. Indian sickness did not worry me.
I was throwing up by the time my Airbus A380 crossed into Indian airspace. When we began our descent into Chennai, one of the flight attendants had to pound on the bathroom door to get me back to my seat. The culprit of my sickness was one of two things: the (delicious) Mongolian barbecue I had during a stopover in Dubai or preemptive Indian diarrhea furies cruising at thirty-eight thousand feet. I stepped outside Chennai International Airport with a hundred-degree fever and splatters of stomach acid caked on my T-shirt. Confused, lost, and scanning the approximately two thousand Indian faces standing outside the airport, I could no longer remember the name of the hotel I was staying in. Eventually, the gentleman from my hotel found me leaning against a crowd-control barricade just off the terminal’s entrance. I might or might not have been quietly weeping. He carried my bags to the car.
On the way to the hotel, the driver, who spoke only a little English, kept glancing back at me. When we arrived, he rushed inside to have a word about my condition with the staff. At the check-in desk, I was told that an appointment with an Indian doctor could easily be made. Nonsense, I said. An exceedingly kind Indian bellman helped carry me to my room. In the elevator, he kept going on about how terribly important it was that I drink tea. Much, much tea. Agreed, I said. Tea. In the room, I attacked with dull savagery five varieties of childproof packaging and gobbled down every type of medication I had on hand. Then I collapsed. When I woke up eight hours later, two pots of tea had been left outside my door.
I decided to become more acquainted with India the following day. “India,” in this context, meant the peop
le sitting next to me in the dining room of my hotel’s first-floor restaurant while I tremblingly ate from a small plate of mangoes. After breakfast, I inquired with the front desk: Did any members of the hotel staff happen to be Christian? The woman manning the desk was not sure; she also seemed slightly troubled by my question. Historically speaking, India’s Christians tended to keep to themselves and were often discouraged from marrying or even dining with those outside their community. To further my research, apparently I would have to venture outside.
India was too hot. That was my first impression. My second, equally forceful impression was that I could have spent a year in Chennai and had no better grasp of India than I did right now. It is that large, that instantly complicated. More than two hundred languages are spoken in India, and twenty languages are commonly spoken in Chennai alone.
I walked. The alleys smelled as if they’d been hosed down by India’s hungriest asparagus enthusiast. Trash in the streets and choking the gutters. If there was any place trash reasonably could be, it was, and in gargantuan quantities. India’s trash felt like some sort of philosophical précis on futility. But everywhere, too, I saw signs of attractive, normal Indian life: boys talking to girls, people going to work, men on their cell phones, movie theaters with charismatic posters written in Tamil, and mothers hugging their children in doorways. I had gone only around the block, but already the nostril-filling reality of India was intensely attractive.
When the first Western explorers landed in North and South America and called it “India,” they were, perhaps, in their error, helpfully establishing for future generations a Western signpost for generic foreignness. This notional “India” is what a certain kind of traveler seeks above all else—a place where life is brighter, the spirituality is higher, and the animals are all named Babar. It was a delusion of having arrived somewhere, perceived something, more intense than oneself.
Later in the afternoon, I wandered outside once more and found a thirtyish Indian man standing in front of my hotel with his motorcycle. He was wearing blue jeans and a thin white linen shirt unbuttoned to display an adolescently hairless chest. His arms were folded, and an impressively unbroken unibrow gave his face a comical furiousness. When I raised my hand to him, though, he smiled and walked toward me. I told the man I wanted to see a little of Chennai but did not want to venture too far. He motioned toward his sidecar and, as I climbed in, told me his name: Dave. I laughed. He knew why I was laughing. “My real name is too hard to pronounce,” he said.
At my insistence, Dave told me his real name, which had approximately eighteen syllables. Dave it was, then, and around the neighborhood we drove. Whenever we stopped, I asked Dave what kinds of people I was looking at: Tamil, Telugu, Hindu, Muslim, Christian? Sometimes Dave knew, but mostly he did not want to guess. I found myself studying the striking faces we passed for traces of India’s painful histories of ethnic conflict and migration.
Despite being a basically impregnable geo-fortress—protected by shark-infested waters to the south and some of the highest mountains on earth in the north—India has attracted an uncommonly diverse number of peoples, some of whom derived from major empires (Persians, Macedonians, Greeks, Syrians, Arabs, Mongols, Turks, Huns, Chinese) and others from largely forgotten empires (Bactrians, Sogdians, Scythians, Kushans, Parthians). Two types of Indians have historically dominated cultural life on the subcontinent. These were the Aryans of the north, who are generally tall and lighter-skinned and genetically Caucasoid, and the Dravidians in the south, who are an older, more indigenous grouping of genetically Australoid peoples with shorter stature and darker skin. The Aryans have tended to lord over the Dravidians, literally and figuratively. Historically, the most subjugated members of the latter were referred to as dasya, or “slave” people, and today are called the Dalit.
Aryans ceded India much of its cultural heritage in the form of Sanskrit (literally “perfect sound”), an Indo-European language that became the Greek or Latin of the subcontinent: Hindi, Punjabi, Nepalese, and Bengali all grew out of Sanskrit, along with dozens of other languages. Chennai, however, was found in one of the strongholds of Dravidian culture, and its predominant language was Tamil (whose mystifying alphabet I spent several fruitless evenings trying and failing to memorize). Another Dravidian language was Malayalam, speakers of which tend to live along the Malabar Coast of western India. This area, today found in the state of Kerala, is where Thomas Christianity first developed, probably due to the trade centers there, which attracted Jewish—and possibly Jewish Christian—merchants. Thomas Christianity’s first contact with India was via Dravidian culture. Its namesake apostle’s final resting place in Chennai, on the other side of India, maintained that ancient cultural connection.
None of India’s indigenous languages have a word for “religion.” The “closest approximation,” the historian Robert Eric Frykenberg notes, is Sanskriti, which does not describe spiritual practices but rather refers to “the whole of high, or classical, civilization and its literatures.” Sanskriti, in this sense, has very little resonance in Dravidian southern India, whose “classical” period is linked to Tamil. According to Frykenberg, ethnic groups in India “never lost their elemental identities because, from the outset and for the most part, they did not allow members to intermarry across ethnic, cultural, and/or class lines.” Thus, Indians understand their placement in society with an unusual degree of cosmological precision. This goes for India’s Christians, Hindus, and Muslims alike. When wave after wave of people come into a place with strongly held fears of intermixing, various means of human accounting will naturally develop to allow these groups to keep track of one another. The most unfortunate reality to grow out of such social accounting is, without question, the Indian caste system.
India’s caste system is old—so old that there does not seem to have been a time when some form of it was not practiced. However, it normalized and intensified during India’s antiquity, when the powerful Arya of the north began to enslave the more numerous Dasya of the south. As Frykenberg notes, most human societies have at some point adopted slavery. “But of no other society on the earth,” he goes on, “could one say that as many as one-fifth of the population were viewed as innately subhuman and, hence, relegated to a permanent, hereditary, and religiously sanctioned status of thralldom.” Frykenberg harshly but fairly refers to Hinduism’s systematized view of human subjugation as “perhaps the most sophisticated and reasoned doctrine ever devised that extolled the virtues of the intrinsic inequality of all mankind.”
It is useful to compare Indian spiritual thinking, and how it affected India’s Christians, with the quandary faced by the first Roman Christians, who were mostly slaves themselves. Yet within three hundred years, Roman Christians had worked their way into the highest echelons of their society. Indian Christians, meanwhile, remain less than 1 percent of the total Indian population (though in Chennai they make up almost 8 percent of the population). Indian Christianity, insofar as it proved upwardly mobile, did not often challenge or tempt the prevailing power structure. This gives Indian Christianity its noticeably different flavor and cultural imperative.
Historically, most Thomas Christians have come from high-caste backgrounds with long traditions of literacy. They were thus able to achieve social prominence within a scholarly culture. Yet every Christian in India, whether local or foreign, past or present, has had to wrangle with the caste system because it cuts directly across the central message of Christian fellowship. Take, for instance, Communion, which ritualistically links Christians to one another. The Indian caste system, however, is rife with fears of “pollution,” and few from a high-caste background would dream of drinking from the same cup as someone from a lower caste.
Because Dave, my tour guide, told me he was Hindu, I asked if we could visit a Hindu temple he liked. He told me I would get a better education about his beliefs by picking up and reading an issue of The Hindu, a widely read (and not overtly religious) left-leaning Indian
newspaper headquartered in Chennai, which has been continuously publishing for more than a hundred years. I took that to mean Dave was not a religious man, but he said no, actually, he was. I already knew that Hinduism was a complicated set of codifications that attempted to explain every facet of existence—everything that grows, lives, and moves is covered by some facet of Hinduism, and even lakes and rivers are regarded as having divine properties by many Hindus—and that despite its disquieting core of social exclusion few other faiths so heroically championed scholasticism for scholasticism’s sake. So I kept pushing; Dave finally relented to my wishes.
Outside a Hindu temple whose fronting and statuary looked (to my non-Hindu eyes) like an advertisement for an ambitiously surreal animated film, Dave calmly explained what Hinduism meant to him. Unfortunately, his relationship to his faith was not so easy for me to understand. Hinduism is the ultimate You Had to Be There faith—and if there is anything to Hinduism, you probably were.
“You know Christians,” I said.
“Of course.”
“What do you think about them?”
“I think of them as people, sir.”
“I’m here to write about India’s Christians. About Saint Thomas.”
“I hope it will be interesting for you.”
“Do you have any particular thoughts on Jesus?”
“We have many of the same stories, you know. Overcoming death? This is a Hindu concern. Life contains death, and we are pieces of life.” Dave noticed me writing down what he was saying and smiled. “So, I think, Jesus makes very much sense to me, as an Indian, if I can be honest with you.”
“Please do.”
“Our goal as Indians is to escape the cycle of life and death. There is something beyond these cycles, something more…eternal?”