Apostle

by Tom Bissell

  Most of Paul’s thoughts on the resurrection of the dead can be found in 1 Corinthians, and scholars and Christian exegetes alike have long been puzzled by what exactly he was trying to say. The main thrust of his argument appears to be that the body will be raised but in different form: “Not all flesh is alike, but there is one flesh for human beings, another for animals, another for birds, and another for fish. There are both heavenly bodies and earthly bodies, but the glory of the heavenly is one thing, and that of the earthly is another.” Both the zoology and the astronomy here are flawed, to say the least,*4 but we can at least appreciate Paul’s metaphorical zeal. “What is sown is perishable,” Paul goes on, “what is raised is imperishable….It is sown in weakness, it is raised in power….If there is a physical body, there is also a spiritual body.” Later in the letter, Paul argues that Adam, the first man, and Jesus are forever linked through sin and resurrection: “For since death came through a human being, the resurrection of the dead has also come through a human being, for as all die in Adam, so all will be made alive in Christ.”

  Paul could not deny for his faith’s sake that what is resurrected is a body of some kind, but he was also too smart to maintain that what is resurrected is merely a body. He thus created a kind of third body, earthly and familiar yet also elevated and spiritually endowed. To make any argument that eschewed the importance of an earthly body seriously harmed early Christians’ enthusiasm for resurrection, the area in which they needed (and today’s Christians continue to need) the most reassurance.

  The resurrection of the dead is where Christianity offers the greatest hope and the least conspicuous guidance. As Paul’s letter to the Corinthians and the Gospel According to John establish, the resurrection probably cannot be convincingly expressed, dramatized, or conceptualized in any language human beings are capable of. The thing that Thomas doubted is the thing we continue to doubt; the proof that Thomas wanted is the proof we continue to want. According to John’s gospel, Thomas never got his proof on the terms he originally desired. Doubting Thomas doubted for good reason.

  V.

  I had booked my Chennai hotel room over the phone, making sure to ask the reservation manager whether his hotel was within walking distance of Saint Thomas Basilica, the supposed resting place of Thomas. The reservation manager was happy to tell me that Saint Thomas Basilica was most certainly within walking distance, as was St. Thomas Mount, where Thomas was supposedly martyred. I booked a room. Then I looked at several maps of Chennai.

  The next day I called the hotel and told the manager I was having a hard time reckoning how what he told me could possibly be true. He said, “No, sir. Both are in walking distance, sir.” As it turned out, he was correct, at least in the sense that New York and Philadelphia are also within walking distance. The basilica, found in a neighborhood called Mylapore, was a four-mile stroll from my hotel’s front door. St. Thomas Mount, meanwhile, was almost eight miles away from the hotel in the opposite direction. Months later, once I had settled into the hotel, I asked if I could have a friendly word with the reservation manager who had so misled me. He no longer worked for the hotel, I was told.

  I tried to get to know the exhaust-choked commercial district of Chennai in which my sickness had sequestered me. Until 1996—when many Indian cities were renamed in accord with resurgent feelings of nationalism—Chennai was called Madras; many today still refer to the city as Madras. (Chennaipatnam and Madraspatnam were the names of small adjacent villages out of which the city later grew. Chennai was apparently thought to be the more historically authentic of the two names.) The capital of the Tamil Nadu state and the fourth-largest city in India, Chennai is known as “the gateway to the south,” and, indeed, every non-Indian tourist I met was headed south (or north, east, or west) as fast as he or she could go. Why? “Because,” I was told, “Chennai is India’s most boring city.” A backpacker I ran into told me he was getting out of Chennai, too, because it was not the “real India.”

  On my second day in Chennai, I dammed my GI tract with Imodium and set out to find some Indian food, which I imagined would be cheerfully vended on every corner. I walked for twenty minutes and passed several bakeries and two Domino’s Pizzas before coming upon an Indian restaurant that promised “high-class all only vegetarian” food. The offerings looked fantastic; the long line of waiting patrons was doubly heartening. After thirty minutes in line, I arrived at the counter to discover there was no menu. Everyone here was ordering his or her favorites and eating with his or her hands out of wicker baskets. I wound up asking the man behind the counter to make me the house special. A moment later, I was eating something he called “cottage cheese chile” out of my own wicker basket. Delicious. Three hours later, I was back in my hotel room, my internal Imodium dam having suffered a severe structural breakdown. That night, for dinner, I enjoyed a plain slice of pizza courtesy of Domino’s, whose customers were the only overweight Indians I saw in Chennai.

  What Chennai lacked in Indian restaurants it made up for in twenty-four-hour emergency care hospitals. On my way back from Domino’s, I walked past several such establishments, including one called the Fracture and Chest Injury Clinic. What I needed was the Ceaseless Diarrhea Clinic. I began to wonder, not unseriously, if I would ever get well. Then, on my third morning in Chennai, I ventured into the city for the first time with no stomach medicine coursing through my system.

  It was a good day: only slightly hellishly hot, the sky so densely blue it seemed as though it were a smooth, cool cove ceiling I could reach up and place my hand against. I had planned to go for a short walk, but suddenly thought, Why not walk eight miles to St. Thomas Mount? In the sixteenth century, Portuguese missionaries had built a small, pretty church (I had, by now, looked at its picture on the Internet many times) atop the mount, at the sight of which arriving Portuguese ships would joyfully fire their cannons. Today the church housed a museum with an audacious collection of supposed relics. Among its treasures was the cross Thomas collapsed on when he died, which was “discovered” by a Portuguese priest during an early renovation of the church and which wept copious tears of blood and water on the eighteenth day of December every year from 1558 to 1704. (“It is strange that since the year 1704,” one local Christian writes, “these wonderful occurrences have stopped short.” Strange indeed!) Hanging above the church’s altar, meanwhile, was one of the seven paintings of Mary tradition attributed to the multitalented evangelist Luke; Indian Christians believe that Thomas somehow hauled this Mary portrait with him to India.

  One odd thing about Indian Christianity is its unsmiling absolutism about legendary material. Indian Christians are fundamentalists about legends. The cross did not become a common devotional object until the fourth century, so the idea that one of the Twelve was carrying one when he died is historically risible. Every Indian Christian I spoke with about this matter maintained, no, that cannot be accurate, that was the cross Thomas held as he died, that is our tradition, our traditions are accurate.*5 It is also well-known that Mary was of relatively little interest to the first Christians, and there is absolutely no record of cultic devotion to her until the mid-second century. Any notion of Luke’s painting Mary’s portrait is obviously ahistorical—a third- or fourth-stage development in the legends that grew around her. Share this with a serious-minded, intellectually sophisticated Indian Christian, however, and prepare yourself for a lecture arguing the contrary.

  In 1955, Rajendra Prasad, the first president of India and a Hindu, said something very revealing at a Thomas celebration in New Delhi: “Saint Thomas came to India when many of the countries of Europe had not yet become Christian, and so these Indians who trace their Christianity to him have a longer and higher ancestry than that of Christians of many European countries. And it is really a matter of pride to us that it so happened.” Christianity came to India early; of that there is no doubt. It is even possible that someone named Thomas was responsible for bringing Christianity to India. The idea that this man w
as born in Roman Palestine in the first century, and served as one of Jesus’s original followers, is not likely. But Indian Christians*6 want something more than the bragging rights of having encountered the Christian faith six hundred years before Russia, nine hundred years before Sweden, or a thousand years before Lithuania.

  Most Christian communities have imagined fanciful pasts for themselves; you might say this is a very Christian thing to do. However, not even the pope claims with absolute certainty that Peter’s remains lie beneath the Vatican. Yet one recently published book—by an Indian Ph.D., no less—contains this sentence: “The date A.D. 52 is now accepted by most scholars as the one that marks the arrival of St. Thomas at the then well known port of Cranganore, in Malabar.” No non-Indian scholar accepts any such thing. The date, as with all dates involving the Twelve, is historically unverifiable.

  It was now 8:30 a.m. If I made it to St. Thomas Mount in three or four hours, I could take an auto rickshaw back to the hotel by mid-afternoon. I had with me a decent map. This was no problem. Walking to St. Thomas Mount? Yes. Good to see the real India.

  Problem 1: Chennai is not a walking town. A lot of sidewalks along major roads (the roads, in other words, I had mapped for) terminated without warning, meaning that, quite suddenly, I was walking down a laneless road, horns beeping everywhere, cars just missing me, rickshaw drivers covering their eyes from the flying dust and tire-launched gravel. After my fifth near visit to the local Fracture and Chest Injury Clinic, I attempted to take a different path to St. Thomas Mount, becoming gradually aware of:

  Problem 2: A large number of Chennai’s streets are unmarked, and many that are marked have no English translation. Not that this mattered anyway, because:

  Problem 3: Much of Chennai looked identical to me. I should have been ready for this. When my driver Dave was showing me around Chennai two days before, he would tell me we were in a wealthy neighborhood, or a university neighborhood, or a bad neighborhood, all of which looked exactly the same. You saw this in a certain kind of Asian city. It was often unclear whether a home was a roofless barnyard or a queenly palace until you ventured past the compound walls. In all but the most ostentatious cases, personal wealth in many Asian countries was not easily gauged from a sidewalk. You had to go inside. This was interesting to think about, but not right now, because right now my stomach problems were returning, which horribly revealed:

  Problem 4: Chennai has no public restrooms—not unless quiet alleyways counted as public restrooms. (Apparently, to many, they did.) Great molten marbles of gastrointestinal agony rolled through me as I staggered from bread shop to furniture store, asking if anyone had a restroom. No one did. I finally found a public restroom, in, of course, Domino’s Pizza, from which I emerged sadly resigned to taking an auto rickshaw for the remainder of my long trip to the mount, which brought me up against:

  Problem 5: Rickshaw drivers in Chennai did not seem to know where anything in Chennai was located. “St. Thomas,” I said to the driver, a drowsy, older man whose face had turned into dark crocodilian armor under the Indian sun. He stared at me diffidently. With his big white bushy mustache, he looked like the negative image of some tiger-stalking British hunter in his sunset years. “St. Thomas Mount. Do you know?”

  “Yes, yes,” he said. “I know.”

  We drove for a while. I could see what I assumed was St. Thomas Mount in the distance. We were moving in an opposite direction from it. “Excuse me?” I said, and pointed. “Isn’t that the mount over there?”

  “Church coming,” he said.

  The mount grew more distant. When we stopped at something called Our Lady Chapel, the driver said that would be three hundred rupees, please. “Sir,” I said, “this is not a mount. This is a chapel.”

  The man climbed out of his auto rickshaw and went and discussed the issue with a fellow rickshaw driver. Broken glass and small sharp rocks covered the street, over which my driver trod without noticeable reaction. When he returned, he nodded at me reassuringly and started up his rickshaw. Ten minutes later, we stopped at the New Life Church, a plain white wooden building. Outside the New Life Church, a dozen young Indians were handing out pamphlets, one of which said, “ ‘How can you believe when you accept glory from one another and do not seek the glory that comes from the one who alone is God?’—John 5:44.” The quotation seemed to be a Christian torpedo aimed directly at the dreadnought of Hinduism. So the New Life Church’s partisans were hard-core Protestant Indians hectoring Hindus, Muslims, and fellow Christians alike to heed the words of the most inflexible, cartoonish brand of Christianity foreign missionaries had to offer. By all evidence, these missionaries were having a good deal of success in India: Evangelical Christianity is one of the country’s fastest-growing sects, and today India has at least ten times as many Christian missionaries preaching within its borders as it has had at any other time in recorded history.

  The New Life Church had one thing going for it. This was its outstandingly clean bathroom, which I took great pleasure in defiling. Afterward, I walked outside, booked another auto rickshaw driver, and told him where I wanted to go. Minutes later, my face was plunged into my hands as I noticed that, once again, we were traveling away from St. Thomas Mount. The driver, thankfully, turned around.

  The most prominent description of Thomas’s supposed martyrdom occurs in the apocryphal Acts of Thomas but does not specify on which of Chennai’s two mounts Thomas met his end. Tradition has evolved to place his death on the larger of the two mounts, which at three hundred feet above sea level was not terribly large. In Tamil, St. Thomas Mount is called Parangi Malai. Its name derives from Pfarangi, a term used in India to describe the Portuguese. Pfarangi, or “Frank,” was apparently first used by Middle Eastern Muslims to describe Christian crusaders, and its employment by Indians suggests how deeply Muslim thought patterns and designations penetrated even distant lands to which Islam spread. The mount was called Parangi Malai due to the number of Portuguese who had once settled at its base; the Portuguese themselves called it Monte Grande. Once upon a time, the mount was a densely forested area filled with tigers and cobras, but today its grounds had been groomed with public-park efficiency. Along the mount’s main road, one of India’s best military academies was located.

  At the base of the mount, in what I gathered was a poor neighborhood, I asked the driver to stop. I thought it would be nice, or nicer, to walk up to the church rather than ride. The driver seemed to think this was an unusual request. Only when I insisted on paying him did he shrug and drive away. I had taken perhaps a hundred steps when another rifle shot sounded in my stomach, one so intense I staggered to a nearby fruit stand and steadied myself against its rusty blue frame. I stood there, breathing, watching some black piglets roll around near a pile of fragrantly burning garbage. Whether the piglets rolled from joy or madness I could not decide. Also watching the piglets were four young Indian men, who noticed me watching them. They walked over.

  I knew I could only imagine—and probably not very accurately—the irritation felt by a poor young Indian living at the base of St. Thomas Mount, who day after day watched rickshaws and taxis carry Westerners and wealthy Thomas Christians through their neighborhood and beneath the mount’s grand arched entrance. I stood there, hunched over in pain, leaning against the fruit stand, doing my best not to look at or challenge the four young Indians, whose wide, mean grins said everything there was to say about their feelings for who I was and what, to them, I represented. My eyes found the face of the ancient shopkeeper whose rusty booth I was leaning against. My shy, pleading smile at her was not returned. One of the four young men said something in Tamil, and the others began laughing in the weird, synchronous way young men laugh when unified in malign intent. I looked over at them.

  They were barefoot. The knees of their pants had been worn thin against the orb of their patellae. Their collared shirts were dirty, opened, buttonless. Their teeth were cavitied. Two of the boys had managed to grow tiny maître d’ mus
taches. They were still speaking in Tamil. I waited for them to go away; I would be a good sport. Poor, powerless kids laughing: surely that was their prerogative. The figure I cut was not exactly dashing, after all. I was sweaty and pale; I had not shaved in a week. Too much travel, too much food, too many hotels, not enough exercise. I always figured that being challenged by young men when I traveled was the insider’s grand but harmless nihilistic gesture against the outsider. With young men, we are essentially talking about cavemen living according to cavemen rules and cavemen assumptions. But I was no longer in my twenties; I was a long way from my twenties. Cavemen logic had long since ceased to make any emotional sense to me.

  I posed no challenge to the young Indians. Graying, overweight, physically unimpressive. I was probably the same age as their fathers. But okay. They could watch me suffer. They could watch me fight back my opening bowels. After the pain passed and I had straightened up, the young men rearranged themselves so that I had no way to walk toward the mount’s arched entrance without brushing past one of them. And this, it turned out, was too much to ask of me.

  I said, “Could one of you idiots fucking move, please?”

  The ancient shopkeeper said something to the young men in Tamil, dispersing them. I walked away from her food stall, toward the mount’s arched entrance. The young men, meanwhile, walked across the street but stayed close to one another. I became fairly sure they were going to regroup and reengage with me as I made my way up the hill, away from the eyes of the shopkeeper. This was exactly what they did. I heard them fall in behind me, still muttering, still laughing. The mount’s arched entrance was thirty yards ahead.

  Tonight I would sleep on sheets as white as tundra; they would descend into dreams with the stench of burning garbage in their nostrils. I tried to remember that. Not as comfort, but as a way to remind myself why my obvious unhappiness could give anyone else pleasure.