by Tom Bissell
The arch was now twenty yards away. Above it arced the words of the Twenty-Third Psalm: THE LORD IS MY SHEPHERD. Then I stopped, turned around, and planted myself there in the middle of the street. The young men seemed surprised that I decided to confront them. I scanned their faces, trying to find the leader. Nothing. No one. Here was a quadrumvirate of leaderless equals.
“Look,” I said. “What do you want?” I threw my arms out. “What do you want? I’m a guest here. A visitor. I’m visiting this mount, which is important to many Indians. What do you want?”
None answered. Less than a quarter of Indians speak English, I recalled reading. So, without really thinking about it, thinking only of my frustration, I kicked some dirt at the young Indians. A few older Indians were watching us now, though not with much concern or interest. One of the young men kicked dirt back at me. I took a step closer, which caused two of them to burst out laughing, and the others quickly joined in. I looked defeatedly around the neighborhood. Inside the nearby, dark little houses I could see six, seven people stirring. Chickens high stepped around, dragging manure and animalcules everywhere they went. Cows standing around, huge and stupid, shit pouring out of them. The Indians in this and many neighborhoods used that shit as a reliable fire source.
I turned around, the twisty road ahead of me lined with palm trees and bushes as spiky and perilous as medieval armaments. I passed beneath the mount’s gateway arch—the young men did not follow—and walked until I found a small, fenced-in area, called “Jesus in Gethsemane,” its resident statue a brightly painted, magnificently bearded, unusually tacky Jesus who stood at least fifteen feet tall. I kept walking up the road. As I climbed, a vista of Chennai pooled out before me, the mostly low buildings seeming to huddle protectively under a gauzy layer of smog. For the first time, I saw how huge Chennai was, how like a vast smoke sea. A taxi came at me, down the road, on its windshield a sticker that read, PRAISE THE LORD. At the top of the mount, finally, was a big parking lot scattered with bright red dirt and lined with tropical trees, rickshaw drivers everywhere, and over yonder a stone stairway that led up to the church itself.
Once again, I was sick, but up the stairs I went, up to the white church, do I really need to describe it, a white church on a hill, the Christian tracts sold everywhere, little pamphlety broadsides filled with blurry photographs and an array of fascinating misspellings, tell me where on earth is the bathroom, sweat pouring down my back, put away your notebook, it is no longer needed, do not care about Thomas, he was not martyred here, please India give me a break, please India praise the Lord, throw the latch on the door and squat and actually is it really are you really are those tears? Oh you are sick are you not dear boy weeping in a church bathroom where your namesake was run through with a spear.
VI.
By the end of the first century, what scholars call the Thomas movement was operating in Syria; by the third century, it was active in India. Today, many of the world’s surviving non-European Christian communities trace themselves back, wholly or partially, to Thomas. The great thirteenth-century Christian philosopher Gregory Bar Hebraeus, a bishop in the Syriac Orthodox Church, went so far as to call Thomas “the first pope of the East.” That Thomas traveled to eastern lands, and saw great missionary success within them, is one of the earliest and most widely attested pieces of apostolic lore.
The Thomas movement was, at least in part, a missionary effort on behalf of the Church of the East, which survives to this day in the form of the Assyrian Church of the East, whose patriarch, oddly, lives in exile in Chicago, Illinois. This theologically and culturally distinct church claims as its founders Peter (due to his having supposedly founded the church in Antioch and a mention in 1 Peter of having been written from “Babylon”), Thomas, Bartholomew, Thaddaeus, and Mari (whom tradition cites as having been one of Luke’s Seventy Disciples). Its theology, however, earned it a different name in antiquity: the Nestorian Church.
Nestorius, the fifth-century bishop of Constantinople, did not formulate the theological position to which he inadvertently gave his name, but his prominence, not to mention his argumentative and unbending nature, has made him one of history’s great scapegraces in the eyes of Christian orthodoxy. The difficult issue was the nature of Jesus’s humanity. Nestorius argued that Mary, whom he regarded as fallibly, sinfully human, was incapable of bringing to term a fully divine Jesus. Nestorius argued that Jesus was, in effect, human on his mother’s side and that his human and divine selves were separate entities within him. Jesus’s humanity (or lack thereof) had been troubling Christian intellectuals for centuries; the formulation of the Nicene Creed in 325 did little to define terms. Nestorius’s argument was opposed by proponents of the rapidly growing cult of Mary, and Cyril, the bishop of Alexandria, led a campaign against what was becoming known as Nestorianism, even though Nestorius was far from its only proponent.
The emperor Theodosius attempted to settle the matter at the Council of Ephesus in 431. When Nestorius arrived, unfortunately, he was not allowed to speak. Nothing was settled beyond the mealy compromise that Jesus Christ was both fully divine and a perfect human; all sides of the debate left the council displeased. Nestorius was driven out of his bishopric and exiled to Egypt.
How Jesus’s human and divine natures coexisted was again addressed at the Council of Chalcedon in 451. (Nestorius was invited to participate but died days before he received his invitation.) The council’s ruling—one of the most important rulings in the history of Christian orthodoxy—held that Jesus was “perfect in divinity and perfect in humanity, the same truly God and truly man, of a rational soul and a body; consubstantial with the Father as regards his divinity, and same consubstantial with us as regards his humanity.” This compromise-driven definition remains the mainline position among Eastern Orthodox, Roman Catholic, and Protestant Christians, but it drove away many ancient believers in Jesus. Among them were those who believed Jesus’s nature was that of one fully divine being (Monophysites), those who believed Jesus’s humanity and divinity were of one insuperable nature (Miaphysites), and those who believed within Jesus were separately human and divine selves traceable to his uniquely complicated parentage (Dyophysites). After Chalcedon, these Christians (Armenians, Copts, Nestorians) broke free from the imperial church. In many cases, they also broke free from one another: even today many non-Chalcedonian churches refuse formal contact. To spread its good news, “Nestorianism” traveled elsewhere, far beyond the borders of the Roman world and its theological enforcers. By the seventh or eighth century, any form of Eastern Christianity that ran afoul of Christian orthodoxy was being called Nestorian.
The most powerful and populous non-Chalcedonian church was, for centuries, the Church of the East. Syriac Christianity had a major influence on the Church of the East, and Syriac Christians, of course, claimed Thomas the apostle as their founder and legitimizer. In the fourth chapter of Matthew, we read of how Jesus’s “fame spread throughout all Syria,” which reminds us how easily Christianity could have remained a predominantly Middle Eastern or Asian faith, with its capital planted not in Rome but in Babylon or Edessa. Syriac Christian missionaries were active in Central Asia, China, the islands of the Persian Gulf, the foothills of the Himalayas, and Sri Lanka. The Church of the East even managed to win over a family of Mongols to the Christian faith, among them a princess who married one of Jenghiz Khan’s sons.*7 Initially, at least, these Christians met with little hostility; the Parthians in particular seemed unusually open to Christian thought. But eastward-moving Christians had little institutional protection or support and were largely cut off from the rest of Christianity. Theirs was also often a deeply monastic and combative form of Christianity, waging what one scholar describes as “Christian life-warfare against the world.” But the Church of the East, which at one point was well positioned to lead a large part of the Christian world, was inexorably affected, and hindered, by the rise of Islam.
When, in the second century, Christianity first entere
d Edessa, the capital of the tiny independent kingdom of Osrhoene (today found in Turkey, about four hundred miles northeast of Palestine), it was an independent city-state relatively uncolored by the philosophical influence of Hellenism or the civic influence of Rome. Furthermore, Syriac, the language spoken throughout Edessa and Osrhoene, was closely related to Aramaic, the language used by Jesus and his original followers, which allowed Syriac-speaking Christians to feel a certain amount of (arguably justified) linguistic chauvinism.*8 The original founders of Osrhoene were Nabataean Arabs. They had no natural place in the Roman Empire to the west or the Parthian Empire to the east, both of which routinely squeezed the region and its capital city. In this challenging religious and geopolitical climate, Edessa somehow managed to become one of the greatest centers of Christian learning of its age.
Eusebius, in his fourth-century history of the church, said virtually nothing about Syriac Christianity. He did, however, tell a story about Edessa that involves Thomas. In Eusebius’s account, a “brilliantly successful monarch” named King Abgar V Ukkama was “dying from a terrible physical disorder” in Edessa. But Abgar heard “continual mention” of a Galilean healer named Jesus, to whom he dispatched a royal messenger. Abgar, who wanted Jesus to come to Edessa and miraculously heal him, concluded his letter in this way: “I may add that I understand Jews are treating you with contempt and desire to injure you: my city is very small, but highly esteemed, adequate for both of us.” The first line of Jesus’s response letter to Abgar: “Happy are you who believed in me without having seen me!” (This is, of course, a gloss on what Jesus says to Thomas in John’s locked room: “Blessed are those who have not yet seen and yet have come to believe.”) Jesus, according to Eusebius, “did not immediately accede to [Abgar’s] request,” explaining, “I must complete all that I was sent to do here.” However, Jesus assured Abgar that once he was “taken up to the One,” he would send a chosen disciple to heal him. “In a very short time,” Eusebius wrote, “the promise was fulfilled. After His resurrection and ascent into heaven, Thomas, one of the Twelve apostles, was moved by inspiration to send Thaddaeus, himself in the list of Christ’s seventy disciples, to Edessa as preacher and evangelist of the teachings about Christ.”
Eusebius assured his readers that “written evidence of these things is available, taken from the Record Office at Edessa,” and further claimed that he had “extracted” various other documents from the Edessan archives, including a Syriac document describing Thaddaeus’s visit, which begins, “After Jesus was taken up, Judas, also known as Thomas, sent to him as an apostle Thaddaeus, one of the Seventy.” Here we find ourselves in a predictable apostolic bramble; yet again the tricksy name Judas complicates the proceedings. Thomas is never referred to as Judas in the New Testament, and Thaddaeus—whose place among the Twelve Eusebius makes quite unclear (it is possible he means another Thaddaeus)—is replaced with “Judas of James” in Luke’s and Acts’ apostolic lists. So who is actually who? A few later retellings of this tradition are highly confused as to whether someone named Thaddaeus, Judas, Thomas, or Judas Thomas delivered the letter to Abgar.
Although Abgar was a historical figure, the story of his letter swap with Jesus is legendary. Even many ancient Christians disputed the story, among them Augustine and Jerome, who were adamant in their belief that Jesus wrote nothing down. While Eusebius might have been fibbing about personally “extracting” the documents from the Edessan archives, a more reasonable explanation is that such documents did exist, and Eusebius did in fact find them, but they were fabrications written by Syriac Christians wishing to give themselves and their church ecclesiastical authority.
Edessa, which thought of itself as the Rome of its region, was home to a busily scribbling group of Christian storytellers and fabulists whose stories proved remarkably successful in passing into the wider Christian tradition, even though the Syriac-speaking Christians responsible for these stories were regarded as Nestorian heretics by many other Christians. The city was also home to an evangelical missionary movement to the east, especially into Parthia (northeastern Iran), which is where Eusebius, and many other ancient Christians, placed Thomas the apostle’s primary activities.
Much of this story is told in The Acts of Thomas, which one scholar calls “the oldest surviving account left by any congregation beyond the frontiers of the Roman Empire in the East.” Most likely, The Acts of Thomas was originally written in the second or third century in Edessa. Its ancient popularity is obvious: versions of the text turn up in Arabic, Coptic, Greek, and several other languages. Although Western Christians looked askance at many aspects of Thomas’s Acts, its official denunciation by the church did not occur until the sixteenth century.
You know you are in for a strange reading experience—even by apocryphal standards—when in the opening moments of The Acts of Thomas Jesus sells Thomas into slavery. Jesus is forced to do this because Thomas tells him flatly, “I am not going to the Indians.” Unfortunately for Thomas, a merchant by the name of Abban happens by. Abban has been dispatched by a certain king Gondaphorus to find a suitable carpenter or builder for a new palace. Jesus approaches Abban, slyly introduces himself as “son of the carpenter Joseph,” and tells him that Thomas is his slave and a good builder to boot. Jesus will, he says, sell Thomas to Abban if Abban wishes. Abban agrees to the deal, approaches Thomas, and asks if Jesus is indeed his master. Thomas says, “Yes, he is my Lord,” thus stepping into the semantic trap Jesus has laid for him.
Eventually, Thomas meets Gondaphorus and agrees to build for him a large, splendid palace. Thomas tells Gondaphorus what he needs (“wood, ploughs, yokes, balances, and pulls, and ships and oars and masts”) and Gondaphorus, impressed, immediately hands him the money to begin work. But Thomas spends all of Gondaphorus’s money on the poor and needy in the surrounding villages. When Gondaphorus gets wind of this, he begins to ponder the manner in which he will kill Thomas. Before Gondaphorus can act, his brother, Gad, falls into a deep sickness and has a vision of Gondaphorus’s palace, which has indeed been built by Thomas, but in Heaven rather than on earth. When Gad returns from his dream, he tells his brother what he saw. Soon enough, the brothers’ souls are put “at ease” by Thomas, and both are baptized.
It is, of course, possible that Thomas, or someone like him, reached India in the first century. Certainly, we know Rome traded with India during that time. It is also true that Judaism had been a small part of life on the subcontinent as early as the fifth century BCE, shortly after the end of the Jews’ Babylonian captivity. India’s ancient trading cities and villages on the Malabar Coast, many of which are today associated with Thomas’s missionary activity, were once known for their Arab and Jewish merchant communities. One of the first churches supposedly founded by Thomas, in a river port village known as Niranam, claims to serve the oldest Christian community in the world, having been continuously operating, according to local tradition, since 54 CE. What seems distinctly less possible is that The Acts of Thomas has anything to tell us about what happened to Thomas the apostle in India. Several scholars argue that when ancient Christians wrote of Thomas traveling to “India,” it could have meant, literally, anywhere. Certain historical findings, however, have led a small group of scholars, most of them Indian, to argue even more vociferously that the stories in The Acts of Thomas are true in their broad outlines.
Take, for instance, King Gondaphorus. In the mid-nineteenth century, several coins bearing his Greek name (Gondophares) were found around Kabul. (They are today displayed in a museum in Lahore, Pakistan.) Gondaphorus, or Gundaphar, far from being a figment of some Edessan storyteller’s imagination, appears to have ruled a kingdom in the Parthian Empire near modern-day Peshawar from 19 to 55 CE, and his name may have some relation to the Taliban stronghold city Kandahar in Afghanistan.*9 The Parthian king’s proclivity for building is recorded on one of the coins bearing his name, greatly exciting those who wish to believe the historical Thomas had dealings with him. However, most kin
gs tend to be builders, because building is what ensures a king’s legacy. It would probably be harder to search through history for an ancient king not inclined to build things. Surely, word of the real Gundaphar could have easily passed into the hearing and consequently the imagination of the anonymous Syrian Christian or Christians who wrote The Acts of Thomas. For these writers, finding out the name of the king who lived in roughly the right place at roughly the right time might well have been as easy as dropping by the Edessan “Record Office” mentioned by Eusebius.
Whether fantasy, fact, or some mixture thereof, The Acts of Thomas is not an Indian document; Indian Christians did not write it. In fact, no Tamil or Dravidian source has anything at all to say about Christians or Christianity until the fourth century. But the stories told in the Acts are clearly related in some way to the earliest sagas and songs Indian Christian families have been sharing with one another for at least seventeen hundred years.
Within India, there are two competing stories about Thomas’s arrival. A “northern” or “western” tradition (which appears to have its origins in stories told by Christian missionaries from Persia and Syria) claims that Thomas arrived in India overland, via Persia or Central Asia. A “southern” or “eastern” tradition (bolstered by internal Indian sources almost entirely derived from local languages) maintains that Thomas arrived from the sea and landed on India’s western Malabar Coast. Beyond that, the two traditions have a few commonalities, including tales of Thomas’s building a palace for a local ruler and the manner of his death. While the earliest manifestation of the northern tradition remains unknown, The Acts of Thomas is its literary apotheosis.