by Tom Bissell
The southern tradition, conversely, is exemplified in the songs and oral traditions of Indian Christianity. The Thomma Parvam, or “Song of Thomas,” is the oldest internal account of Thomas’s arrival and is still sung at some Thomas Christian wedding ceremonies. It establishes the key elements of the southern tradition: Thomas landed on an island off the coast of Malabar, sailed around India, and stopped at Mylapore (or modern-day Chennai); went to China; came back to Malabar, settled in Thiruvanchikulam (near the ancient city of Muziris), and oversaw the seven Christian communities with which he became associated; attracted high-caste Indians with his uprightness; left again for Mylapore; and was martyred by angry Brahmans. The various local traditions that place Thomas in India were not fully collated until the twentieth century, and the first major book on the subject appeared in 1905. Most of the writers to cast their eyes on these traditions since have been bishops, vicars, reverends, priests, or scholars belonging to or associated with various Thomas sects. These Christians have sought to preserve the Thomas stories’ historical integrity, pointing out the numerous similarities within competing strands of the Thomas tradition. These similarities exist, but The Acts of Thomas has much more in common with other apocryphal Acts. It opens with an apostle lamenting his chosen site of missionary activity, includes a detailed naval journey, describes the apostle being held and tortured by a foreign king whose wife proves susceptible to apostolic teaching, and so on. Very clearly there developed in early Christian storytelling a useful narrative template into and out of which various apostles could be swapped.
Undoubtedly, the most famous piece of heterodox Christian literature associated with Thomas is The Gospel of Thomas, which was discovered in a Coptic translation in 1945 at the Egyptian village of Nag Hammadi. Once the Coptic text was published, scholars recognized that it was similar to fragments of an earlier Greek text found in an ancient dump near the Egyptian city of Oxyrhynchus in the 1890s.
Most scholars believe The Gospel of Thomas’s original language was Greek, and its estimated dates of composition range from the 50s to the 150s. Although the text’s author puts himself forward as Judas Thomas (actually, “Judas Thomas the Twin”), as does the author of The Acts of Thomas, and though this author claims to have received secret knowledge from Jesus, as does the author of The Acts of Thomas, the works are not believed to have any literary connection, though they may have a distant theological connection. As it happens, The Gospel of Thomas is not a gospel at all; it is, rather, a narrativeless series of sayings, some of them quite odd. (An especially strange saying likens God’s Kingdom to an assassin!) Many revered teachers in the ancient world saw their words enshrined in “sayings” documents of this type. And while a circle of eager students could be moved to delighted perplexity by the sayings contained in The Gospel of Thomas, it is hard to imagine a social or religious movement being inspired by it.
Roughly half of The Gospel of Thomas will seem familiar to the close reader of the canonical gospels. For instance, The Gospel of Thomas has Jesus boldly flouting circumcision, just as he occasionally flouts the Law in the canonical gospels: “If [circumcision] were useful, children’s fathers would produce them already circumcised from their mothers.” One brash saying corresponds to John’s depiction of Jesus as the root of all earthly creation: “I am the light that is over all things. I am all: From me all has come forth, and to me all has reached. Split a piece of wood; I am there. Lift up the stone, and you will find me there.” Among the most interesting correspondences is The Gospel of Thomas’s version of what is appropriately rendered unto Caesar. “Give Caesar the things that are Caesar’s,” The Gospel of Thomas’s Jesus says, “give God the things that are God’s, and give me what is mine.” The final clause, which is unique to The Gospel of Thomas, thoroughly scrambles the assumed point of Jesus’s foxy answer to the Pharisees in the canonical gospels and hits any reader familiar with the canonical gospels like a smack across the face. Who is this Jesus, anyway?
One thing The Gospel of Thomas’s text utterly lacks compared with the canonical gospels is what the scholar Marvin Meyer calls “spiritualization,” which is to say a dramatic or scenic context that enriches or challenges one’s understanding of what Jesus is actually saying. A telling example occurs in Saying 9:
Jesus said, “Look, the sower went out, took a handful [of seeds], and scattered [them]. Some fell on the road, and the birds came and pecked them up. Others fell on rock, and they did not take root in the soil and did not produce heads of grain. Others fell on thorns, and they choked the seeds and the worms devoured them. And others fell on good soil, and it brought forth a good crop. It yielded sixty per measure and one hundred twenty per measure.
We find parallel passages in the thirteenth chapter of Matthew and the eighth chapter of Luke, but the story of the sower is allegorized into having something to do with the Kingdom or the Word of God. In Meyer’s view, the story of the sower in The Gospel of Thomas is “more original” than the canonical gospels’ allegorized version. The way the story has shifted overtly toward parable, Meyer goes on, suggests that the early church used details “about farming in rural Palestine” to explain to later Christians how faith might endure in hostile times.
The briefest, most enigmatic saying attributed to Jesus in The Gospel of Thomas is this: “Be passersby.” While such sentiment probably has a relationship to Jesus’s recommendation in the canonical gospels that his disciples travel widely and partake of strangers’ generosity, “Be passersby” has an apothegmatic elusiveness. Apparently, it has something to do with keeping away from the corrupting world, remaining alone. (Not for nothing does the word “monk” derive from the Greek monachos, or “solitary.”) These two words never found their way into canonical Christian scripture, but they obviously struck others in the ancient world as worthy of immortalization: a nearly identical saying attributed to Jesus, and inscribed in Arabic, can be found in a tenth-century mosque in India.
VII.
The morning after my cataclysmic visit to St. Thomas Mount, I read a book while drinking a six-dollar bottle of water on one of my hotel’s open-air inner courtyard patios. I felt quite a bit better that morning, my body a plague-cleansed city. My only real malady was a dehydration headache glowing inside my skull and possibly a slight fever. All the same, today was the day I had to visit Saint Thomas Basilica.
On the cab ride over, a liquid seesaw rocked back and forth in my stomach. I gazed out the window, squinting the world into liquidy vagueness, trying not to focus on the dark shops packed with what looked to be detergent boxes; the colorful, ghostly drift of women in saris; the overturned bicycle pinned under a diagonally parked car, the gathered crowd, two hotly arguing men. Sweat poured out of me, and not the honest, gritty-textured sweat of exertion, but sweat that felt sour and contaminating.
The cabdriver had no trouble finding Saint Thomas Basilica, or Santhome Basilica, as it was locally known. Weak and ravenous for caloric strength, I climbed out of the cab and looked around. This was one of the cleaner, more verdant neighborhoods I had seen in Chennai. I had come to associate such neighborhoods with two things: clean toilets and Domino’s Pizza. I walked off in search of the latter, past the basilica, its sign of annunciation an overturned Kubrickian black marble obelisk emblazoned with INTERNATIONAL SHRINE OF ST. THOMAS BASILICA. I did not find Domino’s Pizza. I did, however, stumble across something called the Image College of Arts, Animation, and Technology, which offered courses in game development, game design, and game journalism. I found the stately colonial-era building that provided residence to the diocese’s archbishop. I found a home for retired Indian clergy, one of whom I saw smilingly leaning out of a second-story window to water his flowers. I found a number of parochial schools, around the playgrounds of which trundled happily screaming Indian children in Catholic plaid. I watched two boys kick a soccer ball back and forth until the nuns called them in.
Even though several of the Catholic priests I had known in my life were I
ndian Christians from Goa, I knew I would never get used to steeples towering above equatorial palm trees or school-uniform plaid worn in tropical heat. However anachronous it could sometimes seem, Christianity came into India quietly and, for the most part, accommodatingly. The same cannot be said for Islam, which arrived in India in three waves. The earliest Arab Muslims did not come bearing swords. As educated merchants, India’s first Muslim visitors were deeply curious about the wider world and won many converts along the coasts of India. Shia Muslims from Persia were less accommodating but more successful and influenced Indian religious and bureaucratic life in ways that are still felt today. In the thirteenth century, however, Allah’s final messengers to India arrived from the resource-deprived steppes of Central Asia. Brutal and efficient, these Turkic Muslims were not merchants or scholars or chroniclers or mystics but inveterate warriors who regarded the people of Hindustan as infidels. The Turks established the first Islamic empire in India, partly due to their success at converting low-caste Indians, who were understandably enlivened by Islam’s seemingly promising, spiritually mandated demolition of the caste system. While several of the first Muslim rulers of India’s Mughal Empire displayed a wise public deference to Hinduism (one stopped eating beef as a mark of respect, for instance), their rule eventually came to be characterized by internal instability, geopolitical ambition, and fundamentalist harshness. By the end of the sixteenth century, many Christians and Hindus were actively collaborating with India’s eager European colonizers.
Unfortunately for India’s Christians, the European Christians who rediscovered them were Portuguese sailors—both fanatically Catholic and deeply suspicious of anyone and anything that seemed Moorish, Muslim, or otherwise “heretical.” Less than two hundred years prior to their arrival in India, the Portuguese had lived under the humiliating yoke of Islam. From this they emerged with an angry, aggressive, post-traumatic-stress Christianity and “crusading ethos and religious intolerance as extreme as anywhere in western Europe,” in the words of one historian. Indians, meanwhile, had no frame of reference for what the Portuguese actually represented. India’s earlier Christian incursions had been small and mostly peaceful, and while many Christian visitors sneered at Indian Christianity’s “Nestorian” ways, they were never numerous enough to do anything about it.
Yet the first contact made between Portuguese and Indians, in 1498, was also peaceful. Initially, the Portuguese worked with local Thomas Christians, who were frequently oppressed by non-Christians. Conveniently, the local spice trade, which the Portuguese sought to control, was mainly a Thomas Christian operation, and so both sides agreed to a treaty of formal cooperation in 1503. By 1510, the Portuguese had built a fortress in Goa (which eventually became the largest Christian cathedral in Asia), and some Thomas Christians were drawn into Catholicism. The alliance cracked after five decades due to the fanatical nature of Portuguese Catholicism and the ingrained resistance of Indian Christianity.
By 1550, the Portuguese had massacred thousands of Muslims, outlawed the practice of Hinduism in the lands they controlled, and turned most Thomas Christians against them. Yet the Portuguese had also persuaded the Roman Catholic Church to allow the archbishop of Goa “rights of patronage” over India. The missionary activity the Goan church sponsored was some of the most confrontational and destructive in Christian history. Rome eventually came to regret the carte blanche it had granted its Portuguese messengers, but not until the 1830s did it reassert its authority over Indian Catholicism.
India’s Christians had never been given a reason to think much about the doctrinal disputes that had separated so many European Christians from one another. Having no history of evangelism themselves, many Thomas Christians regarded European conversion drives as behavior more fitting of a Muslim than a self-professed Christian. By the end of the sixteenth century, frustrated Portuguese-sponsored missionaries in India began to subvert and sometimes even destroy the legacies and traditions of Thomas Christians. Around 1560, the Portuguese brought an Inquisition in miniature to the subcontinent. Ancient and revered works of Syriac scripture were scrubbed of “Nestorian” thinking; many other texts were destroyed; all contact with Syria’s Christian patriarchs was forbidden; several libraries were burned. Indian Christianity hardened against all these incursions, and by the seventeenth century the Christians of Portuguese-controlled land lived in a state of open acrimony.
The Portuguese were not the only European Christians in India. In 1639, not too far from Saint Thomas Basilica, a confederacy of largely English merchants landed their ships on a five-mile-long beach and set out to build a “factory,” or trading post. Along the coast were four separate villages, whose Christians the English quickly turned to for help and alliances. Like the Portuguese, with whom they competed, the English traders built a fort, which they named after their patron saint, George. With a foothold trading post already in Surat, on the west coast of India, the Governor and Company of Merchants of London Trading into the East Indies—soon mercifully shortened to the East India Company—was on its way to becoming the first truly multinational corporate entity in human history.
To an extent far surpassing that of the Portuguese, the East India Company leveraged the knowledge and skills of local people. It also routinely exploited and sometimes tormented local people, but Frykenberg argues that the nature of this power balance was more complicated than most colonial relationships. Many towns in the area saw their populations increase fivefold in a decade. While the city-state of Madras/Chennai was overseen by the administrator of Fort St. George and backed by English (and, later, British) sea power, “Indian money, Indian manpower, and Indian methods of collaboration” were all equally crucial to its success. Madras’s central defining component, Frykenberg writes, was that it “permitted and encouraged unrestricted entry and enterprise….Any and all who came to seek shelter within its walls found refuge and opportunity.”
Fort St. George was built only a decade after an earlier Portuguese-designed Santhome Basilica had gone up. The basilica’s spire, which could be seen from the fort walls, must have been a reassuring sight to the English merchants. As Madras/Chennai grew, however, the number of temples and mosques increased apace; by the nineteenth century, the city was a bastion of Hindu nationalism and a favorite city of Indian Muslims. It was also home to large Armenian and Jewish communities, a growingly Evangelical Anglican movement, and an increasingly resentful community of Thomas Christians.
Anglican missionaries attempted to adjust Thomas Christians’ doctrinal peculiarities. When that did not work, they, too, resorted to altering and vandalizing their sacred scriptures. However, a few small groups of Thomas Christians wound up converting to Anglicanism, and some even went so far as to break the cultural taboo of ministering to low-caste Indians. One legacy of this was sharply worsened relations between Hindus and Indian Christians, with the former regarding the latter as social heretics for reaching out to people categorized, literally, as “crushed.” By the mid-nineteenth century, Madras/Chennai had “a special reputation for the vehemence of its Hindu-Christian conflicts,” Frykenberg writes. The Brahman elite frequently attacked Thomas Christians, some even going so far as to hold mocking travesties of the Christian Mass. A consolidated movement of Brahmans and their allies worked to blackball any and all Indian Christians from positions of local power, and because the Brahmans were powerful, and crucial to British business, it became de facto British policy to appease them at every turn, even if it meant shunning Thomas Christians, which struck many Britons within and without India as an appalling turn of events.
Not everything in the story of Indian Christianity’s painful reintroduction to the modern world concerns fragmentation and abeyance. Despite the damage caused in India by agents of Catholicism, the church, in 1894, finally sanctified the use of the Syriac rite for many Indian Catholics and later granted Thomas Christians representation by their own bishops. Today, India’s various Thomas Christian churches, Eastern Catholic Church
, and Roman Catholic Church coexist in a state of relative comity. For more than a century, the Catholic Church has overseen the operation and maintenance of Saint Thomas Basilica, which it elevated to the status of minor basilica in the mid-1950s.
VIII.
The first thing visitors encountered when turning off San Thome High Road and onto the basilica’s grounds was an attractive little jungle glen landscaped directly into the compound’s surrounding wall. Behind the glen, an artificial waterfall quietly spilled. Standing tall amid the vines and fronds was a creamy white statue of the Virgin Mary, who Indian Christians claim appeared to Thomas at several locations around their nation and who might also be Thomas’s sole rival as India’s most beloved Christian figure who is not Jesus.*10
A pair of silent, down-staring beggars were camped nearby the landscaped glen, one of whom wore a T-shirt that read, AT LEAST LIFE SUCKS FOR FREE, which made my giving him a hundred rupees less a matter of choice than reaction. Once I stepped past the beggars, I was in a sunny, orderly place that felt more like Florida than India. I glanced back at San Thome High Road, twenty feet behind me, and saw small but tragic manifestations of workaday Indian catastrophe: a filthy child walking alone down the street, a half-naked man passed out under a tree, a loudly backfiring auto rickshaw. The comparative calm of this basilica’s courtyard suddenly felt like that of a naughty student on his best behavior.
Indians and Westerners strolled about on the courtyard’s albedo white flagstones, the Indians looking perfectly cool in their loose linen clothing and saris while the Westerners were mostly dripping, wet-faced, armpit splotched, camera strapped, fanny packed, and dabbing, dabbing, dabbing at their foreheads. The wall-enclosed courtyard was smaller than I had been expecting, while the basilica itself was larger.