Join me today to meet a saint who refused the call - or at least tried to.
Name: Saint Thomas the Apostle, Doubting Thomas
Life: Died c. 72 AD
Status: Saint
Feast: July 3, December 21
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In 1453 the canons of the Ottoman Turks finally brought down the walls of Constantinople. But like all great catastrophes, the fall of the Eastern Roman Empire changed the world in ways that no one could have predicted. It forced Europeans to sail around the area claimed by the Ottoman Empire. And when they did, they began to rediscover things they had once known but long ago forgotten.
To the West, as it turned out, were the forgotten continents of North and South America. To the East was India, and the Portuguese explorer Vasco da Gama figured out how to get there safely when sailing around Africa. Vasco da Gama sailed to the South of India, where pepper could be found, and the Portuguese rediscovered another long forgotten truth. The sources of late antiquity spoke of a dark-skinned people in the South of India who had become Christians. But these traditions had to be discounted, as they were all mixed up with rumours of the mythical African king, Prester John, as well as the Indian King Gundaphar. And yet, to the surprise of Europe, one of the Portuguese boats carried a visitor who travelled between the great cities of Southern Europe: a dark-skinned priest whom they called Josephus Indus, or Joseph the Indian.
Could it be that the old stories were true? The oldest story gives the credit for the evangelization of India to one reluctant man: Thomas the Apostle, a.k.a. Doubting Thomas.
Even in the Gospels Thomas is a puzzling character. Thomas means twin. Like many Jews, Thomas employed a Greek name to make it easier to deal with Gentiles, but his Greek name is just another version of the word for twin: Didymus. Did Thomas’ parents have twins and give one child a real name and call the other one ‘twin’?
Many people have thought Thomas was more of a nickname than a name. If so, does Thomas’ twin brother appear in the Gospels? As time passed, this question became more and more loaded with symbolism. Was one of the other apostles Thomas’ twin? Gnostic writers tried to coopt Christian symbolism and wrote that Thomas’ was the twin brother of Jesus Himself. But to me, the most interesting possibility is the least symbolically rich one. It doesn’t really make sense to call someone twin when his twin is around, since the word twin doesn’t let you distinguish between them. So perhaps the point of the name is that somewhere else there was a man who looked, thought and spoke like Thomas, and yet Jesus’ mission had cut through even the closeness of twins, so that one was called to be an apostle, and one was not.
We get a clear look at Thomas the Apostle in the Gospel of John as Jesus is about to head out on the journey to Bethany where He will raise Saint Lazarus. Bethany is very close to Jerusalem, and everyone recognizes the danger that Jesus may be arrested - they may all be arrested. Thomas, seeing the danger but not willing to back down, makes a morose comment.
Thomas, called the Twin, said to his fellow disciples, “Let us also go, that we may die with him.” (John 11:16)
So perhaps we should think of Thomas as a realist, a hard-minded person who liked to face the facts. In the event, nothing bad does happen in Bethany, but the raising of Lazarus puts even more of a target on Jesus’ back and the tension mounts. A few books later in the Gospel of John we are at the Last Supper. Jesus has spoken of imminent betrayal. The leader of the disciples, Saint Peter, has tried to profess his own loyalty and Jesus has sadly told him that in less than 24 hours Peter will already have denied Him three times. And then, after all this, Jesus tells them not to be afraid.
“Let not your hearts be troubled; believe in God, believe also in me. In my Father’s house are many rooms; if it were not so, would I have told you that I go to prepare a place for you? And when I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and will take you to myself, that where I am you may be also. And you know the way where I am going.” (John 14:1-4)
It falls to Thomas to ask the obvious, practical question, and to receive in answer a profound truth.
Thomas said to him, “Lord, we do not know where you are going; how can we know the way?” Jesus said to him, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life; no one comes to the Father, but by me.” (John 14:5-6)
Long before Thomas has really absorbed the answer, Jesus goes to the garden of Gethsemane to pray, and when the authorities finally come Thomas abandons his Lord along with everyone else.
Thomas remains hung up on practical questions as the days after Jesus’ crucifixion pass and news starts to filter in that Jesus has been seen alive.
Now Thomas, one of the twelve, called the Twin, was not with them when Jesus came. So the other disciples told him, “We have seen the Lord.” But he said to them, “Unless I see in his hands the print of the nails, and place my finger in the mark of the nails, and place my hand in his side, I will not believe.” (John 20:24-25)
This story has gotten Thomas the nickname, Doubting Thomas. And yet it’s worth noting that despite Thomas’ doubts, he remains with the other apostles, unable to believe that Jesus is alive, but perhaps hoping that it might be so.
Eight days later, his disciples were again in the house, and Thomas was with them. The doors were shut, but Jesus came and stood among them, and said, “Peace be with you.” Then he said to Thomas, “Put your finger here, and see my hands; and put out your hand, and place it in my side; do not be faithless, but believing.” Thomas answered him, “My Lord and my God!” Jesus said to him, “Have you believed because you have seen me? Blessed are those who have not seen and yet believe.” (John 20:26-29)
And so it was that Thomas passed into history as the overly-practical apostle, Doubting Thomas. Now, with his faith renewed, he was identified in Acts as one of the first leaders of the Church. There was already much to be done.
According to the historian Eusebius, it fell to Thomas to reply to the King of Edessa, modern Urfa in Turkey. Apparently the king had once been a mighty warrior but had grown sick and frail. He had heard of Jesus and sent a messenger to ask for help. Jesus had told the messenger to wait. Now Thomas organized the mission to Edessa, sending someone to heal the king and baptize him as well.
Why was Thomas specifically in charge of the situation in Edessa? An old tradition repeated by many early sources has it that the apostles gathered together to work out how to do what Jesus had told them to do, namely to go and make disciples of all the nations. Presumably the way to do this was to head out from Judea in different directions to cover as much as possible of the known world.
As the leader, Peter went West, following a complex route that would take him to the central point of Rome. In one version of the story, the other apostles drew lots to decide who would go where. The Apostle John drew the route North from Judea, toward modern Turkey. Andrew would go Northeast, toward modern Ukraine, into the steppes of the Scythians.
The story of Thomas’ assignment is dramatized in one of our early sources, the strange apocryphal text called The Acts of Thomas. It’s a patchwork, internally inconsistent because the versions we have combine later gnostic additions tacked onto what seems to be an early document. Even so, generations of Catholic scholars have examined the Acts in the belief that it contains valuable insights. In the story the ever practical Thomas draws the worst possible assignment. He is supposed to head East, through the Parthian Empire, Media, Hyrcania, Bactria, and finally beyond that into India. In modern terms his modest assignment included roughly Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and India.
In the Acts of Thomas, Thomas realizes that he can’t do this job. Where would he even begin? True, a few decades earlier, the Greek captain Hippalus had figured out how to use the monsoon season to sail to India. But this was not the sort of wild adventure for a practical man like Thomas. Thomas prayed and explained to God that the mission to evangelize the East was too big and too vague and God was just going to have to find someone else.
Shortly afterward, Thomas was abducted. He was walking through a market when men he had never seen grabbed him and bundled him away. The men said that he was now a slave. The mystery abductors brought Thomas to a merchant caravan, and before he could do anything to explain that they had the wrong man it was already on the move.
In the story, Thomas slowly figured out what had happened. The merchant in charge of the caravan, he learned, had been searching the land for a skilled architect and builder. The merchant wasn’t looking on his own behalf. He had been sent by the great King Gundaphar, who demanded a palace to suit his glory. The search for an architect had led the merchant to a market in Roman Judea. And as he had been surveying the people there, a man had approached him who turned out to have exactly the right sort of slave to sell. The mysterious man claimed to be Thomas’ master, and the merchant had been delighted to finally find someone who could build King Gundaphar’s palace. When the merchant described the man, it sounded to Thomas as though he was describing Jesus. King Gundaphar, as it turned out, lived in the North of India, near Peshawar in modern Pakistan.
Thomas had turned down the impossible mission to evangelize India. Now he realized that he had been given a second impossible task on top of it, namely to build a palace for this King Gundaphar. But this time, instead of saying no, Thomas simply prayed, “Thy will be done.”
The Acts of Thomas bring Thomas and the merchant through several adventures before they arrive at the court of King Gundaphar. By now, Thomas had thought about the task before him. He told Gundaphar that he could build him a palace. He described a palace of surpassing beauty. Not willing to give the job to just anyone, the king asked Thomas to sketch out what he had in mind.
And the apostle took a reed and drew, measuring the place; and the doors he set toward the sunrising to look toward the light, and the windows toward the west to the breezes, and the bakehouse he appointed to be toward the south, and the aqueduct for the service toward the north. And the king saw it and said to the apostle: Verily thou art a craftsman, and it befitteth thee to be a servant of kings. And he left much money with him and departed from him. (James Montague Rhodes translation)
As soon as the king was gone, Thomas took the money that he had left and began to walk through the villages of the kingdom, preaching, healing, casting out demons and feeding the poor. After a time, all the money had been given away. The king sent a messenger to check in, and Thomas explained that he was mostly done but needed to build the roof. The king supplied another infusion of cash, and once again Thomas spent the money on the poor.
Finally the time had come, and the king, excited to see how things had turned out, demanded to see the palace he had paid for. Thomas calmly explained that it had been built, but it wasn’t that sort of palace that the king could easily visit. In fact, it was not the sort of palace a man could see while he was still alive.
In the story, the king explodes in rage. He throws the cheerful Thomas and the merchant who brougth him into prison. The king makes inquiries, and learns that Thomas has taken all his money and spent it on the dregs of his kingdom. The money is completely gone. And then, just as it seems things can’t get worse for Gundaphar, he learns that his sick brother has just died. That night the king decides that Thomas will pay for it, for all of it, and sits up trying to devise the most cruel punishment he can. He’s going to burn Thomas alive. No - wait, that would be too easy, Gundaphar decides. First he’s going to skin Thomas, and then he will burn Thomas alive.
King Gundaphar has finally settled on his plan when, in the early morning, he receives word that his brother is not dead, but rather had what today we would call a near-death experience. King Gundaphar hurries over to see his brother. To his shock, all his brother wants to talk about the palace that Thomas has built. If Gundaphar doesn’t want it, the brother asks, may he have it? Or may he live in some small part of it? In the afterlife, the brother explains, he had seen some of the rooms that Jesus describes, but none so beautiful as the palace built by Thomas, constructed from a holy life of faith and good works.
And so a humbled King Gundaphar summons Thomas and the merchant from prison and asks the apostle to forgive him, and pray for him, and teach him and his brother how they too may construct such palaces and prepare for their own deaths.
It’s a beautiful story, although by the time Joseph the Indian arrived in Europe in the 16th century there was no evidence that such a person as Gundaphar had ever existed. Even the dates didn’t seem right: the mighty Kushan empire ruled where Gundaphar was supposed to have been king. But then, two centuries ago, an archeological discovery changed the story. We found the coins of King Gundaphar, whose name was something like Gondaphares or Gondophernes. Only a few years after Thomas passed through, the kingdom of Gondaphares was obliterated by the Kushan Empire and forgotten. History does not tell how many palaces were built before that time.
By then, Thomas had moved on, moving through India. After the initial portion, The Acts of Thomas become more obviously strange, and shot through with the gnostic suggestion that Thomas was Jesus’ twin - which would make the earlier story about how Thomas was abudcted in the marketplace incoherent. What does seem to be true is that Thomas moved through India, heading South. He may also have gone beyond India. Some traditions suggest that he passed into China, perhaps far into the country. Historians have recently begun to point to the second century carvings on Kwongwang Mountain in the East of China as evidence of Saint Thomas’ influence, arguing that the stone carvings, originally considered to be Buddhist, may really depict the Blessed Virgin Mary with the child Jesus and beside them Saint Thomas.
Tradition has it that Thomas wandered through the East for almost forty years. We can guess where his journey ended from a comment of Saint Ephrem, who would write in the fourth century that Saint Thomas brought light to a conspicuously dark-skinned people in India. That would be a strange comment if Thomas had remained in the North of India. But travellers would long note the contrast in skin-colour between North and South, as did the traveller Jan Huygen van Linschoten at the end of the 16th century, when he visited Malabar in the South:
whose naturall borne people are called Malabaren, which are those that dwell upon the sea coast, are as blacke as pitch, with verie blacke and smoth haire, yet of bodies, lims and visages, in all proportioned like men of Europa: these are the best soldiers in all India, and the principall enemies that the Portingalles [that is, the Portugese] have, and which trouble them continually. (edited by Arthur Coke Burnell)
It was here in the South of India that Thomas’ mission came to an end. Tradition has it that he was martyred, in some versions of the story, for refusing to honour an idol of the death goddess Kali. By now Thomas was popular enough with the ordinary people that the authorities had him killed out of sight: run through with a spear. For this reason, Saint Thomas is usually painted holding the spear, the weapon of his martyrdom.
Tradition gives the year of Saint Thomas’ death as 72 AD. The empire of King Gundaphar was already being forgotten. But Thomas had done the impossible. He had not merely built the king’s palace, but evangelized India too. And for a long time, Christians remembered. The bones of Saint Thomas were, in time, brought back to Edessa. King Alfred of Wessex sent envoys to the Christian communities of India, about eight centuries after the death of Saint Thomas. The crusader states rose and fell, and the bones of Saint Thomas were brought back from the fall of Edessa to the safety of Ortona on the East coast of modern Italy. As the middle ages rolled on, Marco Polo met with the Christians of India on his travels. The bones of Saint Thomas would prove not to be so safe in Ortona after all, which was raided by Ottoman Turks in 1566, who blew up the church with gunpowder. The relics would be carefully restored. But by then, the ‘Portingalles’ had already discovered the heirs of Saint Thomas in the South of India. The Portugese would try and fail to assimilate these Christians, who called themselves Saint Thomas Christians, into the Roman Rite. Today Saint Thomas’ legacy lives on in the one of the largest other rites within the Catholic Church: the Syro-Malabar Rite.
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Hey, you beat me to it, I was going to write about the patron saint and apostle of my country. ☺️
But, you've done a great job.
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