Thomas the Apostle

Life and Ministry

Thomas, called Didymus (the Twin), is named in the apostolic lists in all four Gospels and Acts. The Fourth Gospel gives him three speaking parts: at the raising of Lazarus he says Let us also go, that we may die with him; in the upper room on the night of the betrayal he asks Lord, we do not know where you are going, and how can we know the way; and a week after the resurrection he makes the confession My Lord and my God on seeing the wounds, the highest Christological statement in the Gospels by a disciple. The ancient and well-attested tradition of the Indian church, preserved in the Acts of Thomas (third century) and corroborated by Ephrem the Syrian, sends Thomas eastward after Pentecost, first to Parthia and then by sea to the Malabar coast of southwestern India in AD 52. He planted seven churches along the coast and pushed east to the Coromandel coast, where he made his final mission.

Circumstances of Death

The consistent witness of the Mar Thoma Christians of Kerala and the Acts of Thomas places his death on the hill now called St. Thomas Mount near Mylapore (modern Chennai), around AD 72. Having drawn the hostility of a local brahmin king or priest caste for converting the king's wife and other women of rank, Thomas was speared while at prayer on the hilltop. The relic of a fragment of his skull and the lance head are venerated at the cathedral built over the traditional tomb in Mylapore. The historical kernel — that an apostle named Thomas reached India and died there — is supported by the unbroken existence of a Christian community in Kerala which preserves Aramaic liturgical elements and which received its bishops from the Church of the East until modern times.

Legacy

Thomas's confession in John 20 fixed the Church's earliest formula for the deity of the risen Christ — My Lord and my God. His witness reaches farther than any apostle: he is the founder of Christianity east of the Euphrates, of the Mar Thoma church of India, and through the eastward expansion of the Church of the East, of communities as far as China. The man who needed to touch the wounds became the apostle who carried Christ farthest from the empty tomb. He believed when he saw, then he went where no one had seen.