Ideas: A history from fire to Freud

by Peter Watson

The most famous instance of a link between Christianity and India concerns Thomas, one of Jesus’ original twelve disciples. According to a Syriac source, the Acts of Judas Thomas, probably composed at Edessa, in north-west Mesopotamia in the third century AD, Jesus’ disciples divided up the known world for evangelisation after the Crucifixion, and India fell to Judas Thomas.72 Today, on the Malabar coast of south-west India, there exists a community of some 2 million Indian Christians who believe their church was founded by Thomas. According to local tradition, he landed there around AD 50 and built seven churches.73 No one outside the Malabar community itself believes any longer that the Thomas who initiated the Indian church was the biblical disciple of that name, but the very presence of Christianity in the subcontinent does have some interesting ramifications.