Saint Thomas, Apostle
From
newadvent.org
Little
is recorded of St. Thomas the Apostle, nevertheless thanks to the fourth Gospel
his personality is clearer to us than that of some others of the Twelve. His
name occurs in all the lists of the Synoptists (Matthew 10:3; Mark 3:18; Luke
6, cf. Acts 1:13), but in St. John he plays a distinctive part. First, when
Jesus announced His intention of returning to Judea to visit Lazarus,
"Thomas" who is called Didymus [the twin], said to his fellow
disciples: "Let us also go, that we may die with him" (John 11:16).
Again it was St. Thomas who during the discourse before the Last Supper raised
an objection: "Thomas saith to him: Lord, we know not whither thou goest;
and how can we know the way?" (John 14:5). But more especially St. Thomas
is remembered for his incredulity when the other Apostles announced Christ's
Resurrection to him: "Except I shall see in his hands the print of the
nails, and put my finger into the place of the nails, and put my hand into his
side, I will not believe" (John 20:25); but eight days later he made his
act of faith, drawing down the rebuke of Jesus: "Because thou hast seen
me, Thomas, thou hast believed; blessed are they that have not seen, and have believed"
(John 20:29).
This
exhausts all our certain knowledge regarding the Apostle.
On
the other hand, though the tradition that St. Thomas preached in
"India" was widely spread in both East and West and is to be found in
such writers as Ephraem Syrus, Ambrose, Paulinus, Jerome, and, later Gregory of
Tours and others, still it is difficult to discover any adequate support for
the long-accepted belief that St. Thomas pushed his missionary journeys as far
south as Mylapore, not far from Madras, and there suffered martyrdom. In that
region is still to be found a granite bas-relief cross with a Pahlavi (ancient
Persian) inscription dating from the seventh century, and the tradition that it
was here that St. Thomas laid down his life is locally very strong. Certain it
is also that on the Malabar or west coast of southern India a body of
Christians still exists using a form of Syriac for its liturgical language.
Whether this Church dates from the time of St. Thomas the Apostle (there was a
Syro-Chaldean bishop John "from India and Persia" who assisted at the
Council of Nicea in 325) or whether the Gospel was first preached there in 345
owing to the Persian persecution under Shapur (or Sapor), or whether the Syrian
missionaries who accompanied a certain Thomas Cana penetrated to the Malabar
coast about the year 745 seems difficult to determine. We know only that in the
sixth century Cosmas Indicopleustes speaks of the existence of Christians at
Male (? Malabar) under a bishop who had been consecrated in Persia. King Alfred
the Great is stated in the "Anglo-Saxon Chronicle" to have sent an
expedition to establish relations with these Christians of the Far East. On the
other hand the reputed relics of St. Thomas were certainly at Edessa in the
fourth century, and there they remained until they were translated to Chios in
1258 and towards to Ortona. The improbable suggestion that St. Thomas preached
in America (American Eccles. Rev., 1899, pp. 1-18) is based upon a
misunderstanding of the text of the Acts of the Apostles (1:8; cf. Berchet
"Fonte italiane per la storia della scoperta del Nuovo Mondo", II,
236, and I, 44).
Besides
the "Acta Thomae" of which a different and notably shorter redaction
exists in Ethiopic and Latin, we have an abbreviated form of a so-called
"Gospel of Thomas" originally Gnostic, as we know it now merely a
fantastical history of the childhood of Jesus, without any notably heretical
colouring. There is also a "Revelatio Thomae", condemned as
apocryphal in the Degree of Pope Gelasius, which has recently been recovered
from various sources in a fragmentary condition (see the full text in the Revue
Benedictine, 1911, pp. 359-374).
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