There is a widely held tradition that the Christian churches of South India have their origins in the arrival in 52 AD of Thomas Didymos – both words meaning ‘twin’ in Aramaic and Greek respectively, connoting a spiritual twinship with Jesus. There is also a wide consensus that after Jesus’ death in 33 A.D. Thomas was entrusted with spreading Jesus’ teaching to the east and that he, or another disciple Thaddaeus or Addai on his behalf, spent some time in Edessa, a thriving intellectual and trading acropolis at the cross-roads of the Roman and Persian empires – today the forlorn little town of Sanli Urfa in South East Turkey.

There it seems that the so-called “Gospel of Thomas” would have first been written down in Greek: whether it was first written before Thomas travelled to south India in AD 52 or, as some scholars believe as late as AD 140, it had been circulating long before the four Gospels of the New Testament were finally established in AD 367, defining the core of the Christian Church for the next 1600 years. The Thomas Gospel tells no story of Jesus’ ministry, and makes no mention of his crucifixion; it is a text consisting of just 114 sayings ascribed directly to Jesus in dialogue with his immediate followers and written (perhaps dictated) from memory by Thomas Didymos. The first of them states: These are the hidden logia which the living Jesus spoke and Didymos Judas Thomas wrote; and in the second, Thomas tells us: He who finds the inner meaning of these logia will find Life independent of death. What an invitation! what a promise!

Whether or not Thomas himself spent time in Edessa, he is said to have travelled to northern India where he was well received in the court of King Gundaphorus in the Punjab. Either from there, or via Mesopotamia and thence by sea, he seems to have arrived on the Malabar coast in AD 52, near the old spice-trading port of Muziris just north of Cochin. His teaching appears to have been generally tolerated if not accepted by the Hindu population of the time, to the point where he was able to convert some leading Brahmin families to accept it and become priests; this already suggests, as we shall see, that this teaching, rooted in the actual sayings of Jesus, shared some important features with Hindu tradition. After a while in Kerala, where it is said he established seven churches, Thomas crossed the western Ghats and settled near Madras at the court of King Mazdai. He continued to spread the teaching of Jesus and tradition has it that the King’s wife was so taken by Thomas’ teaching that the King ordered his death, but it is also thought possible that he was killed by soldiers on the order of Brahmins in Madras who resented the impact of his ministry at court. In any event his murder or ‘martyrdom’ is still celebrated each year in Chennai, and a fragment of his bone is still kept in a church on the backwaters above Cochin.

For the next 1,500 years the Thomas Christians maintained their direct links with Mesopotamia, used the Syriac liturgy and traced their apostolic line through Thomas rather than Peter, while at the same time forming a complex and largely stable symbiosis with the indigenous Hindu population. This situation endured until the arrival of the Portuguese, who from the 1530s set about rectifying the Thomasite anomaly — a process culminating in 1599 when the Thomas Christians were forced to attend a synod at Diamper, at which the visiting Portuguese Archbishop Menezes dictated a series of decrees imposing the orthodox Roman Catholic creed, liturgy, rites and the supremacy of the ‘Pope and Bishop of Rome’. One decree specifically extirpated the ‘errors’ of dharma, karma and reincarnation which had evidently spread into the Thomas church from Hindu tradition. However, it would take more than a nine-day synod to obliterate centuries-old social and religious conventions: only 35 years later the Dutch supplanted the Portuguese in Cochin, and there followed 350 years of foreign interference and local pragmatism, leading to the extraordinary diversity of today’s south Indian Christian churches.