The St Thomas Christians of India

On the southwest coast of India, in the state of Kerala, live millions of Christians whose families have been Christian for longer than much of Europe. They call themselves St Thomas Christians, or by the old name Nasrani, and they trace their faith to the apostle Thomas, who, their tradition says, landed on the Malabar coast in the year 52. For centuries their bishops came from Persia, their liturgy was in Syriac, and their customs were thoroughly Indian.

Did Thomas really go to India? How did these Christians come to belong to the Church of the East? What happened when Portuguese Catholics arrived in 1498? And why are there now at least seven churches in Kerala that claim the same apostolic heritage? This article grades the evidence.

In brief

The tradition that the apostle Thomas preached in India is ancient: the Acts of Thomas, probably written in Syriac in the third century, sends him to India, and St Ephrem in the fourth century knew that he died there. The Indo-Parthian king Gondophares, named in the Acts, really ruled in the first century. But other early writers send Thomas to Parthia, "India" in ancient texts can mean other lands, and the link between the Acts' story and Kerala cannot be proved. Firm evidence for Christians on the Malabar coast begins in the sixth century, when Cosmas Indicopleustes reported a church there and, elsewhere on the west coast, a bishop "appointed from Persia." Until the sixteenth century the Thomas Christians belonged to the Church of the East. The Portuguese brought them under Rome at the Synod of Diamper (1599), latinizing their rite and burning books judged heretical. In 1653, at the Coonan Cross, many revolted, and from 1665 a large part of the community turned to the Syriac Orthodox Church. Later divisions produced the seven churches of today.

Thesis: The apostle Thomas's mission to India cannot be proved, but it is an early and plausible tradition, and the Christians who bear his name are one of the oldest Christian communities in the world, whose divided history shows both the endurance of Eastern Christianity and the damage done when unity is imposed by force.

The apostle and the tradition

Thomas, called Didymus ("the twin"), is best known from St John's Gospel, where he doubted the resurrection and then confessed Christ, "My Lord and my God" (John 20:28).¹ The site's infographic on Thomas covers what the Gospels say. The Orthodox Church commemorates him on October 6, and the Orthodox Church in America's life of the apostle says that, according to Church tradition, he "founded Christian churches in Palestine, Mesopotamia, Parthia, Ethiopia and India," and that at the Indian city of Meliapur (Mylapore, now in Chennai), "pierced with five spears, he departed to the Lord."¹

The Thomas Christians' own tradition is more specific. The Malankara Orthodox Syrian Church, describing itself for the World Council of Churches, says that "St Thomas arrived in 52 AD and during a twenty year stay converted several Brahmin families to faith in Christ and established seven centres of worship."² No surviving first-century document records it; it is the community's tradition.

What can we actually verify?

The Acts of Thomas

The oldest narrative of Thomas's mission is the apocryphal Acts of Thomas. Sebastian Brock, writing in the Gorgias Encyclopedic Dictionary of the Syriac Heritage, calls it "the Syriac Acts of Thomas, of perhaps the 3rd cent."³ In M. R. James's translation it opens with the apostles dividing the world by lot: "India fell unto Judas Thomas, which is also the twin: but he would not go." Christ then sells him as a slave carpenter to Abbanes, "a merchant of Gundaphorus, king of the Indians."⁴ The book ends with Thomas's martyrdom under a king named Misdaeus (Mazdai): four soldiers "pierced him with their spears, and he fell down and died," and later "one of the brethren had stolen him away and taken him unto Mesopotamia."⁴

The Acts are a romance with theological aims, including a strong ascetic message, and the Church never received them as Scripture. They are not evidence for the details of Thomas's life. Their value is that they show a Syriac-speaking church, by about the third century, believing that Thomas went to India.

King Gondophares

One detail in the Acts has surprised historians. Gondophares was a real Indo-Parthian king. A. D. H. Bivar, in the Encyclopaedia Iranica, dates his reign to about AD 20 to 46 from the Takht-i Bahi inscription and his coins, a chronology he calls "a result perfectly supporting the Acts of Thomas." He also notes that there may have been several kings of that name on different coin issues.⁵ {{strong: A king named Gondophares ruled part of northwest India and the borderlands in the first century, as the Acts of Thomas say.}} This shows that the Acts preserve a genuine first-century name. It does not prove that Thomas met him, and Gondophares ruled in the northwest, far from Kerala. Brock notes that the Acts "seem to bring him to the north."³

Other early witnesses

Not every early source agrees. Eusebius, citing Origen, says that "Parthia, according to tradition, was allotted to Thomas as his field of labor."⁶ Brock notes that "Several 3rd-cent. Greek sources, however, link him with Parthia," that St Ephrem "refers to Thomas being killed in India" and says a merchant brought some of his bones to Edessa, and that "Mylapore as the site of Thomas's martyrdom is not attested until the Middle Ages."³ He also warns that "India" in Greek and Latin sources "often clearly refers to Ethiopia or South Arabia."³ That ambiguity affects Eusebius's report that Pantaenus of Alexandria, around 190, "is said to have gone to India," where he found people who had the Gospel of Matthew, left by the apostle Bartholomew.⁷

Brock's balanced judgment is that sea trade between the Red Sea and the south Indian port of Muziris "was well developed by the 1st cent. AD, and there is nothing impossible in the strong local oral and written traditions that St. Thomas came to south India."³ The site's article on how the apostles died weighs his martyrdom. {{debated: That the apostle Thomas himself preached in south India and founded the churches of Kerala.}}

Firm evidence: the sixth century and after

The first secure eyewitness testimony to Christians in Kerala comes from a sixth-century merchant and traveller, Cosmas Indicopleustes. In his Christian Topography he writes: "In the country called Malê, where the pepper grows, there is also a church, and at another place called Calliana there is moreover a bishop, who is appointed from Persia."⁸ Malê is Malabar; Calliana, Brock notes, is identified either as Kalyan near Mumbai or as Quilon in Kerala.³ {{very-strong: By the early sixth century there was a church on the Malabar coast, and a bishop sent from Persia served on India's west coast.}}

Later evidence fills out the picture. Copper plates in Old Tamil dated 849 grant privileges to the Tharisa church in Quilon. Stone crosses with inscriptions in Pahlavi, the Persian language, survive from around the ninth century. A Syriac lectionary copied at Cranganore in 1301 names "Metropolitan Mar Jacob, governor of the holy throne of Mar Thomas the Apostle."³ By the late thirteenth century Marco Polo could report that "the Body of Messer St. Thomas the Apostle lies in this province of Maabar," a shrine on the south-east coast visited by both Christians and Muslims.⁹ The Knanaya community traces its origin to Thomas of Cana, said to have come from the Middle East with Christian settlers in 345, but Brock notes that this tradition is "first recorded by 16th-cent. western writers, based on local oral accounts."³

A church of the East

Brock writes that "Prior to the arrival of Europeans in the 16th cent. the Thomas Christians were all part of the Ch[urch] of E[ast]," the church of the Persian Empire whose patriarch, the Catholicos, sat at Seleucia-Ctesiphon.³ Its bishops for India were Persians or Mesopotamians, its liturgy East Syriac, and in the seventh century India's bishops depended on the metropolitan see of Rev Ardashir in Fars. Yet "the effective control lay in the hands of the indigenous Archdeacon."³ The site's article on the Church of the East explains that church's theology and why the label "Nestorian" is misleading.

Not every modern Thomas Christian accepts this account. Thomas Joseph, in the same reference work's entry on the Malankara Syriac Orthodox Church, records that church's view that the Thomas Christians "held in great esteem the ecclesiastical authority of the patr[iarch] of Antioch over the 'East'," and that the scattered evidence is "insufficient to establish the doctrinal confession of the Malankara Church as that of the Ch[urch] of E[ast]." He acknowledges that this is not "the dominant view."¹⁰

The community was Indian in its daily life and Syriac in its worship. In 1490 two Indian Christians travelled to Mesopotamia to ask the Catholicos for bishops, and a letter sent back by the bishops in 1504 described the Thomas Christians as "some 30,000 households."³

The Portuguese and the Synod of Diamper (1599)

The Portuguese reached Kerala in 1498.² At first the Thomas Christians welcomed fellow Christians from Europe, and the Portuguese valued them as partners in the spice trade. But the Portuguese clergy regarded the Church of the East as heretical. After the death in 1597 of Mar Abraham, the last bishop sent to them from Mesopotamia, Archbishop Aleixo de Menezes of Goa arrived in Kerala, secured the support of local rulers, ordained many new priests, and forced Archdeacon George of the Cross to submit.¹¹

The synod met at Udayamperur (Diamper) from 20 to 27 June 1599, with 153 priests and 660 lay representatives. Hidemi Takahashi summarizes that it "passed more than 200 decrees in rapid succession and evidently without any serious debate," designed to conform the Church to post-Tridentine Rome and to sever its links with the Church of the East.¹¹ The decrees, in Michael Geddes's English translation of 1694, ordered the clergy to bring all their books for correction, and of the Syriac breviaries they said that "tho' they do well deserve to be burnt," they could be kept, purged, until new ones arrived, while the offices for Advent and the Nativity were to be "entirely tore out of their Breviaries and burnt."¹² After the synod, Menezes toured the diocese, and books judged heretical "were consigned to the flame." Takahashi adds that "it is difficult now to determine the exact extent of the loss," and that J. Thaliath and other scholars have raised "serious doubts" about the canonical validity of the synod itself.¹¹

Fairness to Catholics requires adding that the synod was the act of the Portuguese Padroado, not of Rome in council, and that the Thomas Christians who remained with Rome kept their Syriac liturgy; their descendants form the Syro-Malabar Church.

The Coonan Cross Oath (1653)

Resentment grew under the Jesuit archbishops who followed. In 1653 rumors spread that a bishop sent from the Middle East, Mar Atallah (Ahatallah), had been drowned by the Portuguese. Brock calls the rumors "false." At Mattancherry near Cochin, the Thomas Christians gathered at a leaning cross and swore the "Oath of the Coonan Cross," refusing obedience to the Jesuit prelates. Archdeacon Thomas was then "ordained" bishop by twelve priests, who claimed to have a letter from Mar Atallah authorizing it.³

Brock says the revolt "effectively split the Thomas Christians into two nearly equal halves." Baby Varghese, in the entry on the Malankara Orthodox Syrian Church, writes that "In 1653 the great majority rejected the forced union with Rome."¹³ The difference may partly reflect what followed: in 1659 Rome sent the Carmelite Sebastiani to Malabar to reorganize the Catholic party.¹⁴ In 1665 the Syriac Orthodox bishop Mar Gregorios of Jerusalem reached Kerala and consecrated Archdeacon Thomas as Mar Thoma I. Over the following generations the West Syriac liturgy of Antioch replaced the East Syriac rite among those who had broken with Rome.¹³

The churches of St Thomas today

Brock counts seven churches of Syriac tradition in Kerala.³ Named as they name themselves:

• The Syro-Malabar Catholic Church, of East Syriac liturgical tradition, in full communion with Rome. It was raised to a Major Archbishopric (Ernakulam-Angamaly) in 1992, and Vatican News in 2024 put its faithful at "almost five million."¹⁴
• The Chaldean Syrian Church, also East Syriac, which renewed the ancient link with the Church of the East in the later nineteenth century; Brock notes it belongs to the Assyrian Church of the East, "not the Chaldean Catholic Church."³
• The Malankara Orthodox Syrian Church (often called the Indian Orthodox Church), Oriental Orthodox and autocephalous, headed by its own Catholicos since 1912.¹³
• The Jacobite Syrian Christian Church (Malankara Syriac Orthodox Church), Oriental Orthodox, described in its reference-work entry as "an integral part of the Syr[iac] Orth[odox] Church," with the Patriarch of Antioch as spiritual head and a Catholicos of India as regional head.¹⁰
• The Syro-Malankara Catholic Church, West Syriac and in communion with Rome since 1930, when Mar Ivanios and a sizable group of Syriac Orthodox entered Catholic communion.³
• The Mar Thoma Syrian Church, which describes itself as "the reformed section of the church," from a reform movement begun in 1836 under Abraham Malpan with Anglican missionary support (Brock dates its formal separation to 1888). It retains "many of the traditional characteristics of the ancient eastern church" and is "in full communion with the churches of the Anglican Communion."¹⁵
• The Malabar Independent Syrian Church, a small church based at Thozhiyur, which separated in 1772.³

The division between the Malankara Orthodox and the Jacobites is the most painful. In 1912 a deposed Syriac Orthodox patriarch, Abdul Masih II, consecrated a Catholicos for India, and a long dispute followed between those who accepted the Catholicos's autocephaly and those loyal to the reigning Patriarch of Antioch. A constitution of 1934 and a 1958 Supreme Court verdict favored the Catholicos; the two sides were reunited after that verdict (Brock dates the reunion to 1964) but divided again in 1975.¹³ Brock calls the "drawn-out and expensive litigation over property" a "running scandal."³ A 2017 Supreme Court judgment upheld the Orthodox side's administration of parishes under the 1934 constitution, but enforcement has dragged on: in December 2024 the Court told the Jacobite parties, "Hand over the keys first," yet in January 2025 it set aside a High Court order for state officials to take over six disputed churches and sent the matter back to the High Court.¹⁶ Both churches confess the same Oriental Orthodox faith; their quarrel is over authority and property.

Objections and replies

"The Thomas story was invented to give a colonial-era church prestige"

The tradition is far older than the Portuguese. The Acts of Thomas date from about the third century, Ephrem knew of Thomas's death in India in the fourth, and Cosmas found a Persian-led church in Malabar in the sixth. What cannot be shown is that the Kerala churches descend from Thomas himself rather than from later missionaries and Persian Christian traders. The honest verdict is: possible and early, not proven.

"The Thomas Christians were really Nestorians"

They belonged to the Church of the East, which the Portuguese called Nestorian; the site's article on that church shows why the label misleads, and Malankara Syriac Orthodox writers dispute even the link. The Thomas Christians confessed Christ as true God and true man and kept a Syriac liturgy of great antiquity.

"Diamper was a legitimate reform"

Defenders can point out that for decades before 1599 the Thomas Christians had received bishops from the Chaldean patriarchs, who were in communion with Rome, and that Rome later gave the Syro-Malabar Church bishops of Indian birth again (from 1896). But the synod's haste, its colonial backing, the burning of books and the doubts scholars have raised about its validity make it hard to defend as a free act of the Church.

An Orthodox view

The Eastern Orthodox Church is not in communion with any of the Kerala churches. The Malankara Orthodox and Jacobite churches belong to the Oriental Orthodox family, which does not receive the Council of Chalcedon; they take part in the dialogue described in the site's article on Eastern and Oriental Orthodoxy, but communion has not been restored. The two Catholic churches accept the papal claims that Orthodoxy rejects, the Chaldean Syrian Church belongs to the Church of the East, which never received the Council of Ephesus, and the Mar Thoma Church follows a reformation the Orthodox Church does not accept. The Orthodox Church holds that the fullness of the apostolic faith, confessed at all seven Ecumenical Councils, is kept in her, and prays that all who bear St Thomas's name may be one in that faith. Orthodox Christians honor St Thomas as the apostle who touched the risen Lord's side and confessed Him God. They can recognize in the Thomas Christians an ancient Eastern Christianity that never passed through the Latin West until Europeans arrived, and they can see in Diamper a warning: the unity of the Church is a gift of the Holy Spirit in one faith, not a uniformity imposed by an empire. Orthodox history has its own examples of that temptation, and of quarrels over property that scandalize the faithful.

What we can say confidently

• By about the third century, Syriac-speaking Christians believed that the apostle Thomas had gone to India.
• Gondophares, the king named in the Acts of Thomas, was a real first-century ruler in northwest India.
• By the early sixth century there was a church in Malabar, and a bishop sent from Persia served on India's west coast.
• Until the sixteenth century the Thomas Christians belonged to the Church of the East.
• The Synod of Diamper (1599) latinized the community under Portuguese pressure and led to the destruction of Syriac books.
• The Coonan Cross Oath of 1653 began the division between Catholic and non-Catholic Thomas Christians, and the community is now divided among seven churches.

What remains disputed

• Whether Thomas himself reached India, and if so whether the south and Kerala, or only the northwest.
• Whether he was martyred at Mylapore; that site is attested only from the Middle Ages.
• Whether the Thomas Christians were always under the Church of the East or once looked to Antioch.
• How many Syriac manuscripts were lost after Diamper.
• Whether most Thomas Christians or about half joined the 1653 revolt.

Conclusion

We cannot follow St Thomas's footsteps across the sea with certainty. We can say that his name has been carried by Indian Christians for well over a thousand years, that their faith reached Kerala long before any European, and that it survived Persian distance, Portuguese pressure and its own divisions. For Orthodox Christians, the Thomas Christians are a reminder that the Gospel spread east as well as west from Jerusalem, and that the apostle who once said "Unless I see" became, by the Church's memory, a witness to the ends of the earth. Their present divisions call for prayer, and their endurance calls for honor.

Notes

1. Orthodox Church in America, "Holy, Glorious Apostle Thomas" (October 6), https://www.oca.org/saints/lives/2026/10/06/102885-holy-glorious-apostle-thomas (John 20:25 and 20:28 as quoted there).
2. World Council of Churches, "Malankara Orthodox Syrian Church," member church profile, https://www.oikoumene.org/member-churches/malankara-orthodox-syrian-church.
3. Sebastian P. Brock, "Thomas Christians," in Gorgias Encyclopedic Dictionary of the Syriac Heritage, electronic edition, https://gedsh.bethmardutho.org/Thomas-Christians.
4. Acts of Thomas 1-2, 168 and 170, trans. M. R. James, The Apocryphal New Testament (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1924), http://gnosis.org/library/actthom.htm.
5. A. D. H. Bivar, "Gondophares," Encyclopaedia Iranica XI/2, pp. 135-136 (2002; updated 2012), https://www.iranicaonline.org/articles/gondophares (read through the Internet Archive copy).
6. Eusebius, Church History 3.1.1, trans. Arthur Cushman McGiffert, NPNF2 1, https://www.newadvent.org/fathers/250103.htm.
7. Eusebius, Church History 5.10.2-3, trans. McGiffert, NPNF2 1, https://www.newadvent.org/fathers/250105.htm.
8. Cosmas Indicopleustes, Christian Topography, Book 3, trans. J. W. McCrindle (London: Hakluyt Society, 1897), pp. 118-119, https://www.tertullian.org/fathers/cosmas_03_book3.htm.
9. Marco Polo, The Travels of Marco Polo, Book 3, ch. 18, trans. Henry Yule, rev. Henri Cordier, vol. 2, Project Gutenberg, https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/12410.
10. Thomas Joseph, "Malankara Syriac Orthodox Church," in Gorgias Encyclopedic Dictionary of the Syriac Heritage, electronic edition, https://gedsh.bethmardutho.org/Malankara-Syriac-Orthodox-Church.
11. Hidemi Takahashi, "Diamper, Synod of," in Gorgias Encyclopedic Dictionary of the Syriac Heritage, electronic edition, https://gedsh.bethmardutho.org/Diamper-Synod-of.
12. Synod of Diamper, Action III, Decree 15, in Michael Geddes, The History of the Church of Malabar ... Together with the Synod of Diamper (London, 1694), p. 171 (spelling modernized from the long s), https://archive.org/details/historyofchurcho00gedd.
13. Baby Varghese, "Malankara Orthodox Syrian Church," in Gorgias Encyclopedic Dictionary of the Syriac Heritage, electronic edition, https://gedsh.bethmardutho.org/Malankara-Orthodox-Syrian-Church.
14. Sebastian P. Brock, "Malabar Catholic Church," in Gorgias Encyclopedic Dictionary of the Syriac Heritage, electronic edition, https://gedsh.bethmardutho.org/Malabar-Catholic-Church; for membership, Vatican News, "Missionary and migrant: a glimpse of the Syro-Malabar Church," 12 January 2024, https://www.vaticannews.va/en/church/news/2024-01/missionary-and-migrant-a-glimpse-of-the-syro-malabar-church.html.
15. World Council of Churches, "Mar Thoma Syrian Church of Malabar," member church profile, https://www.oikoumene.org/member-churches/mar-thoma-syrian-church-of-malabar; for 1888, Brock, "Thomas Christians" (note 3).
16. "Supreme Court orders transfer of 6 Kerala churches to Orthodox faction," Onmanorama, 3 December 2024, https://onmanorama.com/news/kerala/2024/12/03/supreme-court-jacobite-transfer-orthodox-church-kerala.html; LiveLaw, report of the 17 December 2024 hearing, https://www.livelaw.in/amp/top-stories/malankara-jacobite-church-dispute-supreme-court-directs-status-quo-seeks-data-on-population-assets-of-both-denominations-278575; LiveLaw, "Malankara-Jacobite Dispute: Supreme Court Sets Aside HC Direction To Hand Over Churches," 30 January 2025, https://www.livelaw.in/top-stories/supreme-court-malankara-jacobite-church-dispute-sets-aside-hc-direction-to-hand-over-churches-282455.

Bibliography

Primary sources

• Acts of Thomas. In M. R. James, trans., The Apocryphal New Testament. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1924.
• Eusebius. Church History. Trans. Arthur Cushman McGiffert. Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Second Series, vol. 1. Buffalo: Christian Literature Publishing Co., 1890.
• Cosmas Indicopleustes. The Christian Topography. Trans. J. W. McCrindle. London: Hakluyt Society, 1897.
• Marco Polo. The Book of Ser Marco Polo. Trans. Henry Yule, 3rd ed. rev. Henri Cordier. London: John Murray, 1903.
• Geddes, Michael. The History of the Church of Malabar ... Together with the Synod of Diamper. London, 1694.

Orthodox and patristic sources

• Orthodox Church in America. "Holy, Glorious Apostle Thomas." Lives of the Saints, oca.org.
• Varghese, Baby. "Malankara Orthodox Syrian Church." Gorgias Encyclopedic Dictionary of the Syriac Heritage.

Other scholarship (including scholars who disagree)

• Brock, Sebastian P., Aaron M. Butts, George A. Kiraz and Lucas Van Rompay, eds. Gorgias Encyclopedic Dictionary of the Syriac Heritage. Piscataway: Gorgias Press, 2011; electronic edition, Beth Mardutho. Entries: Brock, "Thomas Christians" and "Malabar Catholic Church"; Takahashi, "Diamper, Synod of."
• Bivar, A. D. H. "Gondophares." Encyclopaedia Iranica XI/2 (2002).
• Onmanorama and LiveLaw. Reports on the Supreme Court of India hearings, December 2024.

Sources from the traditions being discussed

• World Council of Churches. Member church profiles: "Malankara Orthodox Syrian Church"; "Mar Thoma Syrian Church of Malabar."
• Joseph, Thomas. "Malankara Syriac Orthodox Church." Gorgias Encyclopedic Dictionary of the Syriac Heritage.