The Myth of Saint Thomas and the Mylapore Shiva Temple

Repository of the Saint Thomas Bone at Cranganore

PART FOUR

Bishop Neill is being charitable to Bishop Medleycott when he calls his India and the Apostle Thomas an imaginative romance built on slender foundations. Henry Love, in Vestiges of Old Madras, is even more forgiving when he writes, "Bishop Medleycott, who has sifted every shred of evidence on the subject, concludes that St. Thomas the Apostle preached and suffered on the Mount, but his arguments do not appear to be altogether convincing."

Bishop Medleycott is the godfather of Thomas-in-India scholarship in India, and even in his day he was accused of working under religious, political, linguistic, regional and racial influences. He was the Vicar Apostolic of Trichur from 1887 to 1896, the diocese in which the alleged landing place of St. Thomas, Cranganore, is located, and was the first European missionary bishop to be appointed by Rome to rule over the local Syrian Christian community. This community existed in a forgotten Kerala backwater that was overshadowed by San Thome at Mylapore, and he had a mandate—or believed he had a mandate—to raise Cranganore's status and prepare the ideological ground for the apostles "return".

Medleycott soon discovered that this was not very hard to do. The old tradition of St. Thomas was still alive in Malabar, in mediaeval Syrian wedding songs and "evidence" left behind by those pious forgers and pirates, the Portuguese, and he had local Syrian priests to advise him. There was also the Acts of Thomas, which nobody knew in the original and which no Christian priest would dare to teach to his congregation. All that was needed was inventive Catholic scholarship to turn a local Syrian tradition into world history.

Medleycott won the day with his work, though he didn't live to see it. St. Thomas was "returned" to Cranganore—now Kodungallur—in 1953, in the form of a piece of bone from the elbow of his right arm. The relic was a gift from the clergy of Ortona, Italy, where the apostle's Church—authenticated remains had lain since 1258. They had been brought to Ortona from Edessa by way of Chios in Greece.

Eugene Cardinal Tisserant, the other imaginative writer of oriental church history, led the "second coming" to Cranganore, and he later proceeded to Mylapore with another bit of Ortona bone for the cathedral there. For the first time in history both sites in India associated with St. Thomas in legend and story could truly say that they possessed his relics.

This event and the alleged first century coming of the apostle were commemorated by the Government of India with postage stamps that were issued in 1964 and 1973. The first stamp depicts the silver bust of St. Thomas that is in the cathedral at Ortona, which contains his complete skull, and the second shows the Persian "St. Thomas" cross on St. Thomas Mount near Madras. That neither these artefacts nor the relics, or, for that matter, the legendary event that they celebrate, are Indian, is one of the ironies that is part of the history of the story of St. Thomas in India.

But Bishop Medleycott's victory went further. He got himself named as the St. Thomas authority in the prestigious Encyclopaedia Britannica, Fifteenth Edition, 1984, along with Chevalier F.A. DCruz, editor of the old Mylapore Catholic Register and author of St. Thomas the Apostle in India.

The unsigned main entry for St. Thomas in the Encyclopaedia is muddled and dissembling and simply wrong in some places. After giving the New Testament references, it says, "Thomas subsequent history is uncertain. According to the 4th century Ecclesiastical History of Bishop Eusebius of Caesarea, he evangelized Parthia (modern Khorasan). Later Christian tradition says Thomas extended his apostolate into India, where he is recognised as the founder of the church of the Syrian Malabar Christians, or Christians of St. Thomas. In the apocryphal Acts of Thomas, originally composed in Syriac, his martyrdom is cited under the king of Mylapore at Madras ..."

The Acts does not "cite" this at all of course, as we have shown by direct quotation; it does not even remotely suggest it. There is no known record that Mylapore had a king in the first century and if it did, he was not a Zoroastrian with the name of Mazdai. The story in the Acts and the Mylapore legend have nothing in common, though the latter can be said to exist only because of the former. Further on the article says, " He allegedly visited the court of the Indo--Parthian king Gondophernes ... though some of the Acts of Thomas is probable, evidence remains inconclusive."

Now even if some of the Acts is accepted as probable, the composer of this entry has still got the story wrong. He uses the word "allegedly" for the visit of St. Thomas to the court of Gondophernes—assuming that Gondophernes is the same as Gundaphorus—when he could correctly cite the Acts for the reference.

These errors are deliberate and motivated, given their context and arrangement, and this St. Thomas entry in the Encyclopaedia has been written by a Catholic scholar who not only subscribes to the apostle's alleged South Indian adventure, but wishes to place the Mylapore tale over that of the Malabar tradition. He does this by mixing the North Indian legend, represented by the Acts, with the South Indian fable that the Portuguese left in Mylapore, to promote his particular South Indian view. He gets away with the deception because nobody has read the Acts of Thomas and studied its references to the kings Gundaphorus and Misdaeus-Mazdai, and the execution of Judas Thomas on a mountain that contained an ancient royal tomb.

It is very disturbing that the editor of the Encyclopaedia Britannica accepted this article for publication, and the oft-made charge that the Encyclopaedia is Catholic--edited and lacks credibility would seem to be true in this case. The allegation is supported by the fact that only A.E. Medleycott and F.A. D'Cruz, both of them strongly prejudiced Catholic promoters of the Portuguese version of the St. Thomas story, are named as reference. With its prestige and immense resources, the Encyclopaedia Britannica could have sought another opinion from among the dozens of reputed historians that it ignored.

Yet Bishop Medleycott with his papal mandate and imperial urges, is not the last word on St. Thomas even in the Encyclopaedia. It has buried two short items in the macropaedia section: one, under "India", by Frank M. Moraes, a biographer of Nehru and former editor of the Indian Express, and the other, under "Indian Subcontinent", by Philip B. Calkins, Professor of History at Duke University, in Durham, North Carolina.

Frank Moraes writes, "Christianity claims to date back to A.D. 52, when St. Thomas, one of the Apostles of Christ, is said to have landed on the west coast of India, where he established a few churches; according to tradition, he travelled from the west coast to the east coast, where he was martyred at Mylapore, in Madras."

This, again, is the South Indian story in general outline, without reference to the Acts. But Moraes has not given it correctly, which often happens with writers who don't know the topography of Madras. According to the Portuguese, who invented the Mylapore fable in the sixteenth century, the murder took place on a small hill eight miles south of Mylapore, which is now called St. Thomas Mount.

And Philip Calkins writes, "Legend has it that St. Thomas travelled from western Asia to Malabar in A.D. 52. He is believed to have established a number of Syrian churches, which would perhaps account for Syrian Christianity being the major form of Christianity until the arrival of the Portuguese in India in the 15th century. Historical evidence of the Christian community cannot be found, however, earlier than the 7th century A.D."

This entry also follows the South Indian legend without reference to the Acts. It is the most cautious statement about St. Thomas in the Encyclopaedia Britannica, yet it too causes misgivings. There is no reason to suggest that St. Thomas established Syrian churches in India—especially when they are called Syrian churches, not Indian churches.[13]

If St. Thomas lived at all, it was in Palestine and Syria, and it was in Syria and Persia, or Parthia, that he proselytised the inhabitants and established churches. This is what the most ancient Alexandrian tradition maintains and what the seventh and eighth century Metropolitans of Fars, Mar Isho Yahb and Mar Thiomothy, testify to when they refuse to submit to the Patriarch of the East at Seleucia--Ctesiphon because their church had been established by Thomas while his had not.[14] The later Edessene tradition is a case of Edessa glorifying an apostle they considered their own—Thomas had visited their city and they possessed his bones—at the expense of India—if of course the "India" of the Acts doesn't simply mean Persia.

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