Saint Thomas
By way of Alex Tabarrok at the Marginal Revolution blog, an article from the turn of the century about a Christian tradition in India. The featured article was published in the UK Guardian newspaper back in April of 2000, written by historian William Dalrymple.
Portuguese explorers and traders who arrived on the southwest coast of the Indian subcontinent around 1500 encountered Christians espousing what the seafaring visitors considered a sacrilegious form of the faith. They quickly moved to destroy any texts, relics, and traditions that struck them as heretical when they established a trading post. Later, as Enlightenment Europeans began their Middle Eastern treasure hunt in the 19th century, forgotten Biblical texts came to light describing the Apostle Thomas’s voyages to India. Subsequent research found support for the claim that St. Thomas had indeed established an Indian Christian outpost among the Hindu population as early as 52 CE.
A teaser from the article:
But perhaps the strangest discovery of all was a previously unknown early Christian text dating from the fourth century AD entitled the Acts of St Thomas. The manuscript told a story that had been forgotten in the traditions of the western Church. According to the Acts, St Thomas was Jesus's twin (the Syriac for Thomas - Te'oma - means twin, as does his Greek name, Didymos); like his brother, he was a carpenter from Galilee.
After Jesus's death, according to the Acts, the apostle had been summoned to India - and his martyrdom - by a mysterious king, Gondophares. Biblical scholars of the 19th century were at first very sceptical of the Acts of St Thomas. They correctly pointed out that the story contained many clearly apocryphal Gnostic elements, and that the earliest surviving version of the text, written in fourth century Mesopotamia, dated from at least two centuries after the events described; up to the beginning of this century, the document was sometimes dismissed as a pious romance.
Read the whole thing—it’s medium length rather than long, surprisingly.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BZC2nWJblhk
Daily dose of Pallas's Cat.
Placido Domingo, everyone.