Doubting Thomas Went to India? The Apostle Called “Twin”

Cold open

Picture this. A Roman merchant ship, riding the monsoon winds, bound for the edge of the known world. And on board... if the old stories are true... one of the twelve apostles of Jesus.

Now... you probably know him as Doubting Thomas. The man who wouldn't believe. Poor fellow. One bad week, and two thousand years of bad press!

But here's the thing. Thomas probably wasn't even his name. It looks like a nickname. And it means... twin.

So whose twin was he? Where did he really go? And how on earth did a man from Galilee end up — if the stories are true — dying on the far side of India?

Today, we're going to find out. And we're going to be honest about it. When something comes from the Bible, I'll tell you. When it comes from early church tradition, I'll tell you that too. And when it's legend... well. You'll know.

Let's begin.

A name that isn't a name

Scripture

Thomas turns up in every list of the twelve apostles: Matthew, Mark, Luke and the Book of Acts. But it's John's Gospel that tells us something curious. Three times, John calls him "Thomas, who is called Didymus."

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Now, Thomas comes from the Aramaic word te'oma. It means twin. And Didymus? That's Greek. It also means twin.

So John is essentially saying: "Twin... also known as Twin."

Which suggests something important. "Thomas" probably wasn't his given name at all, but what his friends called him. So what was his real name?

Tradition

For that, we travel north, to the Syriac-speaking Christians of Edessa, in what's now south-east Turkey. They remembered him by a fuller name: Judas Thomas. Judas... the Twin.

Judas was one of the most common names of the day, and two of the Twelve were already called Judas. So if Thomas was a third... that would explain the nickname.

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And there's manuscript evidence too. An ancient Syriac translation of the Gospels, known as the Curetonian Gospels, slips his full name into a verse. Where our Bibles say "Judas, not Iscariot," that old manuscript says... "Judas Thomas."

Whose twin?

So here's the question everyone asks. If Thomas was a twin... who was the other one?

Scripture

The honest answer from the Bible is: we're never told. Not a word. Somewhere out there was a brother or sister who simply never appears in the story.

Legend

But people do love a gap. And in the early two hundreds, a book called the Acts of Thomas filled it, rather boldly. It claimed Thomas was the twin of... Jesus himself. So alike that, in one scene, a newly married couple sees Jesus... and thinks he's Thomas!

Now, let's be clear. This book never became part of any Bible, and early church writers treated it with real suspicion. It's a religious novel: colourful, strange, and written to make a theological point. Not history.

Speculation

Some readers have made a gentler guess. In Matthew's list, Thomas is paired with Matthew the tax collector, so... were they twins? It's possible. It's also pure speculation. There's simply no evidence.

So the twin remains a mystery. And honestly? I rather like that.

The man behind the nickname

Here's what's unfair about "Doubting Thomas." John's Gospel gives us three scenes where he speaks, and only one of them is about doubt.

Scripture

Scene one. Jesus's friend Lazarus has died, in Bethany, just outside Jerusalem. And Jesus decides to go back there, where, only recently, a crowd tried to stone him to death. The disciples are horrified. "Teacher, they want to kill you, and you're going back?"

And who speaks up? Thomas. "Let us also go... that we may die with him."

That's not a doubter talking. That's a man ready to walk into danger for his friend.

Scene two. The Last Supper. Jesus tells them, "You know the way to where I'm going." And Thomas, bless him, speaks up. "Lord... we don't know where you're going. So how can we know the way?"

And that honest question gets one of the most famous answers in history: "I am the way, the truth, and the life."

Scene three. The famous one. After the crucifixion, the disciples are hiding behind locked doors, and they say they've seen Jesus alive. But Thomas wasn't there. And he says, "Unless I see the nail marks in his hands, and put my finger where the nails were, and my hand into his side, I will not believe."

Eight days later, the disciples are together again, doors locked. Thomas is there this time. And Jesus appears and turns to him. "Put your finger here. See my hands."

Now, here's a detail most people miss. The Bible never actually says Thomas touched him.

What it says is that Thomas answered with just a few words. And they're the most explicit statement by any disciple, in any of the Gospels, that Jesus is God: "My Lord... and my God."

So yes, he doubted. For about a week. And then he said it more plainly than anyone. Not bad for a doubter.

The road east

After that, the New Testament goes quiet about Thomas. He's in a fishing boat at the end of John, and in the upper room at the start of Acts... and then he vanishes from the pages.

So where did he go? For that, we need the early church writers.

Tradition

In the early 300s, the historian Eusebius wrote the first great history of the church. And drawing on an earlier scholar, Origen, he records a tradition that the apostles divided up the world... and to Thomas fell... Parthia.

Parthia was Rome's great rival in the East: a vast empire covering what's now Iran and Iraq. So already, our Galilean twin is headed far beyond the Roman world.

Legend

But that strange old book, the Acts of Thomas, sends him further still. All the way to India.

And the story it tells is wonderful. The apostles cast lots to divide up the world, and India falls to Thomas. He refuses. Flatly. "I'm a Hebrew. How can I go among the Indians?"

So, in the story, Jesus solves the problem in a rather unusual way: he sells Thomas, as a slave carpenter, to a merchant working for an Indian king named Gundaphorus. Off he goes.

The king gives Thomas a fortune to build him a palace. Thomas gives every penny to the poor, and tells the king his palace is waiting for him... in heaven. The king does not buy it. He throws Thomas in prison! It takes the king's brother dying, being shown that heavenly palace, and coming back to life to tell him about it, before the king changes his mind.

A lovely tale... and it comes from legend, not Scripture. And for centuries, historians had no evidence that this king had ever existed.

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And then... the coins turned up.

In the 1800s, in what's now Afghanistan and Pakistan, archaeologists began finding coins. Lots of them. Struck by a king named Gondophares. Then a stone inscription, known as the Takht-i-Bahi inscription, dated by the years of his reign.

Gondophares was real. An Indo-Parthian king, ruling the north-west of the Indian subcontinent in the first half of the first century AD... the very lifetime of the apostles.

Now, that doesn't prove Thomas met him. And notice where he ruled: the far north-west, in what's now Pakistan and Afghanistan, a very long way from the south of India. Hold on to that; it'll matter in a moment. But it does mean the legend kept one genuine piece of history inside it, a name that most people had forgotten for over a thousand years.

Could a Galilean really get to India?

It sounds impossible. Until you realise how busy the ancient world was.

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By the first century, sailors from Roman Egypt knew the secret of the monsoon. Greek sailors had worked it out a century or more earlier, and under the emperor Augustus the trade boomed: over a hundred ships a year, according to the geographer Strabo. Sail from Egypt down the Red Sea in summer, and the winds would carry you straight across the Arabian Sea to India. Turn around in winter, and they'd carry you home.

A first-century sailor's guide, the Periplus of the Erythraean Sea, describes the ports in detail, including one called Muziris, on the south-west coast of India, in what's now Kerala. Pepper, spices, pearls and silk came west. Roman gold went east, so much of it that the Roman writer Pliny the Elder grumbled about all the money draining away to India every year.

So a man setting out from the eastern Mediterranean in the first century could reach India in a matter of months. Not easy. Not safe. But entirely possible.

The Christians of Saint Thomas

And here's where the story stops being just a story.

Tradition

In Kerala live the Saint Thomas Christians, a community that traces its roots all the way back to the first century. Their tradition is very specific. Thomas landed near Muziris in the year fifty-two. He founded seven churches in Kerala. And twenty years later, in the year seventy-two, near what's now Chennai, he was killed... pierced with a spear.

Is it true? Let's look at the evidence, and let's be fair about it.

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In the three hundreds, the Syrian poet Ephrem wrote hymns about Thomas's bones being brought from India to Edessa. Around the year 384, a pilgrim woman named Egeria visited Edessa, and she prayed at the shrine of Saint Thomas. In the five hundreds, a merchant known as Cosmas wrote that there were Christians in "Male, where the pepper grows" (the Malabar coast) and a bishop appointed from Persia at a place called Kalliana. Interestingly, he never mentions Thomas. And when Marco Polo passed through in the twelve-nineties, he described the tomb of Saint Thomas, and the Christians who looked after it.

Today, the San Thome Basilica in Chennai stands over that traditional tomb. And part of his relics travelled on, from Edessa to the Greek island of Chios, and in 1258 to the town of Ortona, in Italy, where they remain.

So where does that leave us? Here's the honest verdict. It can't be proven either way. The written evidence comes centuries later. The real king, Gondophares, ruled the far north-west, which supports the old legend, but not the Kerala tradition in the south. And historians are genuinely divided. Some think a first-century mission is quite plausible; the sea route was busy, after all. Others think the tradition grew up later, when Syriac-speaking Christians from Persia came to India in the two or three hundreds.

What no one disputes is this: by the five hundreds, there were Christians in India. And they believed it was Thomas who brought them the faith.

The "Gospel" of Thomas

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One last thing, because you may have heard of it. In 1945, near a town in Egypt called Nag Hammadi, a farmer dug up a sealed clay jar. Inside were ancient books, and one of them was the Gospel of Thomas: a hundred and fourteen sayings of Jesus.

It opens with these words: "These are the secret sayings which the living Jesus spoke... and which Didymus Judas Thomas wrote down."

There's that name again. Judas, the Twin.

Many scholars date it to the second century, long after Thomas's lifetime, though some argue parts of it are older. Almost no one thinks Thomas himself wrote it, and it was never part of the Bible. What it does show is just how famous Thomas had become: famous enough that people wanted to write in his name.

Close

So. Let's go back to that ship on the monsoon winds.

History remembers this man for a single week of doubt. But look at what else we've found. A man who was ready to die for his friend. A man honest enough to ask the question nobody else would. A man who, when he finally saw, said it more plainly than anyone.

And then, if his followers are right, a man who carried that story further than almost any of the Twelve: past the edge of the Roman Empire, across an ocean, to the far side of India.

Two thousand years later, there are still millions of Christians in India who call themselves by his name.

Not bad... for a doubter.

Next time: an apostle who may have had two names, and a mystery hiding in plain sight in the Gospels. Bartholomew. Or is it?