One of the most unhelpful stereotypes that we need to dispel is that Christianity is a Western faith. Is Syria western? Is Israel? Is Turkey? Is Ethiopia? The answer is of course no. And nor is India. And Christianity first arrived in India probably a full 900 years (and definitely 600 years) before it arrived in say Sweden. Scripture records the missionary journeys of Paul, who as we all know went West & North from Jerusalem, but it doesn’t record the journeys of those who went East. And of course the trouble with Christianity when it arrived in places like Britain was that it was an imported eastern faith. We desperately need to recover the convictions as well as the historical knowledge that the gospel properly belongs to all the ends of the earth.

Alex Tabarrok recently wrote an excellent piece, Don’t Doubt: Saint Thomas in India about this history and it needs to be known much, much more.

Christianity in India has roots at least as old as in Italy. Millions of Christians in Kerala today believe that their tradition traces back directly to Thomas, one of the 12 apostles of Jesus, who traveled to India in the first century AD. According to the Acts of Thomas, the apostles divided the world and drew lots to decide their respective regions for spreading the gospel. Thomas, drew India but, ever the doubter, he demurred. “It’s too hot and the food isn’t kosher”, he said, more or less. Jesus appeared to Thomas, however, and bade him “go to India!” Amazingly, he still demurred–what a doubter!–but by a minor miracle just as this was happening an Indian merchant arrived in Jerusalem calling for a master architect and builder to return with him to India. Finally, with this sign, Thomas’s doubts were allayed and his India adventures began.

And

Historians tend not to trust oral history but to me it’s the oral histories, the genealogies of Indians who trace their lineage back to someone who was personally converted by Saint Thomas, and the songs that are most convincing. Indians have orally preserved the vedas for some four thousand years so I trust them on Saint Thomas. In the 4th or early 5th century, Saint Jerome wrote that “Christ lives everywhere. With Thomas in India and Peter in Rome.” And of the two, I’d put more money on Thomas.

After founding seven churches in Kerala, Thomas journeyed to the eastern region of the Indian peninsula, near present-day Chennai. Here Thomas’s mission was ended when he refused to bow down to Kali and was killed. Even so he was held in such reverence that his place of death was marked and his body kept and entombed. Fifteen hundred years later the Portuguese built a cathedral over his tomb, both of which you can still visit today as I did recently. Even for those not of Christian faith or any religious affiliation, connecting with 2,000 years of history and considering the distances Thomas travelled is quite moving, especially when it happens in a place which stills seems far from the Christian world.