The Missionary Societies

Christianity did not come to India with the Europeans. According to a third-century Apocryphal text, the so-called ‘Acts of Thomas’, the apostle Thomas was invited to India by the Indian king Gondophares. He arrived on the island of Malankara off the Malabar coast in the year 50 AD and founded the first Christian churches. Throughout the South Indian landscape one finds churches and shrines erected at places where Thomas supposedly founded Christian congregations. Perhaps the most famous of these is St. Thomas Mount at Mylapore near Madras, where the saint is said to have suffered a martyr’s death and to have been interred. Another tradition, also linked to the name of Thomas, speaks of Thomas of Jerusalem, a pious merchant who in 345 AD arrived in India with a bishop and several priests, thereby linking the Indian churches firmly with the West Asian centres of Christianity: Constantinople, Smyrna and Edessa. ¹ Apart from the spiritual links, there is no doubt that trading links between the western coast of India and West Asia had been established as early as the first centuries AD. About the same time we find the first traces of Jewish settlements in Cochin and other places on the Malabar coast. This was a consequence of the Jewish diaspora, which saw Jewish settlements scattered all over the Graeco-Roman world, as well as in Persia, North Africa and India. The maritime and commercial expansion of Islam, which from the eighth to the eleventh centuries forged strong links across the Arabian Sea from the ports of the Persian Gulf to the commercial settlements on the western coast of India, thus took place along already established trade routes. However, Islam was not the only religious and commercial network to tie together the countries around the Arabian Sea. ²