“Go out to the whole world, proclaim the Gospel to all creation”
(Mark 16:15)
Following His words, St. Thomas took the eastern route, past the Roman Empire, travelling by land, river and sea, across the continent of Asia. He preached the Gospel in West and Central Asia (the Parthian Empire of that time), in the Indo-Parthian kingdom in the north-west of India, beyond the coasts of peninsular India and China, before returning to India, to die a martyr near Chennai, in AD 72.
St. Thomas Christians in Asia
Among all the churches founded by St. Thomas in the course of his epic journey, the Church of the East in the Persian Empire, concentrated in the Iraq of today, spread, despite periodic persecution, to be the largest church outside the Roman Empire, with an extensive missionary wing. By the seventh century it suffered a split consequent on Christological controversies. Under the Arab rule, there came to be two churches: The Patriarch of the East (originally Catholicos) at Seleucia and thereafter Bagdad; and the Catholicos of the East at Tagrit (an ancient city west of the Tigris, between Baghdad and Mosul) established under Antiochian inspiration. But the assault of the Mongols (1263) and by Tinnur (1394) led to a steady decline and near extinction of both, under Islamic rule. Today there is a scattered minority of Orthodox Christians in Iraq, linked to the Syrian Orthodox Church, who venerate St. Thomas as their Patron Saint.
Not much is known about the Church in China founded by St. Thomas, except that the Persian records of the 7th century mention about the Metropolitan of China (as well as the Metropolitan of India). The presence of Persian Christians missionaries around 635 is seen from the Sin-Gnarn-Fu monument Shensi province of Middle China.
Christian communities, linked to the (Persian) Church of the East, are known to have existed in the north and west of India, until the Islamic conquests. Significantly, the Archeological Museum in Taxila (Pakistan) records the visit of St. Thomas to the town in A.D. 40. It was the capital of the Parthian King, Gondoforus, as well as the ancient Buddhist learning center of Asoka’s time.
Compared to the other Churches founded by St. Thomas, the one that he established soon after his arrival at the port of Kodungallur (near Kochi) in A.D. 52, has had exceptional continuity, escaping the fate of persecution or annihilation which the other churches faced through their life. The worst that the Indian in the church suffered, and that too in recent centuries, was the repeated depletion on the exertions of rather aggressive western colonial missionaries. The Malankara Orthodox Church has remained an indigenous national religious community with on minority complexes despite being a minority in numbers. The Orthodox Christians, so named to denote true faith and not conservatism, were also known by other names like Nazranis (followers of Nazarene) or St. Thomas Christians after the name of the founder.