The St. Thomas Tradition

Intimately bound up with the Addai tradition of the evangelization of Edessa is the preaching of St. Thomas. Early on, Thomas – one of the Twelve – was considered to be the one who sent Addai to Edessa from the Holy City. A Syriac document probably written at Edessa itself at the beginning of the third century (ca. 200 A.D.) is the Acts of Judas Thomas. The Acts, which are the “oldest narrative account of a Church in Asia beyond the border of the Roman Empire,”

narrate the missionary career of Thomas, who was certainly the apostle of the Parthians, Medes and other peoples east of Parthia.

According to the Syriac tradition of the Acts, it is Judas Thomas (which may be the source of the identification of the Edessene Addai with the apostle ‘Judas Thaddaeus’ of the Twelve) who was the apostle of Edessa, and is sometimes referred to as ‘Thaddaeus who is Thomas’ or simple ‘Judas who was also called Thomas.’

Thomas was later introduced into the story of Abgar, although “nowhere in the earlier versions of the proselytization of Edessa is it claimed that St. Thomas himself came to the city.”

The association of the two traditions concerned with Thomas from the Twelve and Thaddaeus-Addai “integrated the evangelization of Edessa within the direct apostolic tradition.”

The very early Hymn of the Soul contained in the Acts, states that the prince of Maishan, on following the trade route that connected Adiabene in the east to Edessa and Nisibis in the West to India and Fars had “…quitted the East and went down…I passed through the borders of Maishan, the meeting place of the merchants of the East, and I reached the land of Babylonia.”

Another tradition originating in Alexandria around the middle of the third century actually has Thomas going into the Parthian Empire rather than to Edessa. This tradition is backed by Origen (d. 251) in his Commentary on Genesis (Chapter 3), who is in fact the first to mention it, and is also found in Eusebius’ Ecclesiastical History (3:1) and in the Syriac Clementine Recognitions.



Thomas is also considered the apostle of India by many of the earliest ecclesiastical sources. However, the Alexandrine tradition initiated by the missionary Pontaeunus (180/190 A.D.) – who was sent by Demetrius the bishop of Alexandria on a mission to India – it was Bartholomew (the ‘Nathaniel’ of the New Testament) who was the apostle to India, and who also brought with him a Hebrew (Aramaic?) copy of the Gospel of Matthew; this information is witnessed to by both Eusebius and Jerome.

Since Bartholomew is usually considered the apostle to Armenia, Arabia and Persia, it is extremely out of the ordinary. In any case, it is certain that before the end of the second Christian century a living community of faithful was to be found in the south of the Indian sub-continent which traced their apostleship – according to the vast testimonies of the tradition – to Thomas.

The Witness of Egeria the Iberian (ca. 384 A.D.)

A very important witness to the tradition of the apostolic activity and missionary work of Thomas one of the Twelve is the so-called Journal of the late fourth century Iberian nun Egeria. Egeria’s famous Journal records her pilgrimage to the Holy City and the various other pilgrimage-sites visited by the Spanish nun on her journey. She recalls that

…no Christian who has achieved the journey to the holy places and Jerusalem misses going also on the pilgrimage to Edessa. It is twenty-five staging posts away from Jerusalem. But Mesopotamia is not so far from Antioch. So, since my route back to Constantinople took me back that way, it was very convenient for me at God’s bidding to go from Antioch to Mesopotamia…(17:1)

Three years after her arrival in Jerusalem she goes to Mesopotamia, to Harran the land of Abraham and to Edessa the ‘blessed city:’

But God also moved me with a desire to go to Syrian Mesopotamia [the Greek translation of the Padan Aram of Gen 28:1 which Egeria uses in reference to Edessa]. The holy monks there are said to be numerous and of so indescribably excellent a life that I wanted to pay them a visit; I also wanted to make a pilgrimage to the martyrium of the holy apostle Thomas, where his entire body is buried (17:1)

The Edessene connection with Thomas the apostle goes back to the Acts of Judas Thomas. Since the time of the writing of the Acts around 200 A.D., it was believed that notwithstanding the widely-accepted tradition that he died in India, his body was removed to Edessa, certainly before the middle of the fourth century when Ephrem penned his Nisibene Hymns (42), who mentions the presence of the apostle’s bones in Edessa. The other component of the Edessene connection, around the time of Egeria’s Journal ca. 384 A.D., was that Thomas – rather than Addai – was believed to have been sent by Christ to Edessa.

Recalling the existence of the Abgar tradition, Egeria states: “It is at Edessa, to which Jesus, our God, was sending Thomas after his ascension into heaven, as he tells us in the letter he sent to King Abgar by the messenger Ananias. This letter has been most reverently preserved at Edessa where they have this martyrium” (17:1).

Egeria recounts the story of her arrival in Edessa and her meeting the bishop of the city. She also recalls the many martyria or shrines built over the martyrs’ tombs and the consecrated monks who took care of these shrines, which by the year 449 A.D. numbered some 90,000 in the hills of Edessa.

The church of St. Thomas was built sometime between 373 and August of 394 when the coffin of the apostle was moved to his own church:

As soon as we arrived, we went straight to the church and martyrium of holy Thomas; there we had our usual prayers and everything which was our custom in holy places. And we read also from the writings of holy Thomas himself [certainly the Syriac Acts of Judas Thomas]. The church there is large and beautiful, and built in the new way – just right, in fact, to be a house of God…I saw a great many martyria [martyrs’ shrines] and visited the holy monks, some of whom lived among the martyria, whilst others had their cells further away from the city where it was more private. (19:2-4)

The bishop of Edessa takes Egeria to visit the pilgrim sites present in the city. The foremost among them being the palace of Abgar

, built in 205-206 A.D., and a huge marble likeness of the famed monarch:

So first of all he took me to the palace of King Abgar, and showed me a huge marble portrait of him. People said it was an excellent likeness, and it shone as if it was made of pearl. The look on Abgar’s face showed me, as I looked straight at it, what a wise and noble man he had been, and the holy bishop told me, ‘That is King Abgar. Before he saw the Lord he believed in him as the true Son of God.’ Next to this portrait was another of the same marble; he told me it was the king’s son Magnus, and he too had a wonder face (19:6).

The ‘holy bishop’ of Edessa recounts the whole story of letter of Abgar to Christ and reference is also made to the attack of Edessa by the Persians in 259 A.D., which seemed to contradict the promise of Christ that the city would never succumb to its enemies, as contained in the Greek recension of the letter of Christ to Abgar.

The holy bishop told me this about it: ‘King Abgar wrote a letter to the Lord, and the Lord sent his answer by the messenger Ananias; then, quite a time after, the Persians descended on this city and encircled it. So at once Abgar, with his whole army, took the Lord’s letter to the gate, and prayed aloud: ‘Lord Jesus,’ he said, ‘You promised us that no enemy would enter this city. Look now how the Persians are attacking us!’ With that the king held up the letter, open in his hands, and immediately a darkness fell over the Persians who were by then close outside the city walls. It made them retire three miles away, and the darkness was so confusing to the Persians that they found it difficult to pitch camp and carry out patrols even at three miles’ distance from the city (19:8-9).

The bishop is narrating the story of the attack of Edessa by the Persians under Shapor I in 259 A.D., and this late-fourth century witness most probably exhibits an earlier tradition held in the city, or one approved by the bishop himself. The pilgrim Egeria was also shown the gate of the city through which the messenger Ananias entered bringing in the letter of Christ to Abgar, as well as the tomb of Abgar’s family. The bishop also gave Egeria a copy of the Lord’s letter, which seems to have been a popular souvenir for the pilgrims to the city, containing the promise of Christ for the city which was not to be found in the Eusebian version. The Iberian nun spent three day in Edessa and then headed for the near-by city of Harran, the city of Abraham, which was also a pilgrimage site for the numerous monks of Mesopotamia which Egeria notices with interest.

Further minor documents, such as the Acta Maris, or the Acts of Mar Mari are of a much later period and describe the missionary activity of Mari, the disciple of Addai, into Seleucia-Ctesiphon which became the primatial see of the Church of the East in 280 A.D., under its first documented archbishop Mar Papa who is well-known for his work of effecting the centralization of authority of the Persian episcopate in the person of the bishop – now archbishop (and later ‘catholicos’) – of the Persian royal twin-cities. The missionary activity of Mari reaches its peak in the end of the 80’s of the first Christian century, and the evangelization of the royal-cities is also linked to the mother Church at Edessa by the mere fact that it was Addai who sent his disciple Mari deep into Persian territory. According to the Acts, Mari is supposed to have founded over 300 churches or communities, and is said to have been buried at Deir Qunni, which was known as one of the foremost pilgrimage sites and ‘basilicas’ of the patriarchal see. However, even though this tradition cannot be corroborated by any documentary evidence outside of the Church’s tradition and later documents, it nonetheless demonstrates the importance of the oral tradition in order to attempt to explain the origins of what has been called the once most missionary-minded Church of all Asia.

It has been the humble aim of this presentation to look at the apostolic origins of this Church which has given countless martyrs for Christ, and which was once an important – albeit isolated – component of the Church of the Church of Christ, the Church of the apostles and martyrs.