In the beginning of the sixteenth century Barbosa found the church of St. Thomas half in ruins and grown round with jungle. A Mahomedan fakir kept it and maintained a lamp. Yet in 1504, which is several years earlier than Barbosa’s voyage, the Syrian Bishop Jaballaha, who had been sent by the Patriarch to take charge of the Indian Christians, reported that the House of St. Thomas had begun to be inhabited by some Christians, who were engaged in restoring it.

Mr. W. R. Philipps has a valuable paper on The Connection of St. Thomas the Apostle with India in the Indian Antiquary, XXXII., 1903, pp. 1–15, 145–160; he has come to the following conclusions: “(1) There is good early evidence that St. Thomas was the apostle of the Parthian empire; and also evidence that he was the apostle of ‘India’ in some limited sense,—probably of an ‘India’ which included the Indus Valley, but nothing to the east or south of it. (2) According to the Acts, the scene of the martyrdom of St. Thomas was in the territory of a king named, according to the Syriac version, Mazdai, to which he had proceeded after a visit to the city of a king named, according to the same version, Gūdnaphar or Gūndaphar. (3) There is no evidence at all that the place where St. Thomas was martyred was in Southern India; and all the indications point to another direction. (4) We have no indication whatever, earlier than that given by Marco Polo, who died 1324, that there ever was even a tradition that St. Thomas was buried in Southern India.”

In a recent and learned work (Die Thomas Legende, 1912, 8vo.) Father J. Dahlmann has tried to prove that the story of the travels of St. Thomas in India has an historical basis. If there is some possibility of admitting a voyage of the Apostle to N.W. India (and the flourishing state of Buddhism in this part of India is not in favour of Christian Evangelization), it is impossible to accept the theory of the martyrdom of St. Thomas in Southern India.

The late Mr. J. F. Fleet, in his paper on St. Thomas and Gondophernes (Journ. Roy. As. Soc., April, 1905, pp. 223–236), remarks that “Mr. Philipps has given us an exposition of the western traditional statements up to the sixth century.” He gives some of the most ancient statements; one in its earliest traceable form runs thus: “According to the Syriac work entitled The Doctrine of the Apostles, which was written in perhaps the second century A.D., St. Thomas evangelized ‘India.’ St. Ephraem the Syrian (born about A.D. 300, died about 378), who spent most of his life at Edessa, in Mesopotamia, states that the Apostle was martyred in ‘India’ and that his relics were taken thence to Edessa. That St. Thomas evangelized the Parthians, is stated by Origen (born A.D. 185 or 186, died about 251–254). Eusebius (bishop of Cæsarea Palæstinæ from A.D. 315 to about 340) says the same. And the same statement is made by the Clementine Recognitions, the original of which may have been written about A.D. 210. A fuller tradition is found in the Acts of St. Thomas, which exist in Syriac, Greek, Latin, Armenian, Ethiopic, and Arabic, and in a fragmentary form in Coptic. And this work connects with St. Thomas two eastern kings, whose names appear in the Syriac version as Gūdnaphar, Gundaphar, and Mazdai; and in the Greek version as Goundaphoros, Goundiaphoros, Gountaphoros, and Misdaios, Misdeos; in the Latin version as Gundaforus, Gundoforus, and Misdeus, Mesdeus, Migdeus; and in the remaining versions in various forms, of the same kind, which need not be particularized here.” Mr. Fleet refers to several papers, and among them to one by Prof. Sylvain Lévi, Saint Thomas, Gondopharès et Mazdeo (Journ. As., Janv.–Fév., 1897, pp. 27–42), who takes the name Mazdai as a transformation of a Hindū name, made on Iranian soil and under Mazdean influences, and arrived at through the forms Bazodēo, Bazdēo, or Bāzodēo, Bāzdēo, which occur in Greek legends on coins, and to identify the person with the king Vāsudēva of Mathurā, a successor of Kanishka. Mr. Fleet comes to the conclusion that: “No name, save that of Guduphara—Gondophernès, in any way resembling it, is met with in any period of Indian history, save in that of the Takht-i-Bahi inscription of A.D. 46; nor, it may be added, any royal name, save that of Vāsudēva of Mathurā, in any way resembling that of Mazdai. So also, as far as we know or have any reason to suppose, no name like that of Guduphara—Gondophernēs is to be found anywhere outside India, save in the tradition about St. Thomas.”

XVIII., [p. 357.]

CALAMINA.

On this city of the martyrdom of St. Thomas, see Indian Antiquary, XXXII., pp. 148 seq. in Mr. Philipps’ paper, and XXXIII., Jan., 1904, pp. 31–2, a note signed W. R. P.

XIX., [p. 361.] “In this kingdom [Mutfili] also are made the best and most delicate buckrams, and those of highest price; in sooth they look like tissue of spider’s web!”

In Nan p’i (in Malabar) Chau Ju-kwa has (p. 88): “The native products include pearls, foreign cotton-stuff of all colours (i.e. coloured chintzes) and tou-lo mién (cotton-cloth).” Hirth and Rockhill remark that this cotton-cloth is probably “the buckram which looks like tissue of spider’s web” of which Polo speaks, and which Yule says was the famous muslin of Masulipatam. Speaking of Cotton, Chau Ju-kwa (pp. 217–8) writes: “The ki pe tree resembles a small mulberry-tree, with a hibiscus-like flower furnishing a floss half an inch and more in length, very much like goose-down, and containing some dozens of seeds. In the south the people remove the seed from the floss by means of iron chopsticks, upon which the floss is taken in the hand and spun without troubling about twisting together the thread. Of the cloth woven therefrom there are several qualities; the most durable and the strongest is called t’ou-lo-mién; the second quality is called fan-pu or ‘foreign cloth’; the third ‘tree cotton’ or mu-mién; the fourth ki-pu. These textures are sometimes dyed in various colours and brightened with strange patterns. The pieces measure up to five or six feet in breadth.”

XXI., [p. 373.]