Tea at Trianon: Did the Apostle Thomas Travel All the Way to India?

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Sunday, May 24, 2026

Did the Apostle Thomas Travel All the Way to India?

From The Collector:

The New Testament’s depiction of Jesus’s disciple Thomas has given him the nickname “Doubting Thomas.” Yet, ironically, according to church tradition Thomas’s faith in the risen Christ drove him to evangelize a greater distance from Palestine than even the Apostle Paul reached in his storied missionary journeys in Anatolia and Europe. Thomas may have gone as far as South India with the Christian gospel, establishing multiple churches along the way and eventually dying as a martyr on Indian soil.
When reconstructing the histories of ancient Christian figures like Thomas, historians often must rely on sources that contain legendary material. This is partly why it is customary to qualify historical claims with phrases like “according to tradition.”

A key source for the life of Thomas is an early third-century work entitled The Acts of Thomas. This work is counted among the many pseudepigraphical narratives about the infancy years of Christianity, which tend to contain accounts deemed unreliable by modern historiographical standards. While The Acts of Thomas’s historical value is compromised as a result, the fact that a document about Thomas’s activities in India was being read in the third century suggests that both Thomas’s ministry and the backstory of the church in India were of interest to Christians in the early church. Ancient Christian writers from diverse areas also wrote of Thomas’s ministry in India. (Read more.)