The Journey of Christianity to India in Late Antiquity: Networks and the Movement of Culture

Nathanael J. Andrade. The Journey of Christianity to India in Late Antiquity: Networks and the Movement of Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018.

Nathanael Andrade’s The Journey of Christianity to India in Late Antiquity offers a new account of how Christianity reached the Indian subcontinent. Informed by network and world-systems theory, Andrade explores the trade routes that traversed the Indian Ocean and Roman Mediterranean worlds, arguing that ancient stories about Christians in India were shaped by exchanges across these vast regions of Eurasia over the centuries. The evidence for everyday commerce and connectivity that Andrade presents challenges standard narratives about Christianity in India that have relied on ancient literary sources, above all the Acts of Thomas. Surviving in different versions in Syriac and Greek, the Acts of Thomas has been a key source in the historiography of South Asian Christianity and in the oral and material histories of many South Asian Christians. Andrade’s work is a critical reappraisal of the Acts as “invented tradition,” and it joins the broader turn to relational and global approaches in classical and late ancient studies. As Andrade states in the introduction:

This book parts ways from most previous scholarship principally by maintaining that knowledge of socio-commercial networks and other social factors should provide context for the Acts of Thomas and problematic literary narratives, not vice versa. The regional dispositions of socio-commercial networks in fact shaped how most forms of Christian culture were transported throughout the ancient world system. They were vital in structuring how Christianity traveled from the Mediterranean world to the Red Sea, Iran, central Asia, and the Indian Ocean world between the first and fifth centuries C.E. (p. 21).

The book’s six chapters are arranged in three parts. Part One (Chapter 1) examines the textual history of the Acts of Thomas. Andrade dates the surviving Syriac and Greek versions no earlier than the middle to late third century CE, adding that both versions are compilations that might have drawn on a now lost textual tradition of the second century that located the apostle Thomas primarily in Parthia (pp. 32-42; 50-4). Andrade argues that the earlier Parthian Acts was a source for the text’s famous opening sequence in which Thomas is enslaved to the merchant Habban/Abbanes at Jerusalem. In an unlikely scenario, Thomas and Habban somehow sail from Jerusalem to India. However, if the Parthian Acts was a primary source, it is more likely that the Habban sequence was originally set at a commercial centre like Charax Spasinou near the Persian Gulf where there were established sailing routes to the Indian subcontinent (p. 42-50). In addition, the Acts contains few details about ancient India itself, reflecting instead generic knowledge of historical figures and names, like the Indo-Parthian ruler and title, Gondophares (p. 43).[1] For Andrade, these features suggest the initial circulation of Acts material in Upper Mesopotamia where Thomas was the apostle to Parthia who also travelled to Central Asia and north India. But with the growing importance of Addai/Thaddeus traditions in Edessa, Thomas’s main territory shifted to India, the focus of the surviving Acts (pp. 54-60). These aspects of the text’s history reveal a religious topography shared among late ancient Christians in Parthia and in the Roman Mediterranean who were connected by known socio-commercial networks and who sought to identify fellow Christians in territories further east (pp. 60-4). Rather than straightforward documents of how Christianity reached India, the Acts for Christian readers in these areas “framed how they conceived of the history and geography of Christianity in Asia” (p. 64).

In Part Two (Chapters 2-3) Andrade discusses the shifting location of “India” in other late ancient Christian topographies, checking them against the evidence for the main commercial network, namely, the Roman Egyptian network which was centred in Alexandria and connected the Indian Ocean to the Red Sea and Mediterranean. For Mediterranean Christians especially, “India” referred not only to the subcontinent but also to east Africa, southern Arabia, and Socotra, all regions thought to be inhabited by Indoi or “Indians” (pp. 73-84). Ecclesiastical histories that claim the apostles Matthew and Bartholomew and the bishop Frumentius missionized parts of “India” are thus not referring to the subcontinent but to Aksumite or Meroitic Ethiopia, while other ancient Christian histories use terms like “inner/nearer India” and “greater India” to differentiate parts of East Africa and Arabia from the subcontinent (pp. 84-92). As information circulated about Christians in “India” or among “Indians,” authors like Eusebius and Jerome often assumed that the subcontinent was the primary referent and placed figures like Pantaenus there, whereas Rufinus states that Pantaenus went to “nearer India,” meaning Aksumite Ethiopia (pp. 87-92). This cartography of plural “Indias,” Andrade maintains, reflects changes and disruptions to the Roman Egyptian commercial network that connected South Asia to the Roman Mediterranean. Drawing on current scholarship on Indo-Mediterranean trade, Andrade surveys much of the known literary, documentary, and archaeological evidence for the multiethnic, multilingual pathways that defined this network, which flourished in the first-third centuries (pp. 94-124). However, Andrade proposes that Christian culture could not have reached the Indian subcontinent through this specific network before the sixth century and only after it had taken hold at intermediary points like Aksumite Ethiopia and southern Arabia in the fourth. This timeline is based on an understanding of the slow movement of people and information in the premodern world and on documented changes to the Roman Egyptian network: by the fourth century, routes terminated at the Red Sea and Arabia but once again reached the Indian subcontinent in the sixth (pp. 124-35). The several “Indias” found in late ancient Mediterranean Christian texts might therefore indicate a fourth- to fifth-century context in which direct routes to India were absent (pp. 128-9). With the renewal of direct commercial links in the sixth century, however, Mediterranean Christian sources like the Christian Topography show a greater awareness of India as the subcontinent and of Christian communities there (pp. 134-5).

Part 3 (Chapters 4-6), the final part of the book, explains how the overland socio-commercial networks connecting the Roman Levant (Andrade’s term for certain parts of West Asia), Parthian/Sasanian Persia, and Central Asia gradually established Christian communities associated with the Church of the East in India and transmitted Acts traditions between the Mediterranean and South Asia. Andrade offers a critical reading of the claims found in Syriac apocryphal and hagiographical texts about early communities of Christians in Central and South Asia in the first-second centuries (pp. 139-49), and he stresses that human movement was gradual due to the segmented nature of the overland network that first connected the Levant to the Parthian/Sasanian lowlands then eventually to regions like Iran and north India (pp. 166-201). He argues that Christians travelled through the Sasanian segment of the network to reach Central and South Asia no earlier than the late fourth century, briefly citing factors like the consolidation of the Church of the East and the Sasanian persecutions. Andrade concedes, however, that Manicheans were present in the network centuries before (pp. 201-206). Going further, the final chapter of the book contends that merchants from the Sasanian network brought knowledge of the Acts to south India only in the fifth century when routes extended there. Andrade also argues that the oral and material histories of St. Thomas Christians, including the burial site of Thomas at Mylapore, cannot be securely dated before this point (pp. 207-21). The Thomas traditions of south India are local adaptations of stories that first circulated among Mediterranean Christians then were brought to the subcontinent centuries later, and with the renewal of the Roman-Egyptian network’s direct links to India in the sixth century, more concrete information about Christian communities in India, and of local traditions about Thomas’s life and death, now reached Mediterranean Christians (pp. 221-30). As Andrade concludes, this exchange illustrates how the “socio-commercial networks of antiquity carried the constantly changing culture of Christianity, and the ceaselessly transforming narrative of the preaching of the apostle Thomas, from the Mediterranean to India and back again” (p. 230).

The Journey of Christianity to India in Late Antiquity is a compelling take on how some Christians imagined an interconnected late ancient world. At the same time, Andrade’s account ultimately privileges the free movement of ideas and people even when stories like the Acts of Thomas reflect very different perspectives and realities. Ancient commercial networks were conditioned by the incentives of powerful and oppressive empires, and the Acts itself tells a story of enslavement, forced migration, and forced labor.[2] In addition, the reception of the Acts in India reflects still other realities. There is far more going on here than St. Thomas and other South Asian Christians “inventing” their past, and scholars such as Clara Joseph have shown that histories of colonialism and anti-colonial struggle are key to understanding the vitality of Christianity and Acts traditions in India.[3] While Andrade foregrounds promising avenues for understanding the Acts, future scholarship would benefit from better engaging with the historical contexts and experiences of the communities that have shaped these traditions.

[1]The generic character of “India” in the Acts is also discussed in Kendra Eshleman, “Indian Travel and Cultural Self-Location in the Life of Apollonius and the Acts of Thomas,” in Journeys in the Roman East: Imagined and Real, ed. Maren R. Niehoff (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2017), 183-201.

[2] Jennifer A. Glancy, “Slavery in Acts of Thomas,” Journal of Early Christian History 2 (2012): 3-21. Andrade does not engage Glancy’s work extensively.

[3] Clara A.B. Joseph, Christianity in India: The Anti-Colonial Turn (New York: Routledge, 2019) and eadem, “The Apocryphal Acts of Thomas and Empire,” in The Oxford Handbook of Postcolonial Biblical Criticism, ed. R.S. Sugirtharajah (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020), 1-23. For additional perspectives, Sonja Thomas, Privileged Minorities: Syrian Christianity, Gender, and Minority Rights in Postcolonial India. (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2018) is an important intersectional study of Syrian/St. Thomas Christians in postcolonial India.

Michelle Christian is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Historical Studies and the Department for the Study of Religion at the University of Toronto