The Acts of Thomas

The Acts tell how the apostles divide the world by lot, how India falls to Judas Thomas, and how he is sold as a carpenter to a merchant of King Gundaphoros. A series of wonder stories follows, ending in the kingdom of Misdeus, where Thomas is killed by four soldiers with spears. The closing lines say that his bones were afterwards carried away to the West.

The work is anonymous and carries no date. M. R. James, The Apocryphal New Testament (1924), assigns it to the third century and says that, according to the weight of authority, it was composed in Syriac. He accepts that the complete Greek text is a translation from Syriac, while holding it still arguable that the work was first written in Greek and that the Greek of the martyrdom preserves the older text. Percy Gardner, cataloguing the coins of King Gondophares for the British Museum in 1886, likewise spoke of “legends dating from the third century” that record the visit of Thomas to India. A. F. J. Klijn, The Acts of Thomas: Introduction, Text, and Commentary (2nd ed., 2003), places the work in early Syriac Christianity. On that dating it was written some two centuries after the time it describes. It is cited in this wiki for what was told about Thomas by then, not as a record of his travels; see the Apostle Thomas and the Christians of India.