St Thomas, who took the Gospel to India, according to traditions which first appear in the late 2nd century AD. In this book Serena Fass tells us this story with a traveller’s eye and deep empathy across the roads of ancient Parthia and Gandhara to the palm forests of tropical South India. As a traveller’s tale alone it takes some beating. But of course it is much more. 

Scholars these days tend to think the goal of Thomas’s mission was the court of King Gondophares of Taxila near Rawalpindi in present day Pakistan, but South Indian Christians have always insisted that their church was also founded by Thomas, whose original tomb still stands near Chennai. His landfall is said to have been at a place called Muziris near Cranganore in Kerala, where a gleaming white Christian basilica commemorates him today. What is so intriguing about this tradition is that it pinpoints the very place and the moment when sea voyages linked the Roman world with South India, as we can see in one of the most remarkable texts from the ancient world, the Periplus, or Gazetteer, of the Red Sea. Written in Thomas’s lifetime about AD 60, the Periplus lists twenty ports down the west coast of India, just the journey Thomas would have made. And the most important – Pliny calls it ‘the first market of India’ – was indeed Muziris, where the Greek and Roman colonists even erected a temple to the deified Emperor Augustus. 

Here then, of all places, we might imagine the Greek-speaking Thomas to have made his landfall: on a trade route well known to the merchants of the Eastern Mediterranean, who included Jews. Till recently, the site of Muziris had never been discovered in the intricate filigree of lagoons in the Kerala backwaters north of Cochin. But in 2005 archaeologists from Kerala found it four miles inland, by an old bed of the Periyar river. The main mound is 600 metres across, in a shady grove of palms, bananas and jackfruit, festooned with twining pepper vines. Coins of Nero and Tiberius have been found nearby, and excavations have revealed that the mound is stuffed with Roman amphorae, terracottas, Mediterranean glass ornaments, and precious stones. Here then, at last, we may imagine the apostle making his landfall on the outermost edge of the Roman world. 

But did he? The earliest Syriac and Greek traditions place him up in the Indo-Greek court at Taxila; but Muziris was a major trading place for the merchants of the eastern Mediterranean in the first two or three centuries AD, and the  landing of a Roman Jewish traveller in the Periyar River around the time of the Periplus is plausible in every way. If unverifiable, the tradition ought to be  true, in a land where oral traditions have had extraordinary tenacity – where among the Tamil Jain communities, for example, entire poems have been handed down from the late Roman world to modern times. So too the tale of Thomas’s death is still part of the Tamil Christian tradition at St Thomas’s Mount outside Madras (Chennai) from where his remains were translated to Edessa in Syria as recorded by St Ephraim in the 4th century. 

It is a literally amazing story; and not content with following Thomas along the Silk Road and down to Chennai, Serena even takes us in a poignant epilogue back to Thomas’s final resting place in Ortona on the Adriatic in central Italy. What an adventure!

Michael Wood,  Historian, author and TV film-maker,   Epiphany 2017.