Page 115 - Acts of Apostle Thomas

X 72 AD APOSTLE ST. THOM10A6S MARTYRED : M. M. NINAN

St. Ephrem's works note that the bones of St. Thomas were venerated there in his time. The great
hymnodist alludes to the transferral of the bones in his Carmina Nisibena (42:1.1-2.2, Kathleen McVey,
Ephrem the Syrian, Paulist Press, 1989, p. 25):

The evil one wails, "Where then
can I flee from the righteous?
I incited Death to kill the apostles
as if to escape from their scourges
by their death. More than ever now
I am scourged harshly. The apostle I killed in India
[has come] to Edessa before me. Here is he and also there.
I went there, there he is.
Here and there I found him, and I am gloomy.
Did that merchant carry the bones?
Or perhaps, indeed, they carried him!

A Nestorian bishop of Basrah, at the mouth of the Tigris-Euphrates, wrote the Book of the Bee in the
thirteenth century which states:

“Thomas was from Jerusalem of the tribe of Judah. He taught the Parthians, Medes and Indians; and
because he baptized the daughter of the King of the Indians, he stabbed him with a spear and he died.
Habban the merchant brought his body and laid it in Edessa, the blessed city of Christ our Lord. Others say
he was buried in Mahluph [Mylapore], a city in the land of the Indians.”

His relics were moved from Edessa. The Edessene Chronicle says that in 394 "the casket of the Apostle
Thomas was removed to the great church erected in his honor."

Muslims captured Edessa in 1142, at which the Christians took the relics to the isle of Chios in the Aegean
Sea, where they remained for more than a century.

In 1258 the prince of Taranto raided Chios and sent the relics to Ortona, Italy, where they were installed in
the cathedral. In 1952 Cardinal Tisserant arranged to have sent to Cranganore a thigh bone in 1952, on 19th
centenary celebration the arrival of Thomas there.

After a short stay in the Greek island of Chios, on September 6, 1258, the relics were transported to the
West, and now rest in Ortona, Italy.

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