According to the dominant church tradition, the apostle Thomas first brought the gospel to India. Whatever the case, the oldest Christian communities in India refer to themselves as Thomas Christians, which lends credence to the notion that Thomas reached Kerala in 52 before suffering martyrdom in Chennai some twenty years later.
“The Koran preaches the oneness of God and emphasizes divine mercy and forgiveness. God is almighty and all-knowing, and though compassionate towards His creatures He is stern in retribution. He enjoins justice and fair dealing, kindness to orphans and widows, and charity to the poor. The most important duties of the Muslim are faith in God and His apostle, prayer, almsgiving, fasting, and (if possible) pilgrimage to the Sacred House at Mecca, built by Abraham for the worship of the One God.”
The news that there were many Christians across the Mongol Empire, some holding high office, was not received with unalloyed joy in Rome. Back in the fifth century the Nestorians, followers of a patriarch of Constantinople who had emphasized the disunity of Christ’s human and divine natures, had been condemned as heretics. Many had migrated to Persia, where they joined the existing Church of the East and continued to thrive after the Arab conquests, expanding deep into Central Asia and China and implanting the veneration of St Thomas the Apostle in India.
It is a spectacular passage. And it almost certainly is something very close to what Jesus actually said. And why? Because it is not at all what the early Christians thought about how a person gains eternal life. The early Christian church taught that a person is rewarded with salvation by believing in the death and resurrection of Jesus. The Apostle Paul, for example, was quite adamant that people could not earn their salvation by doing the things the law required them to do, or in fact by doing anything at all. If that were possible, there would have been no reason for Christ to have died (see, for example, Gal. 2:15-16, 21). Even in Matthew's Gospel the focus of attention is on the salvation that Jesus brings by his death and resurrection. In this saying of Jesus, however, people gain eternal life not because they have believed in Christ (they have never even seen or heard of the Son of Man), but because they have done good things for people in need. This is not a saying that early Christians invented. It embodies the views of Jesus. The Son of Man will judge the earth, and those who have helped others in need will be the ones who will be rewarded with eternal life.
Going back to ancient sources
We do, of course, have ancient sources, but they are not as ancient as we would like. Our very first Christian author is the Apostle Paul, who was writing twenty to thirty years after Jesus's death. A number of Paul's letters are included in the New Testament. Other Christian authors may have been writing earlier than Paul, but none of their works survive. The problems with Paul are that he didn't actually know Jesus personally and that he doesn't tell us very much about Jesus's teachings, activities, or experiences. I sometimes give my students an assignment to read through all of Paul's writings and list everything Paul indicates Jesus said and did. My students are surprised to find that they don't even need a three-by-five card to list them. (Paul,by the way,never says that Jesus declared himself to be divine.)
"The exhortation of the apostle to make fast one's own call is here interpreted as a duty to attain certainty of one's own election and justification in the daily struggle of life in the place of the humble sinners to whom Luther promises grace if they trust themselves to God in penitent faith are bred those self- confident saints whom we can rediscover in the hard Puritan merchants of the heroic age of capitalism and in isolated instances down to the present On the other hand, in order to attain that self-confidence intense worldly activity is recommended as the most suitable means. It and it alone disperses religious doubts and gives the certainty of grace."
