Holy Apostle Thomas

Thomas was a Galilean Jew, called among the Twelve and given the Aramaic name Thomas, which means 'twin'; the Gospel of John, when he is mentioned, glosses the name into Greek as Didymus.

He appears three times by name in the Fourth Gospel and each time speaks. He proposed to his fellow disciples, when the Lord turned back into Judaea to raise Lazarus, that they should go with him to die together; he asked at the Mystical Supper the question that drew from the Lord the saying 'I am the way, the truth, and the life'; and on the eighth day after the Resurrection he was given by the Lord the wounds of the hands and the side and answered with the confession the Church has not ceased to repeat: 'My Lord and my God.'

Tradition relates that when the apostles cast lots after Pentecost to divide the world between them for preaching, India fell to Thomas. He went first to Parthia, then to the kingdom of Gondophares in north India, and afterwards down the Malabar coast in the south, where he founded seven churches that survive to this day as the ancient St. Thomas Christians of Kerala.

He was martyred at Mylapore near the modern city of Chennai, run through with a spear, around the middle of the first century. The Church keeps his memory on the sixth of October, and on the Sunday after Pascha as Thomas Sunday or the Antipascha, the eighth day on which the Risen Lord returned to the upper room to meet him.