Thomas came here in 52.
The church holds that the apostle Thomas landed at Kodungallur in AD 52, founded seven and a half churches along the Malabar coast, and was killed at Mylapore near Madras in 68. The tradition is old and continuous in Kerala; outside historians treat the second-century Acts of Thomas as legend and the Indian Christian presence as securely attested from about the third century onward.
The Thomas tradition is the foundation of Saint Thomas Christian identity and is shared by every Kerala church that descends from the community — Orthodox, Jacobite, Mar Thoma, Syro-Malabar and Syro-Malankara alike. The evidence is a body of local tradition, the Acts of Thomas, and later Syriac and Latin references; there is no first-century documentation, and historians divide on whether the mission is plausible or legendary. What is not in doubt is that a Syriac-speaking church existed in Kerala well before the Portuguese arrived, with bishops sent from Persia and a place in the local caste order. The Malankara church treats the apostolic claim as settled and the historians' caution as an outsider's problem.
The same ground, other faiths
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