Apostle Thomas
Parthia West and EastFirst on Vincenzo Maria's list is Syria-Mesopotamia. The Carmelite friar specifically mentions "the neighborhood of Edessa," but in the same breath expands the initial mission field to almost all of the Persian empire, or "Parthia," where he preached "to Parthians, Medes, Bactrians, Hyrcanians, and Taprobanians. Hyrcania abutted the southeastern corner of the Caspian Sea; Taprobane was Ceylon. Apparently he was depending on the Nestorian tradition for the emphasis on Parthia; he has Thomas visit it twice.Edessa is the place Thomas would have been most likely to visit, if indeed an apostle by that name went anywhere outside of Israel. Additionally, there are signs pointing to a sojourn in Edessa. There or in its area of cultural influence, it seems, most of the Thomas literature originated the texts purporting to record the words Thomas received from his spiritual twin and master and to describe his travels and preaching. And Mesopotamia, neighboring the Mediterranean littoral where Jesus and his followers lived, with many people speaking almost the same language as they did, had a substantial Jewish population, Greek-Bactrians,and Greek-Parthians; they would have been a natural mission of the first evangelizers wherever they might have gone.James Robinson, a leading figure in making available to the scholarly world the Coptic texts found at Nag Hammadi in Egypt, suggests that Aramaic-speaking mendicant prophets from Judea would naturally have gravitated toward Aramaic-speaking farming and shepherd hamlets toward the northeast, and some might well have settled in the center of Syriac culture, Edessa. They would have brought with them the stock of sayings in Aramaic that came to form the Gospel of Thomas . Thomas himself could have been such a settler. To support this attractive speculation, however, no firm evidence has come to light."Parthia" more broadly may be a stronger candidate than Edessa itself to be called Thomas's mission field. Whatever writer or group composed the original Acts of Judas Thomas had assigned him to an "India" where Gundaphorus had been the ruler. A later Syriac document, The Teachings of the Apostles , divides the twelvefold mission field much as the Acts of Judas Thomas does, but goes further, naming the regions that each of the Twelve had. This excerpt was not written by us, we are basically repeating it from the original author.
Adam Zia Khairzada
