The Journey of Christianity to India in Late Antiquity: Networks and the Movement of Culture by Nathanael J. Andrade (review)

Christianity's journey beyond the eastern fringes of the Roman Empire has long been associated with the travels of merchants. In the Acts of Thomas the resurrected Jesus sells his own disciple to a merchant from India. Meanwhile, in the Acts of Mar Mari, it is Parthian merchants who bring the Christian message from upper Mesopotamia to the northern shores of the Persian Gulf after they are evangelized in Edessa by another apostle, Judas Thaddeus.

While such hagiographical tales hardly suffice as evidence for the wide geographic dispersion of the Jesus movement in the first century, it is true that overland and maritime trade networks extended across vast distances in late antiquity, connecting south India to the Levant via both sides of the Arabian peninsula. Remarkably, Christianity did journey as far as south India in late antiquity. But, as Nathanael Andrade argues in his new book, it was not before the fifth century and not via Roman Egypt and the Red Sea. Instead, it was by way of the Persian Gulf that merchants from the Sasanian Empire first brought Christianity to India.

For those who know anything about the history of Christianity in India, or the Syriac Church of the East's missionary sprawl across central and south Asia, this is not news. Syriac continues to be used as a liturgical language among many Christian communities in India, and there is extensive evidence for missionary efforts centered out of Rev-Ardashir in the Iranian province of Fars in late antiquity. Still, quite a bit of work remains to be done before we can more fully understand the origins and extent of these missionary expeditions, to say nothing of the implantation and growth of Christianity in India a thousand years before the arrival of the Portuguese. Andrade's contribution helps somewhat, but he is to be credited more with closing off fruitless lines of inquiry than with exploring altogether new or poorly studied ones. Despite his title, Andrade's book is not actually about Christianity's journey to India in late antiquity. Instead, it is an idiosyncratic look at two pathways by which Christianity might have gotten there. Only his sixth and final chapter begins to engage how and when Christians from Sasanian Persia evangelized the Indian realms where their commercial activities took them, and even then he mostly gestures at stones unturned.

The book is divided into three parts. Parts two and three consider the Red Sea and Persian Gulf trade networks, but the book begins with the Acts of Thomas, the most renowned literary explanation for Christianity's early presence in India. In line with most scholars, Andrade agrees that the surviving form of the Acts was composed in Syriac, probably in Edessa, and probably in the mid- to late third century. The key word here is surviving form. Andrade skillfully teases apart the form of the text as we know it in order to show how it is a patchwork of several earlier literary and religious traditions. The earliest Thomas narrative, he argues, put the apostle in Parthia, not India. Thomas was moved farther east only later—namely, once it became clear that a role in Mesopotamia made little sense in light of the various Addai (Thaddeus) narratives about the conversion of Edessa.

If whether Thomas went to Parthia or India was unclear, then the location of "India" only fueled the confusion. As Andrade shows in his second chapter, early Christian writers often conflated the actual India with much nearer lands such as Ethiopia, southern Arabia, or the island of Socotra off the horn of Africa. Even those who grasped the geographic distinction frequently misunderstood their sources as referring to "outer India" when they likely meant one of the "inner Indias" by the Red Sea. This toponymical ambiguity notwithstanding, the trade network connecting Roman Egypt to south India did succeed in bringing Christianity to...