Note 37 — Notes.

Whether the extremely interesting and ancient tradition be genuine (as maintained by Tillemont) or not, that Abgarus, king of Edessa, sent messengers to our Lord in Judæa, begging Him to come and visit him and heal him of his sickness, and that our Lord in reply sent him word that He must do the work of Him Who sent Him and then return to Him above, but that after His Ascension He would send an Apostle to him, and that in consequence of this promise St. Thomas received the far East for the field of his labours—and, however much be chronologically correct of the mass of records and traditions which tell that this Apostle travelled over the whole Asian continent, from Edessa to Tibet, and perhaps China—it would appear to be intrinsically probable and as well attested as most facts of equally remote date, that both this Apostle and Thaddæus, one of the seventy-two disciples, preached the Gospel in countries east of Syria, and that his successors, more or less immediate, extended their travels farther and farther east. It is mentioned in Eusebius (Book v. c. 10), that S. Pantæus, going to India to preach the Gospel early in the 3rd century (Eusebius himself wrote at the end of the same century), met with Brahmans who showed him a copy of the Gospel of St. Matthew in Hebrew, which they said had been given to their forerunners by St. Bartholomew37. Lassen himself allows, that in all probability certain Brahmans, at a very early date, fell in with Christian teachers, and brought them back home with them. Further, that the idea of there being any merit in bhakti, or pious faith, and a development in the teaching concerning the duty of prayer may be traced to this circumstance. Nor does he deny that when in 435, Eustathius, Bp. of Antioch, with the help of Thomas Kama, a rich local merchant, went to found a mission at Mahâdevapatma (Cranganore), he found Christians who dated their conversion from St. Thomas living there. His further efforts to disprove that St. Thomas himself penetrated very far east, and that the early Christian establishments at Taprobane and Ceylon were founded by Persian Christians, though far from conclusive, tend as far as they go but to support all the more the theory of an admixture of Christian with Brahmanical and Buddhist teaching; because, the less pure the source of teaching the more likely it was to have resulted in producing such an admixture in place of actual conversion. Nor does the circumstance on which he lays much weight, that the Brahmans resented the inroads of Christian teaching on their domain, even with severe persecutions, at all afford any proof that there were not Brahmanical teachers, who either through sincere admiration (for which they were prepared by their early monotheistic tradition), or from a conviction of the advantage to be derived in increase of influence by its means, or other cause, may have thought fit, or been even unconsciously led to incorporate certain ideas of the new school with their own.