‘I, Jesus, son of the carpenter Joseph, declare that I have sold my slave, Judas by name, to you.’
Jesus sells a man into slavery,
Acts of Thomas, 2, 3rd century AD
Sailing to India might have been common in the ancient world. That did not mean it was easy. Read a guidebook produced by one ancient merchant who made the journey and it is filled with horrors, with lurid tales of the ‘rascally’ locals who will menace you; the rough seas that will shake your ship; and the serpents with ‘blood-red eyes’ that will surge towards you from the shore.1
One of the most intriguing ancient travelogues was written by the navigator Cosmas ‘Indicopleustes’ – Cosmas ‘India sailor’ – who went from Alexandria to Sri Lanka in the sixth century. In his Christian Topography, Cosmas recounted the many marvels one might meet on this magnificent journey. He is impressed by rumours of the unicorn (‘a terrible beast and quite invincible’), describes the pepper tree in detail (it is ‘a deep green colour’) and is repelled by the taste of dolphin meat (‘rank’).2 He becomes particularly animated by the elephant trade in India. These animals, he observes, are priced by height, and they are highly valued, partly because Indian kings bought them to use in war – but also because the kings simply liked to watch them fight, as they ‘thrash each other with their trunks till one of them gives in.’3
But while some things seem to catch Cosmas’ attention, even to surprise him, others he regards with absolute complacency. When he finally reaches Sri Lanka, where the pepper plant grows and the sea gleams blue, he not only finds large numbers of Christians already living there, but he also comes across a long-established Christian church and ‘moreover a bishop, who is appointed from Persia.’4 Some might have been surprised at the presence of Christians at the southern tip of India – but not Cosmas. He greets the Christian presence there with absolute equanimity. As he writes, did the Lord not ordain that ‘the Gospel shall be preached throughout the whole world’?5 Well, here is merely proof of that command coming true. ‘The whole earth has been filled with the doctrine of the Lord Christ,’ he writes, ‘and is still being filled.’ He himself is able to vouch for this ‘from what I have seen and heard in the many places which I have visited.’6
Had Cosmas been able to understand the texts that those Christians used, he might have been a little less satisfied. For almost certainly the Christians whom Cosmas saw in India were Thomas Christians, a group influenced by an ancient text known as the Acts of Thomas. In this text, Jesus sells a man into slavery, is described as having a twin brother and rants, at length, about the ghastliness of children.
‘Go into all the world and proclaim the gospel to the whole creation.’7 These, so the Bible said, were the words of Jesus to his disciples. The followers of Christ evidently listened, and obeyed, for Christianity spread far and it spread fast. By the third century, it had reached Egypt and Ethiopia and the Iranian plateau; and it kept going, onwards, eastwards, to Kyrgyzstan, Turkmenistan and to China.8 By AD 650, the Church of the East had bishops as far east as Samarkand; envoys from Kyrgyzstan would later appear in Byzantium, much to the surprise of the locals, with crosses tattooed on their foreheads.9 By the year 1000, there were churches in Nineveh, Isfahan and Herat. Eastern Christians were ministered to by priests with such names as Banus the Uigurian and helped by laymen called such things as Kiamata of Kashghar and Tatta the Mongol.10 In the Middle Ages, the Eastern Christian church – not the Western – was the most widespread in the world.11
This can seem surprising to those raised in the West. Western Christianity, with its paintings of pale-faced saints and honey-haired Jesuses, has an almost unshakeable habit of thinking of Christianity as Western. It was not. As historians have long pointed out, when Christ told his followers to spread the word to the ends of the earth, he was standing on a hill in western Asia and speaking Aramaic as he did so.12 Many of Christianity’s greatest early thinkers were from Egypt and North Africa, not Europe. Yet Western Christianity, which read most of its holy texts first in Greek, then later in Latin, long showed a resolute amnesia to such simple truths. In the nineteenth century, there was a ‘rediscovery of the ancient Eastern Christians’, as the scholar Aziz Atiya put it – but the ‘rediscovery’, it should be noted, was from the point of view of Western scholars: Egyptian Copts had not, on the whole, forgotten that they existed.13
It is easy to smile at the geographical misconceptions of ancient writers, but each age has its own geographical blindness. Considering ‘the East’ to be somewhere peculiarly remote and impossibly hard to reach has, perhaps, been a blindness of the West. The historian Philip Jenkins has offered a simple calculation that shows this beautifully. If you head east from Jerusalem, Jenkins wrote, you reach Baghdad in just 600 miles, Tehran in less than 1,000 and Samarkand in 1,850. Paris or London are, by contrast, over 2,000 miles away.14 And, for much of the period of Roman imperium, these western areas were far more forbidding and foreign.
In those days, the unimaginable other was less to be found to the east of the empire than in its north-west, on that damp and dagger-shaped island known as Britain. This was widely considered to be an appalling and uncivilized place, used by the Roman poet Virgil as a byword for the ends of the earth.15 In this ghastly land, as the geographer Strabo observed, ‘the sun is to be seen for only three or four hours round about midday’ and the inhabitants were alarmingly tall – ‘half a foot above the tallest people’ in Rome – and unattractive with it. Strabo had once seen some of them in Rome; they were, he recalls with disdain, ‘bandy-legged and presented no fair lines anywhere else in their figure.’ The only good thing one might say about the Britons was that they were better than the Irish, who Strabo can barely even be bothered to lift his pen to comment upon. ‘Concerning this island,’ he writes, ‘I have nothing certain to tell, except that its inhabitants are more savage, since they are man-eaters as well as heavy eaters.’ And, he adds, they have sex with their mothers. Or so they say.16
But, though Christianity spread, it did not stay the same. Were a traveller to walk east or south from Alexandria, they would have been hard pressed not to notice the religion changing, again and again. In Ethiopia, for example, Pontius Pilate was looked upon with favour – and is to this day revered as a saint.17 The sacred books were different, too, for Christians there (as they did elsewhere in the ancient world) read a canon that included an extensive list of the wicked things in which angels inducted mankind, including the sinful habit of wearing bracelets and the ‘beautifying of the eyelids’. It went on: ‘Semjâzâ taught enchantments, and root-cuttings, Armârôs the resolving of enchantments, Barâqîjâl [taught] astrology, Kôkabêl the constellations, Ezêqêêl the knowledge of the clouds . . .’18
The ancient traveller might also have come across an engaging Christian sect known as the Ophites, who were said to believe that Christ had come – but that he was a snake. Thus, as one Christian reported, these people ‘honour the serpent and regard him as Christ, and have an actual snake . . . in a basket of some sort.’19 This group of Christians had developed a complex theology and various proofs for this claim: was not there a snake in the garden of Eden? Had it not shown mankind the route to knowledge? And are our intestines not shaped like a snake? The truth was clear: Christ is a snake.20 During their worship, it was said that these Christians ‘spread loaves around on a table, and call the snake to come; and when the den is opened it comes out. And then the snake – which comes up of its own accord and by its villainy . . . crawls onto the table and coils up on the loaves.’ Once the bread has been ‘consecrated by its coiling’, these Christians ‘offer a hymn to the father on high’ and ‘so conclude their mysteries.’21
Meanwhile, in other places, there were those who not only burned incense to Jesus, but who burned incense to the Greek philosopher Pythagoras and the poet Homer too, worshipping them alongside Christ. These people – or so it was said – claimed to have a portrait of Jesus painted by Pilate, and they put up portraits of ‘certain philosophers besides – Pythagoras, Plato, Aristotle, and the rest’, which they hung alongside their portraits of Jesus. ‘And after setting them up they worship them and celebrate heathen mysteries.’22 Elsewhere, the traveller might have come across yet other Christians, who – eschewing the male-only hierarchy that many Christian groups had already developed – recognized women as bishops. Or they might have come across a sect of ancient Christians who believed that Joseph had made Jesus, that angels had made the world and that Jewish customs should be preserved, and so insisted circumcision should still be practised on all adult male converts. That particular group did not spread very far.23
Almost everything that could vary among Christians did vary, from methods of worship, to beliefs, to personal conduct. The sexual habits of the Christians that Epiphanius wrote about so vividly, the Borborites, would become infamous.24 They were accused of using their religion as a means to seduce women, by claiming that sex was an essential part of worship. ‘Have sex with me,’ these Christian men allegedly said, ‘so that I may offer you’.25 As it happened, this particular Christian sect also believed not in one divine being, but in 365 (called ‘archons’, in the jargon), and so the men had to have sex 365 times, to honour each one of those divine beings. For reasons that remain theologically obscure (but that can cynically be guessed at), for full enlightenment, the entire process then had to be repeated. Once this 730-stage worship had been performed, a man in this sect then considered himself able to say, ‘I am Christ, for I have descended from on high through the names of the 365 archons!’26
The differences continued. Take, for example, the Origenists, Christians who rejected both marriage and resurrection, and whose sexual activity was (at least according to Epiphanius) ‘incessant’. These Christians, he wrote, used to ‘soil their bodies, minds and souls with unchastity’. They dressed themselves up as monks and nuns, and then, ‘as Onan coupled with Tamar and satisfied his appetite but did not complete the act’, so these Christians did the same with their ‘nuns’.27 Such stories, entertaining though they are, should be read with a certain suspicion: Epiphanius is a witness to treat with caution at the best of times, and sexual immorality was a staple criticism that was levelled at so-called heretics.28 But, then, given the vast losses of texts that occurred, the historian is forced to use such sources: there is so little else left.
There were other slanders, too – darker ones. The Greeks and Romans, when they heard that Christians were told to ‘love one another’ and that they drank the blood of their saviour, were suspicious about what went on during Christian worship.29 But, if Epiphanius is to be believed, some Christians deserved such censure. It was said that the Borborites used to abort then eat human foetuses: ‘They extract the foetus at the stage which is appropriate for their enterprise, take this aborted infant, and cut it up in a trough with a pestle. And they mix honey, pepper, and certain other perfumes and spices with it to keep from getting sick, and then all the revellers in this [herd] of swine and dogs assemble, and each eats a piece of the child with his fingers.’30
Had our imaginary ancient traveller, on this tour of the ancient world, then turned towards Syria, he or she would have found a rich source of Christian differences – though, of course, Syrians would have baulked at the idea that it was their Christianity that was ‘different’. In Syriac Christianity, for example, there were twelve magi, rather than the three of Western tradition. (The number and names of the magi varied widely from country to country – which is hardly surprising, since the Bible doesn’t specify either how many there were or what they were called.) So, while Christians in the West know the magi as Caspar, Melchior and Balthazar, in a Georgian manuscript they were called Wiscara, Melikona and Walastar, and in Persia they became Amad, Zud-Amad and Drust-Amad.31 Other differences were greater still: one enormously popular version of Christianity that flourished in Syria rejected the idea of bodily resurrection, blended Christianity with astrology and followed a leader who, or so his critics muttered, ‘did not read the prophets but the books of the Zodiac.’32
Other Syrian differences were theologically more profound. The Holy Spirit – which in many Western traditions is translated as ‘he’ – in the early Syriac tradition was at times rendered decisively as female. An Old Syriac translation of the gospels refers to the Holy Ghost with the word ‘she’: ‘she shall teach you everything.’33 In an ancient ode that dates back perhaps to the end of the first century, the Holy Spirit appears again as female: ‘The Holy Spirit is she who . . .’ reads one line.34
It is possible to argue that this was a mere grammatical glitch: there is no neuter in Syriac and so each word, even the word for something as abstract as a spirit, has to be one thing or the other, and the authors happened to plump for female. (On some occasions it is changed, in Old Syriac, to ‘he’.) But Syrian Christians don’t seem to have regarded it as a glitch. In one poem known as the Hymn of the Pearl, God is described as ‘King of Kings’ while the Holy Spirit is described as the ‘Queen of the East’ and ‘Mother’ of the soul.35 One influential Syriac Christian author wrote lyrically about how a man ‘loveth and honoureth God his Father, and the Holy Spirit his Mother.’36 There is an ancient precedent for this: in the gospel known as the Gospel of the Hebrews (one of many gospels that was lost and is known today only from fragments), Jesus speaks of ‘my mother, the Holy Spirit’.37
Nor was God always as overwhelmingly masculine in Syriac traditions as he was in Western ones. The Odes of Solomon, beautiful poetry used by Syriac Christians, contain lines that can feel, today, strikingly unorthodox – though they were unlikely to have been considered such when they were written, in the second century or so. In one ode, God is represented as having full breasts that are milked by his son and by the Holy Spirit: ‘The Son is the cup, and He who was milked is the Father: and the Holy Spirit milked Him: because his breasts were full, and it was necessary for him that His milk should be sufficiently released; and the Holy Spirit opened His bosom and mingled the milk from the two breasts of the father.’38
The influence of some of these other Christianities seeped westwards over the centuries. What has been described as ‘the earliest Christian hymnbook’ was written in Asia, in Syriac, in around the first or second century; the ancient sounds of Syrian music, it is thought, echoed into the air for centuries.39 It now seems possible, perhaps even probable, that Coptic monks travelled to the British Isles. Long before the so-called Apostle to the English, Augustine of Canterbury, arrived in England at the end of the sixth century, Coptic missionaries had arrived here from Egypt. The graves of seven Coptic monks have been found in Northern Ireland, and it is argued that hints of Coptic Christianity can be seen in Irish architecture and ceremonies. Scholars have speculated that the famous glittering swirls of Irish handicraft from this period ‘and their unrivalled illuminations’ might ‘be traced to the influence of Egyptian missionaries.’40 It is tantalizing to think how different the world of the West might have been if the Christianity of these Egyptian missionaries, rather than that of Roman Christianity, had taken hold in Britain, and the damp island at the west of Europe had become a stronghold of Coptic Christianity rather than Catholicism.
Difference flourished, everywhere. Even attitudes to difference itself varied. By the third century, the form of Christianity that would later gain supremacy within the Roman Empire had long been pouring odium on writings that it considered heretical, apocryphal, or pagan. But other Christians were far more liberal. In second- and third-century Alexandria, there flourished a group of so-called ‘academic Christians’, who acted exactly as that name implies. Far from arguing against the ‘wicked’ and ‘extremely impious’ doctrines of Greek philosophy, this appealing group welcomed all intellectual speculation.
These Christians openly blended Christianity with Platonism and, as the historian David Brakke has written, ‘tolerated and even encouraged philosophical speculation and diversity of opinion on certain Christian teachings.’ The academic Christians ‘sought to discover Christian truth wherever it might manifest itself literarily, including pagan literature, Jewish writings of all kind, and Christian books that their fellow Christians may have considered suspect’.41 They resisted the very idea of a closed canon of ‘acceptable’ books. The response to this liberal attitude was, naturally, ferocious: hostile Christians started to harden the idea that some books were unacceptable, and even argued that academic speculation itself was unnecessary. The very word ‘teacher’ started, in this anti-intellectual atmosphere, to become suspect.42 The attitudes of the academic Christians were, eventually, suppressed.
And had our ancient traveller from Alexandria continued east and then east again, he or she might have come, eventually, to the same place as Cosmas Indicopleustes: to the Thomas Christians of India, whose Christianity was infused by the Acts of Thomas. It is, to this day, an interesting text. Near its opening, Jesus is seen giving the command to his followers that they should go forth into the world and spread his word. So far, its narrative feels familiar. But almost immediately it starts to surprise, for Thomas – who in this telling is surlier than apostles usually are (and who is also, somewhat alarmingly, referred to as Jesus’ ‘twin’) – refuses.* ‘Wherever you wish to send me, send me,’ he says, ‘but elsewhere. For I am not going to the Indians.’43
Jesus, however, is not to be put off. At that moment, he happens to notice a merchant walking about nearby; the merchant has, by good luck, come from an area near modern Afghanistan, to find a carpenter.44 The resourceful Jesus approaches him. Need a carpenter? he asks. The merchant replies, ‘Yes.’ Well, says Jesus, ‘I have a slave who is a carpenter, and I wish to sell him.’ Jesus points out Thomas, who, blithely unaware, is visible in the distance. The Indian merchant buys him immediately and Jesus, with bureaucratic efficiency, writes the merchant a bill of sale, which reads: ‘I, Jesus, son of the carpenter Joseph, declare that I have sold my slave . . . to you, Abban, a merchant.’ Things move quickly: ‘When the purchase was completed the Saviour took . . . Thomas, and led him to Abban, the merchant.’ Thomas now accepts his fate, and boards a ship bound for India.45
The narrative continues in a similarly eventful manner, taking in numerous miracles and some surpassingly beautiful poetry. One of its most striking scenes takes place at a wedding. As the scene opens, a young royal couple are about to consummate their marriage. The groom, thinking that he is going to meet his wife, ‘raised the curtain of the bridal chamber, that he might bring the bride to himself.’46 He is, to say the least, surprised to find Jesus already in bower with his wife. Jesus, it transpires, has materialized there so that he can give the newly married couple a lecture on celibacy – and then promptly does so.
Settling himself down on their marriage bed, Jesus tells the now slightly less happy couple to sit on two nearby couches, then proceeds to explain, at length, why they should not have sex. His reasoning is forceful. Children are without exception awful, Jesus says: they ‘become either lunatics or half-withered or crippled or deaf or dumb or paralytics or idiots’, while their tedious parents become ‘grasping’.47 If you do have children, then there will be no rest for either party, for children inevitably do ‘unprofitable and abominable works. For they will be detected either in adultery or in murder or in theft or in unchastity, and by all these you will be afflicted.’ Therefore refrain, Jesus warns them, ‘from this filthy intercourse.’48
Western Christians might have long disdained such stories, but Thomas Christians defend the antiquity of their religion. And theirs is, arguably, a claim that is supported by archaeology, for large numbers of ancient stone crosses have been found in numerous places on the south-west coast of India that have been dated to as early as the second century.49 Which, if true, would make them older than any Western cross.50