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This website hosts the 2010 revised and updated edition of The Myth of Saint Thomas and the Mylapore Shiva Temple. It is a complete study of the St. Thomas in India legend — its origin, history, ideology, and communal ramifications — and is named after the main, 24-chapter essay by Ishwar Sharan. It includes 28 independent, penetrating articles by senior journalists and scholars, and exposes in detail the anti-Hindu bias in India’s secular English-language media.
Part of the book documents the pronounced Christian bias of the Encyclopaedia Britannica and popular online reference portal Wikipedia. Both encyclopedia’s carry fanciful, non-factual entries for St. Thomas the Apostle in India that they refuse to correct or change.
The book also documents the destruction of the original Kapaleeswara Shiva Temple by the Portuguese and its replacement by the San Thome Cathedral Basilica on the Mylapore beach in Chennai.
This online edition on WordPress can be easily searched using the search field at the top of the side bar. There are many relevant reference links including a link to the original 3rd century Syrian religious romance, the infamous Acts of Thomas by Bardesanes, which is the source of the legend of St. Thomas in India.
A hard copy of The Myth of Saint Thomas and the Mylapore Shiva Temple is available from publisher Voice of India, New Delhi. It has an extensive bibliography and is a valuable tool for researchers and historians.
Indologist Dr. Koenraad Elst has written a comprehensive foreword for the new edition. His short foreword to the 1995 edition is posted here as he makes some pertinent remarks about Indian secularists and their uncritical acceptance of Christian mythology as Indian history.
Dr. Elst studied under Jesuits at Katholieke Universiteit in Belgium, Europe’s oldest Catholic university at Leuven, and is in a position to say with authority that the St. Thomas in India tale today is a fraud on the people of India by crafty, untruthful Catholic priests who make their living by fooling the faithful. He writes:
According to Christian leaders in India, the apostle Thomas came to India in 52 AD, founded the Syrian Christian Church, and was killed by the fanatical Brahmins in 72 AD. Near the site of his martyrdom, the St. Thomas Church was built. In fact this apostle never came to India. The Christian community in South India was founded by a merchant called Knai Thoma or Thomas of Cana in 345 AD — a name which readily explains the Thomas legend. He led four hundred refugees who fled persecution in Persia and were given asylum by the Hindu authorities.
In Catholic universities in Europe, the myth of the apostle Thomas going to India is no longer taught as history, but in India it is still considered useful. Even many vocal “secularists” who attack the Hindus for “relying on myth” in the Ayodhya affair, off-hand profess their belief in the Thomas myth. The important point is that Thomas can be upheld as a martyr and the Brahmins decried as fanatics.
In reality, the missionaries were very disgruntled that the damned Hindus refused to give them martyrs (whose blood is welcomed as “the seed of the faith”), so they had to invent one. Moreover, the church which they claim commemorates St.Thomas’s martyrdom at the hands of Hindu fanaticism, is in fact a monument of Hindu martyrdom at the hands of Christian fanaticism. It is a forcible replacement of two important Hindu temples — Jain and Shaiva — whose existence was insupportable to the Christian missionaries.
No one knows how many Hindu priests and worshipers were killed when the Christian soldiers came to remove the curse of Paganism from the Mylapore beach. Hinduism does not practice martyr-mongering, but if at all we have to speak of martyrs in this context, the title goes to these Jina- and Shiva-worshipers and not to the apostle Thomas. — Dr. Koenraad Elst
The Myth of Saint Thomas and the Mylapore Shiva Temple, third revised edition, 2010 is available from publisher Voice of India, New Delhi. It has an extensive bibliography and is a valuable tool for researchers and historians.
San Tommaso Basilica, Ortona, Italy
The real tomb of St. Thomas in San Tommaso Basilica, Ortona
San Thome Cathedral, Mylapore, Madras, India
The fake tomb of St. Thomas in San Thome Cathedral, Madras
