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ST. THOMAS THE APOSTLE AND INDIA SI
Güdana who may possibly have been his brother.’ The
inscriptions of this Gondophares or Gondopharnes range over a
period of 26 years, and the last one, the so-called Takht-i Bahi
inscription2, is dated in the year 103 of an era which was long
disputed. Nowadays, however, scarcely anyone doubts that we
have here the so-called Vikrama-era which was instituted in the
year 58 B.C. Consequently Gondopharnes would still have
been reigning in 45 A.D., and as this was his 26th year he
must have become a ’great king’ in about 19 A.D.
Reinaud, in 1848, was the first one to put forward the
afterwards undoubted identification of Gondophar(n)es with king
Güdnaphar of the Acts of Judas Thomas. And Professor
Rap-son3 quite recently has drawn attention to the possibility of
identifying Guda(na) with Gad, the ’king’s brother’ in the
apocryphal work. Also this identification cannot, as far as my
opinion goes, well be contested. But this proves to full
evidence that beneath the fa7iciful exterior of the Acts there is the
nucleus of a historical tradition which connected, in some tvay or
other, a Christian missionary called Thomas and said to have
been one of the Apostles of our Lord with king Gondopharnes
who between 19—A.D. (and perhaps a few years more) was
the overlord of North- IVestei-n India and Afghanistan. This, I
venture to think, becomes still more evident if we take also the
following facts into consideration.
Gondopharnes himself belonged to an Iranian dynasty; his
name is purely Iranian (Vindafarna) and belongs to a category
which is well-known’to classical scholars through examples such
as Ttaaacpépvrj; etc. Historically he was the last great ruler during
a period of Iranian (Parthian) supremacy in North-Western India
which may have lasted between about 75 B.C.—50 A.D.
But about the later date an end was put to his proud realm
by a new wave of invaders, the Kushänas, who came from
1 Cp. Rapson in Cambridge History of India I, 577 sq.
2 On this inscription, which was discovered in or about 1875, cp.
Dowson Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society 1875, 376 sqq.; Thomas
ibid. 1913, 636; Cunningham Archaeological Survey of India 1875, 58 sqq.;
Senart Journal Asiatique 1890: 1, 113 sqq.; Boyer ibid. 1904: 1, 457
sqq. etc.
3 Cambridge History of India I, 579.
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