As much as any of the twelve apostles chosen by Jesus Christ — as much as Peter, as much as Paul — Thomas has captivated the imagination of modern western Christians. They tend to identify with a doubter. They want to know him better. In modern religious art he is often depicted moving his hand (sometimes tentatively, sometimes boldly) toward the wound in Christ’s side. In the far east, however, and especially in India, Thomas has always been revered as the great apostle, the man who did for the orient what Peter and Paul did for the occident.

Thomas was a devout Jew who grew up in a unique vassal kingdom within the Roman Empire. There, children and young men learned their trades from their fathers. They learned the law in the synagogue. The rest of the world judged Palestinian Jewish culture to be strange, idiosyncratic, and intractable. Thomas and his countrymen saw it a different way: God had chosen them and given them a way of life that set them apart from other nations.

Into Thomas’s ordinary life came a rabbi named Jesus, who changed him, changed his life, changed his plans. Thomas experienced many adventures in Jesus’ company before traveling — as a rabbi himself — to the distant and exotic land of India, a climate and a culture quite unlike his own. Legend has it that India fell to him by lot when the apostles were allowing God to determine their future. Thomas drew the straw tagged for the very ends of the earth.

According to ancient traditions, Thomas voyaged along the trade routes; and, like Paul, he went first to the Jews of his adopted country. Over the course of many years in India, he preached, worked miracles, and inspired conversions, until a fateful final confrontation with the local priests of the goddess Kali.

A vibrant, distinctive Christianity grew from his gospel seeds. And the word spread. There is ample testimony from the era of the Fathers confirming Thomas’s apostolate in India: the Syriac Acts of Thomas describe it in detail; Clement of Alexandria mentions is, as do The Didascalia Apostolorum, Origen, Eusebius, Arnobius, Ephrem, Gregory Nazianzen, Cyrillonas, Ambrose, Gaudentius, Jerome, Rufinus, Theodoret, Paulinus, Jacob of Sarug, Gregory of Tours, Isidore of Seville, and many others.

And Thomas’s deeds were never forgotten in India itself, where Christianity has endured in spite of tremendous difficulties. There are pilgrimage sites related to the apostle’s life and death — they were popular destinations even in the time of the Fathers — and several epic poems about Thomas have been passed down by Christians for generations. (There are even popular Hindu poems about him!) Curiously, these ancient songs preserve certain telltale archaic forms of expression that we find in the Acts of the Apostles — referring to Christianity as “The Way,” for example. These, too, could be evidence of great antiquity.

Marco Polo heard the oral traditions when he visited India. So did the Portuguese traders who colonized the lands in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. They made voluminous records of all they found. The traditions made their way, via missionaries, to the New World. There, the first generation of Aztec and Maya to convert to Christianity read Thomas back into their own history; and legends emerged of the apostle’s fabulous voyage to Central America. When those American tribes read the gospels and the histories of the church, they could imagine Thomas, alone of the apostles, coming to them with the good news.

Recent bestsellers often present Thomas in terms of so-called “gospels” that bore his name. Those texts are certainly ancient, and they are fascinating in an esoteric way. But they do not even pretend to be historical; nor do they present a character of any human warmth, a Thomas whom readers can come to know. Instead, “Doubting Thomas” appears as a useful peg on which to hang sectarian doctrine.

But Thomas was not the sort of seemingly disembodied spirit we encounter in the pseudonymous gospels that borrow his name. He was a particular man of flesh and blood who lived in a particular time and place. He took particular hardships upon his flesh (harsh travel, demanding asceticism, persecution and abuse) and he shed his blood at a particular moment, all for the sake of the saving gospel of Jesus Christ.

Pope Paul VI wrote a letter on the 1,900th anniversary of the martyrdom of St. Thomas, in 1972 — an important papal acknowledgment of the Indian tradition. Pope John Paul II also made several references to Thomas’s life and death in India.

Some critical scholars (of course) dismiss the accounts of Thomas in India. But India’s historians have subjected the evidence to rigorous scrutiny in recent years, and even many Hindus have come to affirm its possibility and even probability. I’m definitely with them, and I hope to write a book on the subject in the not too distant future. I invite you to read a couple of books and study the matter for yourself. They’re not available in the United States, so you have to order them from India. (For such purchases I have received the best service from Merging Currents, a U.S.-based import company.) The books are A.M. Mundadan’s History of Christianity in India (Volume 1: From the Beginning up to the Middle of the Sixteenth Century) and George Menachery’s massive collection The Nazranies.

While you’re waiting for your books to arrive, please pray Thomas’s intercession for the Christians of India, some of whom have endured subtle (and not so subtle) persecution in recent years. The blood of the apostle is the seed of their Church. We can be certain it will flourish in peace in due season.

Oh, and one more thing: St. John’s gospel gives us no indication that “doubting” Thomas took Jesus up on the offer to explore the wound in His side. That’s an imaginative leap that many artists have been willing to make. But all we know from the New Testament is that Thomas made the leap of faith.

A very cool and unusual assortment of information on early Christian history — some translations, too.

I’m planning to direct your attention, every now and then, to the great contemporary historians who are urging us to turn to the past, to study the past, to learn from the past, and to be grateful for our past. What they say about American history or world history applies all the more to early Church history. Consider Victor Davis Hanson, who last year published a little essay titled “What Happened to History?” The following are outtakes. Their application to the study of the Fathers should be self-evident.

Our society suffers from the tyranny of the present. Presentism is the strange affliction of assuming that all our good things were created by ourselves — as if those without our technology who came before us lacked our superior knowledge and morality…

We rarely mention our forebears … Public acknowledgment of prior generations characterized the best orations of Abraham Lincoln, Franklin Roosevelt and John Kennedy, who looked for guidance from, and gave thanks to, their ancestors…

To appreciate the value of history, we must also accept that human nature is constant and fixed across time and space. Our kindred forefathers in very dissimilar landscapes were nevertheless subject to the same emotions of fear, envy, honor and shame as our own…

Reverence for those who came before us ensures humility about our own limitations. It restores confidence that far worse crises than our own … were endured by those with far less resources at their disposal. By pondering those now dead, we create a certain pact: that we, too, will do our part for another generation not yet born to enjoy the same privilege … which at such great cost was given to us by others whom we have all but now forgotten.

My friend and colleague Rob Corzine recently took part in an ecumenical panel discussion on “How the Early Church Read the Bible.” You’ll find audio of the event, and even copies of all the handouts, right here. Rob will be with us on our St. Paul Center pilgrimage to Rome next May. We hope to have details soon.

I noticed this morning that, while I was looking the other way, nine reviews had accumulated on Amazon for my latest book, The Grail Code: Quest for the Real Presence, which I co-authored with my friend Christopher Bailey. Check out the reviews. They’re uniformly effusive, and this pleases me to no end. (The book is available in Canadian French, too, as Graal Code: Enquête sur le mystère du Graal. And it’ll soon be out in German. Chris and I have heard rumors of Italians and Spaniards waiting in the wings. One may hope, and so may two.)

And while you’re surfing, visit GrailCode.com, Chris’s blog. You’ll find lots of fascinating scoops on the Grail, Merlin, Arthur, Guinevere, Lancelot, Galahad, and all the questers.

N.S. Gill, About.com’s guide to Classical History, has posted some good pointers to online resources about Egeria. Egeria was the Spanish nun who kept a diary of her pilgrimage to the Holy Land, probably in the fourth century. The diary is a warm document, rich in description of the Church’s official liturgy as well as the spontaneous and popular piety of ordinary Christians. And it’s one of the extremely few records we have of the “mothers” of the Church. For a full text of Egeria’s book (at least as much as has survived), see here.

Today’s the feast of the first Roman Martyrs. Theirs is a story you just have to hear. But first we have to backtrack a little bit.

In July of A.D. 64, during the tenth year of Nero’s reign, a great fire consumed much of the city of Rome. The fire raged out of control for seven days — and then it started again, mysteriously, a day later. Many in Rome knew that Nero had been eager to do some urban redevelopment. He had a plan that included an opulent golden palace for himself. The problem was that so many buildings were standing in his way — many of them teeming wooden tenements housing Rome’s poor and working class.

The fire seemed too convenient for Nero’s purposes — and his delight in watching the blaze didn’t relieve anybody’s suspicions. If he didn’t exactly fiddle while Rome burned, he at least recited his poems. Nero needed a scapegoat, and an upstart religious cult, Jewish in origin and with foreign associations, served his purposes well. Nero, who was a perverse expert at human torment, had some of its members tortured till they were so mad they would confess to any crime. Once they had confessed, he had others arrested.

He must have known, however, that the charges would not hold up. So he condemned them not for arson, or treason, or conspiracy, but for “hatred of humanity.”

To amuse the people, he arranged for their execution to be a spectacle, entertainment on a grand scale. The Roman historian Tacitus (who had contempt for the religion, but greater contempt for Nero) describes in gruesome detail the tortures that took place amid a party in Nero’s gardens.

Mockery of every sort was added to their deaths. Covered with the skins of beasts, they were torn by dogs and perished, or were nailed to crosses, or were doomed to the flames. These served to illuminate the night when daylight failed. Nero had thrown open the gardens for the spectacle, and was exhibiting a show in the circus, while he mingled with the people in the dress of a charioteer or drove about in a chariot. Hence, even for criminals who deserved extreme and exemplary punishment there arose a feeling of compassion; for it was not, as it seemed, for the public good, but to glut one man’s cruelty, that they were being punished.

That is all we know about the first Roman martyrs. We know none of their names. Tacitus doesn’t tell us why they were willing to die this way rather than renounce their faith. Yet this should be an important question for us to consider. Why did the martyrs do this? What prepared them to face death so bravely? To what exactly did they bear witness with their death?

The answers to these questions (and many more) can be found in the rest of the article, at the archive of Touchstone Magazine, where the article appeared last March. If you’re not already subscribing to Touchstone, please do! Touchstone is one of the few magazines that treat the Fathers as news.

The article originated in a talk I gave in Rome last year on the feast of the Roman Martyrs. It’s called “The Roman Martyrs and Their Mass.” You can get the talk on MP3 right here. It’s free, of course.

St. Augustine on the feast of Saints Peter and Paul, courtesy of Father Z.

Now the National Geographic Channel brings you … The Apocalypse. Says their press release: “For nearly 2,000 years, the Book of Revelation has haunted mankind. On Sunday, July 16, at 9 p.m. ET/PT, the National Geographic Channel (NGC) premieres Secrets of Revelation, a one-hour special that explores the mysteries behind this ancient and provocative text.”

It’s a pity I have to trim the hedges that night.

I hope you’ll spend your idle moments with Kevin Edgecomb’s translation of the world’s oldest commentary on Revelation instead, St. Victorinus’s third-century In Apocalypsin. Kevin already has the first six chapters ready for your reading.

Hat tip on National Geographic: David Mills of Mere Comments.

UPDATE on Kevin’s progress: Make that eight chapters of Victorinus, and Kevin plans to have the thing finished this weekend.

AMENDED UPDATE on Kevin’s progress: Uh, I mean next weekend.

I love the feast of Saints Peter and Paul for many reasons — not least because it’s the ordination day of my good friend and sometime co-author, Father Kris Stubna. With Father Kris I wrote two small Q&A catechisms that have sold well and, I hope, served well. They’re What Catholics Believe and The Pocket Catechism for Kids. We have a third book under consideration with a publisher right now, and we wouldn’t mind at all if you prayed for its happy landing.

But I love the feast day mostly because I love Saints Peter and Paul. One of the great joys in my life is my job as vice-president of the St. Paul Center for Biblical Theology — so there’s my Pauline connection. As for Peter: well, I take comfort in his life story, because even the most reverential of his ancient biographers portray him doing bonehead things and then repenting, and then repeating step one. This pattern is quite familiar to me. Just ask my wife for details.

Peter and Paul — two Jewish boys from the Levant — are undeniably Roman saints. The Bible tracks their steps on the way to Rome. And the early Church was lock-step consistent in assigning the locus of their martyrdom to the imperial city. Writing around 69 A.D., St. Clement of Rome used a curious and seemingly primitive phrase when he spoke not of “the twelve apostles,” but of “the two apostles.” Peter and Paul were Rome’s apostles, and so they were Clement’s.

Clement wrote his letter from the city of Peter to correct a church of Paul, the rowdy congregation in Corinth, to whom the Apostle to the Gentiles had written two (canonical) letters. The great patristic scholar Msgr. Thomas Herron (who died in 2004) once concluded from Clement’s letter that the papacy has not only a “Petrine trajectory,” which is often noted, but also a “Pauline trajectory,” which has been neglected. He called on future scholars to discern what that Pauline trajectory has meant historically, and what it might mean theologically.

Lots of Fathers follow Clement’s lead and talk up Rome’s “two apostles” — most notably Irenaeus, whose day we celebrated yesterday. And there’s no shortage of ancient graffiti attesting to the abiding presence and power of both apostles, in their legacy, in their bones, and in their spirit.

But the real cool guy for this feast day is Pope St. Leo the Great, who preached the model homily on the first century’s dynamic duo. He calls them the new founders of Rome. As Romulus and Remus had established the old Rome, pagan Rome, so Peter and Paul now received honor as founders of the new Rome, Christian Rome, an eternal city, as it were. If you have five minutes to spare today, please read St. Leo’s Sermon 82, “On the Feast of the Apostles Peter and Paul.” If you’ve got more time, here’s more to read on this very Roman day (and in the months of its afterglow):

* Kevin Edgecomb’s fresh new translation of 1 Clement.

* From The Way of the Fathers archive: Footsteps of the Fathers.

* And the big one: Father Luke Rivington’s 500-page study of The Primitive Church and the See of Peter (from 1894). Right now it’s posted entirely in PDF and partially in HTML.

In Rome there’s no work today — that is, even more “no work” than usual! In America and elsewhere, it’s best to celebrate the feast with chocolate.

Now everybody’s favorite online library of the Fathers, New Advent, has a blog on its front page. New Advent’s proprietor, Kevin Knight, was the great pioneer of Catholic presence on the Web, and he’s continued to be visionary in his use of the technology. I’ve had the privilege of meeting Kevin and corresponding with him, and I know him to be a noble soul who lives up to his last name. If you follow my links, you already visit New Advent often. But spend some time today browsing the blog as well.

Rod Bennett has just completed a fascinating five-part series titled “The New Gods.” He argues that modern “pagan” mythology is embedded in science fiction and fantasy films, and that we can and should imitate St. Justin Martyr in engaging the devotees of today’s strange gods. Here’s the first post. But read all five.

Want to know more about St. Justin Martyr? My son (and webmaster) just posted the audio of my KVSS interview broadcast on St. Justin’s feast day.

St. Irenaeus is a giant. Pay no mind to the modern academics who portray him as a meanie nun out to rap gnostic knuckles with a crozier-sized ruler. St. Irenaeus was a scholar’s scholar, a biblical theologian of the first rank. He was a global diplomat who actually succeeded at making peace. And he was a holy, plain-speaking, and truth-telling bishop. If today’s gnostic resurgents don’t like him, it’s because, after eighteen centuries and more, his critique is still right as rain and still raining all over the gnostic parade.

Irenaeus deserves a posthumous Purple Heart for having read all the available gnostic writings in their entirety. I have six children, but I cannot imagine that kind of patience. And most of the time he was able to address the gnostic arguments (I use the term loosely) in an even tone. Sometimes they raised his ire. Once their cosmology got so flaky that it inspired the saint to compose a parody. There are times when only satire will do.

St. Irenaeus is an important link in tradition’s golden chain. He probably composed his works when he was very old, in the late 100s in the land we now know as France. When he was a young man, though, he lived in Asia Minor, where he studied under the holy bishop Polycarp, who had himself converted to Christianity under St. John the Apostle. Irenaeus treasured the stories of John that he had learned from his master. His few, small anecdotes are a precious witness to the life of the apostle.

And all of Irenaeus’s life gave witness to the teaching of the apostles. The man was steeped in Scripture, steeped in liturgy, in love with the Church and all of its glorious structures of authority. In Irenaeus’s voluminous writings we find it all: the Mass, the papacy, the office of bishop, the real presence of Jesus in the Eucharist, the condemnation of heresy. One of my favorite lines from his work is this, quoted in the Catechism of the Catholic Church: “Our way of thinking is attuned to the Eucharist, and the Eucharist in turn confirms our way of thinking.” This is the most primitive form of the axiom that later Fathers would state as “Lex orandi, lex credendi.” The law of prayer is the law of belief. The liturgy is the place where living tradition truly lives.

The old Catholic Encyclopedia tells us that the biographical information we have about Irenaeus is shaky. But there are a few things we know for sure. He was born in or near Proconsular Asia in the first half of the second century. He sat at the feet of the holy Bishop Polycarp (d. 155) at Smyrna. During the persecution of Marcus Aurelius, Irenaeus was a priest of the Church of Lyons. The clergy of that city, many of whom were suffering imprisonment for the faith, sent him (177 or 178) to Rome with a letter to Pope Eleutherius concerning the Montanist heresy, and on that occasion bore emphatic testimony to his merits. Returning to Gaul, Irenaeus succeeded the martyr St. Pothinus as Bishop of Lyons. During the religious peace which followed the persecution of Marcus Aurelius, the new bishop divided his activities between the duties of a pastor and of a missionary and his writings, almost all of which were directed against gnosticism, the heresy then spreading in Gaul and elsewhere. In 190 or 191 he interceded with Pope Victor to lift the sentence of excommunication laid by that pontiff upon the Christian communities of Asia Minor that celebrated Easter on a day different from the rest of the Church’s feast. Nothing is known of the date of his death, which must have occurred at the end of the second or the beginning of the third century. Tradition holds that he died as a martyr, so the priests wear red vestments today.

Irenaeus wrote many works. None of these writings has come down to us in the original text, though a great many fragments of them survive as citations in later writers (Hippolytus, Eusebius, etc.). Two works, however, have reached us in their entirety: The first and most important is a treatise in five books commonly titled “Adversus Haereses,” devoted to the “Detection and Overthrow of the False Knowledge.” A second work is the “Proof of the Apostolic Preaching.” The author’s aim here is not to refute heretics, but to confirm the faithful by expounding the Christian doctrine to them, and notably by demonstrating the truth of the Gospel by means of the Old Testament prophecies. It is a magnificent testimony to the deep and lively faith of Irenaeus.

Father Paul Mankowski, S.J., has — in the spirit of Irenaeus — taken on the task of challenging and refuting the saint’s modern detractors. Read his brief essay on the subject.

KVSS Radio interviewed me to celebrate this great day. I’ve posted the audio file on my Talks page. KVSS has also posted our conversation on its own special Mike Aquilina page. Bless their hearts.

You should get to know KVSS and my regular interviewers, morning hosts Bruce and Kris McGregor. No one is doing more to promote the Fathers via radio. You can help the KVSS apostolate by donating here.

There are complete (if dated) English translations of Irenaeus available online: Adversus Haereses and Proof of the Apostolic Preaching.