When northern India was converted to Islam in the seventh century A.D., the fanatical conquerors destroyed all the monuments of the "infidels". Because of the special position of Mary's grave, however, the Moslems were able to recognize that the memorial was a relic of a "People of the Book", either Christians or Israelites, and thus spared it and treated it with respect.
In 1898, the British colonial army built a defence tower immediately next to the monument. This, of course, did not deter many pilgrims from visiting the place of worship. In 1917, the building surrounding the grave was partly torn down at the order of a certain Captain Richardson, so that pilgrims would remain at a distance from the military zone. Loud cries of protest from the population caused the local officials to intervene, and the complete destruction of the memorial was thus prevented. The events concerning the matter of Mary's monument are to be found in the archives of the local administration, dated July 30, 1917. In 1950, the monument was restored. After official recognition of the border to Pakistan, the defence tower was removed; in its stead, a network of antennae for a television station flanks the tombstone.
Today a 170 km road runs from Mari to Srinagar, the capital of Kashmir, through wooded mountain scenery. About 40 km south of Srinagar, between the villages of Naugam and Nilmag, the Yus-Marg, the meadow of Jesus, is to be found on a vast plain. Here it is the Bani-Israel, the children of Israel, who settled in the area after 722 B.C. and continue to live there as shepherds who have passed down the reports that Jesus preached there.
The Acts of Thomas relate how the apostle Thomas lived as a missionary at the court of the Indian King Misdai in southern India, where he gained many followers and converted a great number of people. Later he fell into disfavour and met the fate of a martyr. When Marco Polo returned to Europe from his twenty-five year stay in the Far East, in 1295, he was able to tell the West of the existence of numerous Christians who worshipped the grave of the apostle Thomas, on the eastern coast of south India (as we have already mentioned, the grave of the apostle Thomas continues to be honoured in Milapore, near Madras in southern India, although his bones had been transported back to Edessa at the beginning of the fourth century). According to Marco Polo,the "Thomas Christians" used a red earth tinted by the martyr's blood for healing the ill. There had also been Christians on the western coast of south India (now the Malabar Coast of Kerala); according to the great traveller, Christianity had been in existence there for a very long time.
There are even earlier records to bear witness to Christianity in India.' Tertullian listed India among those lands "ruled" by Christianity. Ephracm (c. 306-373 A.D.) wrote of Thomas' missions in India, and Anorbius (c. 305 A.D.) also listed India among the countries under Christian influence. A person bearing the title "Bishop John of all Persia and Greater India" took part in the ominous Council of Nicaea.
In 1900, a short article appeared in an English journal which demanded the attention of the entire theological profession. It was reported that in the ruined Indian city of Fatchpur Sikri (175 km south of Delhi and c. 25 km from Agra), a saying of Jesus, completely unknown in the Occident, had been found engraved on an ancient wall. Fatehpur Sikri owed its short period of prosperity to the Indian Mogul emperor, Akbar the Great (1542 1605), who created the town from the ground up; the town was deserted a few decades later. In May 1601, the emperor made a triumphal entry into the city, and had the maxim inscribed on the southern main gate (Buland Darwaza) of the mosque. In 1582 Akbar had proclaimed a rational monotheism, in which he attempted to create a syncretic and unitarian harmony (din ilahi) among the various Indian religions. He had made sincere attempts to come to grips with the principles of Hinduism, Parsism and Jainism, and he was taught about the Gospels by Portuguese Jesuits who lived at his court. His plan was to unite India, then split into religious factions, in a single Religion that would contain the quintessence of all the various faiths as its one Truth. Akbar must have selected this particular saying of Jesus because it seemed to him to be the best representation of his ideas; otherwise he was hardly likely to have placed it in such an important place.
When leaving the precincts of the mosque via the main gate, one can read the inscription on the left side of the enormous archwav, underneath a description of the occasion it celebrated and the date: Jesus (Peace be witb bim) bas said: 'Tbe world is a brid ,ge.Pass over it,but do not settle down on it!'
Asecond inscription, this one above the archway of the northern wing (Liwan) of the mosque, gives the maxim in a slightlv different form, "Jesus (Peace be with him) has said: 'The world is a proud house, take this as a warning and do not build on it!...
The Portugese missionaries could not possibly have told the araban (Gk. = sayings attributed to Jesus but not found written in the Bible) to Akbar, for they are not to be found in any Christian source. The very extensive Life of Jesus which the Jesuit Jerome Xavier wrote for Akbar contains neither of the quotes. It is thus possible that the agrapha came from the early Thomas Christians. The form of introduction in the sayings, which is always the same, can be found in the later Islamic accounts about Jesus, so that most Orientalists have inferred that the saying can only have arrived in India via Islam. But this need not be the case, for there is a conspicuous agreement between this saying and the far earlier maxims of Jesus in the apocryphal Gospel of Thomas; this in both form and content. The Gospel according to Thomas is now accessible in its entirety thanks to the sensational finds at Nag Hammadi in 1945. The "Gospel" is not a coherent narrative like the synoptic Gospels, but a collection of 114 sayings of Jesus, in an arbitrary order. Most of the maxims are introduced with the same formula, "Jesus has said".The anthology is introduced in the following way: "These are the secret sayings which the living Jesus spoke and which Didymos Judas Thomas wrote down. And he said, 'Whoever finds the interpretation of these sayings will not experience death.""
Even if it were not possible to prove that the apostle Thomas actually lived in India, there is much evidence of missionary activity throughout India long before the Mohammedans stormed the land. The Aramaic Gospel according to Matthew, which must have originated in c. 180 A.D., tells of a missionary voyage to the Indians undertaken by one Pantaenus of Alexandria.
The Cbronicle of Seert (I8,25) relates that Bishop David of Basra (a contemporary of the Metropolite Papa who died in A.D. 316), went to India and preached there with great success. In about the year 335, Emperor Constantine sent Bishop Theophilos to India to reform the ecclesiastical system there, according to accounts by Philostorgius from before A.D. 433.
In an account from the end of the fourth century, Symeon of Mesopotamia mentions the martyrdom of Indian "barbarians" for Christ. The Cbronicle of Seert 11 9 also reports that in about A.D. 490, the Persian bishop Ma'an sent his writings to India. In the accounts of Cosmas Indicopleusta, one can find precise geographical references about the voyage to India which he undertook in around A.D. 525. He found Christians on the island of Sri Lanka, and on the Indian west coast, "in Male, where pepper grows (Malabar), and in the place called Kalliana (Kalyan, near Bombay)", and he mentions that Kalliana was the seat of a bishop who had once lived in Persia".
This brief enumeration should suffice to disprove the theory generally held by Indologists that Jesus did not become known in India until he was introduced through Islam. Yet one must add that the Koran has a great deal to offer on the topic of Jesus' life in India. According to the Koran, Jesus did not die on the cross, but survived the crucifixion, and lived thereafter in a "Happy Valley".
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