When modern European missionaries arrived in India in the eighteenth century, they were astonished to discover Christian communities that traced their origins back to Thomas. How and when did Christianity spread eastwards? The earliest answer can be found in the pages of The Acts of Thomas. The Acts of Thomas is one of five surviving apocryphal acts along with Andrew, John, Peter, and Paul that recount the adventures of the apostles as they carried the Christian message to the far reaches of their world. The well-known Hymn of the Pearl, widely regarded as an allegory of the soul on its journey, from God and back to God, is found in its pages. (http://www.amazon.com/Acts-Thomas-Early-Christian-Apocrypha/dp/1598150219)

Darrell L. Bock suggests the real lost gospel is the one already found in the Bible and reminds everyone of what it means: good news. --from publisher description.

The Acts of Peter, one of the Apocryphal Acts of the Apostles that detail the exploits of the key figures of early Christianity, provides a unique window into the formation of early Christian narrative. Like the Gospels, the Acts of Peter developed from disparate oral and written narrative from the first century. The apocryphal text, however, continued to develop into a number of re-castings, translations, abridgements, and expansions. The Acts of Peter present Christian narrative in an alternate universe, in which canonization did not halt the process of creative re-composition. Now, in this groundbreaking book, Thomas examines the sources and subsequent versions of the Acts, from the earliest traditions through the sixth-century Passions of the Apostles, arguing the importance of its "narrative fluidity": the existence of the work in several versions or multiforms. This feature, shared with the Jewish novels of Esther and Daniel, the Greek romance about Alexander the Great, and the Christian Gospels, allows these narratives to adapt to accommodate the changing historical circumstances of their audiences. In each new version, the audiences' defining conflicts were reflected in the text, echoing a historical consciousness more often identified with primary oral societies, in which the account of the past is a malleable script explaining the present. Although the genre most closely comparable to these works is the ancient novel, their serious historical intent separates them from the later, more self-consciously fictive novels, and maintains them within the realm of the earlier historical novels produced by ethnic subcultures within the Roman empire.

Annotation Klijn (emeritus, U. of Groningen) presents a commentary on the acts of Thomas. He relies on the Syriac text, thought by him to be the original language of the writing, but makes reference to the Greek translation. He seeks to demonstrate that the work belongs to the Eastern Christian tradition rather than that of the Gnostics. Klijn has revised the introduction in response to more recent work on Syriac Christianity, but largely left the commentary the same as in the original 1962 edition. Annotation (c)2003 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com).

THE BOOK OF THOMAS THE DOUBTER: Uncovering the Secret Teachings is a biblical, historical novel based on the Gospel of Thomas and Acts of Thomas uncovered among the ancient Nag Hammadi texts. The book depicts Thomas carrying out Jesus' secret teachings as a disciple and as an apostle in India. In India, there are sites and landmarks commemorating Thomas. Also in India are the Thomas Christians (the Syrian Nasrani), affirming their founder as the disciple Thomas.