Gondophares - Connection With Saint Thomas and Apollonius of Tyana

Connection With Saint Thomas and Apollonius of Tyana

The apocryphical Acts of Thomas mentions one king Gudnaphar. This king has been associated with Gondophares I by many scholars, as it was not yet established that there were several kings with the same name. Recent research by R.C. Senior shows with some certainty that the king who best fits these references was Gondophares-Sases, the fourth king using the title Gondophares.

A. D. H. Bivar, writing in The Cambridge History of Iran, said that the reign dates of one Gondophares recorded in the Takht-i Bahi inscription (20–46 or later AD) are consistent with the dates given in the Apocryphal Acts of Thomas for the Apostle's voyage to India following the Crucifixion in c. 30 AD. B. N. Puri, of the Department of Ancient Indian History and Archaeology, University of Lucknow, India, also identified Gondophares with the ruler said to have been converted by Saint Thomas the Apostle. The same goes for the reference to an Indo-Parthian king in the accounts of the life of Apollonius of Tyana. Purii says that the dates given by Philostratus in his Life of Apollonius of Tyana for Apollonius' visit to Taxila, 43–44 AD, are within the period of the reign of Gondophares I, who also went by the Parthian name, Phraotes. Saint Thomas was brought before King Gundaphar (Gondophares) at his capital, Taxila. "Taxila" is the Greek form of the contemporary Pali name for the city, “Takkasila”, from the Sanskrit “Taksha-sila”. The name of the city was transformed in subsequent legends concerning Thomas, which were consolidated into the Historia Trium Regum (History of the Three Kings) by John of Hildesheim (1364–1375), into "Silla", "Egrisilla", "Grisculla", and so on, the name having undergone a process of metamorphosis similar to that which transformed “Vindapharnah” (Gondophares) to “Caspar”. Hildesheim's Historia Trium Regum says: “In the third India is the kingdom of Tharsis, which at that time was ruled over by King Caspar, who offered incense to our Lord. The famous island Eyrisoulla lies in this land: it is there that the holy apostle St Thomas is buried”. "Egrisilla" appears on the globe made in Nuremberg by Martin Behaim in 1492, where it appears on the southernmost part of the peninsula of Hoch India, “High India” or “India Superior”, on the eastern side of the Sinus Magnus ("Great Gulf", the Gulf of Thailand): there Egrisilla is identified with the inscription, das lant wird genant egtisilla, (“the land called Egrisilla”). In his study of Behaim's globe, E. G. Ravenstein noted: “Egtisilla, or Eyrisculla, is referred to in John of Hildesheim’s version of the ‘Three Kings’ as an island where St. Thomas lies buried”.