But Christ overrules the obstinate refusal of his doubting Apostle. A merchant has arrived from India, with a commission from a certain King Gundaphorus, to buy him a carpenter, and for three pounds Christ sells him His servant Judas, "who also is Thomas." The slave-dealing need not stop us. It only amounts to saying than Thomas came to be sold as a slave to an Indian merchant, and that people saw in the circumstance the overruling finger of God. But Gundaphorus is a historical personage, whose identity has been brought to light by the industry of the pioneers of modern historical research, and was an

[paragraph continues] Indo-Parthian king, ruling in the Indus valley. Thus St. Thomas goes, according to one story, to India; according to another, to Parthia. Both stories may be true, supposing that he went to Indo-Parthia. Gundaphorus had a long reign, from A.D. 21 to A.D. 60, and he ruled over the districts of Arachosia, the lower Indus, Herat, and Peshawur. He was a great ruler, for the Scythian hordes of the Yuetchi had not yet swept down upon his territories, and, like great rulers, he immortalized himself in stone. He was a mighty builder, and his buildings were artistically adorned. We shall see in discussing Gandhara art, which is the art of North-West India at the beginning of the Christian era, that it is dominated by Graeco-Roman conceptions, and a recent discovery at Peshawur has given the world the name of a Greek architect for the stupa erected by the Scythian King Kanishka in honour of S'akyamuni's relics. It is, therefore, an altogether possible story that St. Thomas should fall into the hands of kidnappers, and be taken, as a slave skilled in building and architecture, to the court of a great Indian king, thus fulfilling, in spite of himself, the desires of his Master.

The Indian merchant, Abbanes, having made his purchases, returns to his master in Indo-Parthia. "They began, therefore, to sail. And they had a fair wind, and they sailed fast until they came to Andrapolis, a royal city." The Syrian trade with India went overland as far as the head of the Persian Gulf, and thence by sea to the mouth of the Indus. If St. Thomas was sold as a slave and taken to India, it would be by that route that he would be taken. Andrapolis means the "city of the man," and Purushapura, the modern Peshawur, has the same meaning. Purushapura was, as the legend says, actually the royal city of Gundaphorus.

After being for some time in the service of Gundaphorus, at Andrapolis, or Purushapura, where he did much preaching of the gospel, St. Thomas goes to a neighbouring kingdom, the sovereign of which appears as Misdeus or Basdeo. The second of these names gives us an Indian form, Vasudeva, and it is known that a king of this name was reigning, contemporaneously with Gundaphorus, at Mathara on the Jumna.