mission · 52 · India
Eusebius, quoting Origen, assigns Parthia to Thomas. The third-century Acts of Thomas takes him further, to a king called Gundaphar who wants a palace built — and Gundaphar turned out to be real, an Indo-Parthian ruler of the first century whose coins were dug up in the nineteenth. That does not make the Acts history, and this dataset cites them only as tradition; but it is a stranger coincidence than a pure invention usually manages. The Saint Thomas Christians of Kerala have asserted the landing without interruption, and the later record here — Cosmas finding a bishop at Kalliana in the sixth century, the Tharisapalli plates in the ninth — is not tradition at all.
To take the lot that fell to him — Parthia by Eusebius, India by the Acts.
A church on the Malabar coast that has called itself after him for as long as there are records of it.