Exploring Christianity’s Indian Roots and Materialistic Dimensions

Christianity is often discussed in the context of Western history – the Roman Empire, the Reformation, the European missionaries. But the story of Christianity is much older and far more global than that framing suggests. Among its most striking early chapters is the faith’s presence in India, traceable to the first century CE, and at its theological core lies something equally surprising: a profound engagement with the physical, material world. Understanding both of these dimensions – the Indian roots of Christianity and its materialistic orientation – reveals a religion that is far more embodied and earthbound than its spiritualized reputation often implies.

Christianity’s arrival in India: the Thomas tradition 🔗

Long before European missionaries arrived on Indian shores, Christianity may already have taken root there. According to a well-established tradition, the Apostle Thomas – one of the twelve disciples of Jesus – landed at Muziris (present-day Kodungallur) on the Malabar Coast of Kerala in 52 CE. He is said to have preached among both Jewish and Hindu communities, established seven Christian communities across southern India, and was eventually martyred at Mylapore near present-day Chennai in 72 CE. His tomb in Mylapore has been a site of continuous pilgrimage for centuries.

The Saint Thomas Christians, also known as the Nasrani community and primarily located in Kerala, describe their identity as “Indian in culture, Christian in faith and Syrian in liturgy.” For them, this is not a historical curiosity – it is an unbroken, living tradition spanning nearly two millennia. When the Portuguese explorer Vasco da Gama reached India in 1498, he found thriving Christian communities already present in the south, a fact that astonished his crew.

Historical evidence and scholarly debate 🔗

The historicity of Thomas’s mission is a matter of genuine scholarly debate. There is no contemporary written documentation confirming the apostle’s physical presence in India. Historians note that the earliest known text connecting Thomas to India is the Acts of Thomas, a third-century Syriac document, which many scholars classify as hagiography rather than factual history. Yet the tradition is far from without support. The Christian historian Eusebius recorded that a scholar named Pantaenus visited India between 177 and 192 CE and found established Christian communities already using a version of the Gospel of Matthew. A bishop named John, signing documents at the Council of Nicaea in 325 CE, noted he presided over churches in Persia and India.

Physical evidence adds further weight to the tradition. Coins recovered from Punjab, Sindh, and Afghanistan confirm the existence of King Gondophares – a figure mentioned in the Acts of Thomas – establishing that at least some elements of the Thomas narrative align with verifiable history. Marco Polo visited the saint’s tomb in the 13th century, and several other medieval travelers recorded the site’s significance as a pilgrimage destination.

Today, an estimated six Indian Christian denominations trace their origins back to Thomas. Whether or not every detail of the tradition is historically provable, the community itself – with its distinct rites, liturgical language, and cultural identity – stands as living testimony to Christianity’s deep roots in the Indian subcontinent.

Christianity as a materialistic religion 🔗

The word “materialistic” carries baggage in ordinary usage – it tends to evoke consumerism or greed. But in a theological and philosophical context, Christian materialism refers to something quite different: the idea that matter, the body, and the physical world are not inferior to the spiritual but are, in fact, central to God’s concern and to human salvation. This is not a fringe position. It is, arguably, woven into the fabric of Christian doctrine from the very beginning.

The Incarnation: God enters the physical world 🔗

The doctrine of the Incarnation – that God became flesh in the person of Jesus Christ – is the theological cornerstone of Christianity’s engagement with the material world. The term itself comes from the Latin in carne, meaning “in the flesh.” This is not a metaphor. Christian orthodoxy insists that Jesus was fully human and fully divine – that he experienced hunger, thirst, pain, and death in a real body. This doctrine directly affirms the goodness of physical existence, countering any assumption that matter is somehow inferior to spirit.

As one theological analysis puts it, Christianity “is in some sense a materialist creed.” God is present in the Eucharist through the everyday stuff of bread and wine. Salvation is not primarily about escaping the body – it is expressed through feeding the hungry and caring for the sick. Jesus’s ministry in the Gospels is saturated with physical acts: healing bodies, restoring sight, raising the dead. The physical world, in Christianity, is not a prison to escape but a creation to be redeemed.

The body matters: resurrection, not mere immortality 🔗

One of the clearest signs of Christianity’s material orientation is its doctrine of bodily resurrection. The Christian belief is in the resurrection of the body, not merely the immortality of the soul. This is a crucial distinction. Many ancient philosophical traditions – particularly Platonic and Gnostic ones – taught that the soul is the real person and the body is a temporary container to be discarded. Christianity rejected this view. The resurrection of Jesus was understood as a bodily resurrection, and the hope for believers is a bodily resurrection as well. The body is not a side issue – it is part of the story of salvation.

Theologians point out that if Jesus assumed a human body at the Incarnation, lived in obedience in that body, maintained a body in his resurrection, and will return with a body, then embodiment is central – not incidental – to his redemptive work. This logic extends to believers: to be human is to be embodied, and that embodiment is theologically significant.

Critiquing the trend toward over-spiritualization 🔗

Despite this, the history of Christianity has seen persistent trends toward what might be called over-spiritualization – a tendency to treat the spiritual as primary and the physical as secondary or even suspect. As Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger (Pope Benedict XVI) observed, Christian theology over time had a tendency to convert the “kingdom of God” into a “kingdom of heaven beyond this mortal life,” and the well-being of people into a “salvation of souls” that only becomes meaningful after death. He explicitly stated this was not the message of Jesus Christ.

The theologian Charles Taylor coined the term “excarnation” to describe this modern inclination – the tendency to reduce significant reality to the mind and treat the body and material world as mere vehicles. This impulse, Taylor argues, is indebted to ancient Gnosticism, which blamed the world’s ills not on human sin but on physical creation itself. Christianity has always officially opposed this view, but excarnation continues to shape how many Christians practice and understand their faith in practice.

Pope John Paul II’s Theology of the Body directly confronted this trend, asserting that the body “alone is capable of making visible the spiritual and divine.” His lectures became a landmark restatement of Christianity’s incarnational commitment: the call is not to become more spiritual in an otherworldly sense, but to become more incarnational – more fully engaged with bodily, material, and social existence.

Christianity’s concern with the physical lives of believers 🔗

This theological framework has always had practical implications. Christianity’s material concern is not just about doctrine – it shapes how the faith engages with poverty, sickness, justice, and social life. Scholars of Christian formation argue that human development, including spiritual development, is fundamentally physical, embodied, and social – and that the New Testament clearly teaches that an inward focus on subjective experience, without concern for virtuous action in relationship with others, is not the intent of Christian faith.

This means that Christianity, when true to its doctrinal foundations, cannot treat the world as a waiting room. The Incarnation means the God of the Bible is not an aloof deity barking orders from afar. He entered the world – its suffering, its hunger, its political realities – and called his followers to do the same. The physical existence of believers: their bodies, their communities, their economic conditions, their mortality – all of these are within the scope of Christianity’s concern.

India and the material dimension: a convergence 🔗

There is an interesting resonance between the two themes of this discussion. The Thomas tradition in India is itself deeply incarnational in character. Thomas’s journey was a physical one – across dangerous seas and unfamiliar lands. The communities he is said to have established were real, rooted communities: families, churches, trading networks, cultural traditions. The Saint Thomas Christians of Kerala did not exist as a purely spiritual fellowship – they were, and remain, a concrete, embodied, historically situated people.

Similarly, the materialistic dimension of Christianity is not a late development or a minor theological footnote. The material world in Christianity is the very site of divine authority, where God took on embodied existence and where the drama of salvation unfolds. To reduce Christianity to an escape from the physical is to misread its central claims. From the shores of Kerala to the theological lecture halls of Rome, the religion has consistently – if not always consistently enough – insisted that the body matters, that the world matters, and that what happens in physical reality is of eternal significance.

What do you think? If Christianity is fundamentally a religion that affirms the importance of physical existence and the material world, how does that challenge common portrayals of religion as primarily “otherworldly”? And given that Christianity reached India in the first century – long before European colonialism – how might that change the way we think about the relationship between Christianity and Indian culture?

References

1. https://www.keralatourism.org/christianity/arrival-stthomas/6
2. https://www.reviewofreligions.org/47624/st-thomas-and-the-ancient-christian-tradition-of-india-the-apostle-who-journeyed-farther/
3. https://baselius.ac.in/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/MRPSUMMARY.pdf
4. https://radical.net/article/apostle-thomas-gospel-india/
5. https://www.britannica.com/topic/Incarnation-Jesus-Christ
6. https://www.newlifepca.org/pastorbobsblog/2014/12/24/3-reasons-the-incarnation-is-important
7. https://yalebooks.yale.edu/2017/02/09/material-theology-and-christian-religion/
8. https://cfc.sebts.edu/faith-and-culture/incarnation-gods-blueprint-human-anthropology/
9. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Materialism_and_Christianity
10. https://christoverall.com/article/longform/incarnation-versus-excarnation-in-culture-and-church-2/
11. https://cct.biola.edu/the-physical-nature-of-christian-life-formation-and-flourishing/
12. https://www.wisdomlib.org/christianity/concept/material-world