The Apocryphal Writings and India

Abstract This chapter investigates apocryphal writings like the Gospel of Thomas (GTh) and the Acts of Thomas (ATh) with a focus on their cross-cultural and indigenous connectivity to the Indian/Indo-Parthian scenario. The GTh and the ATh are usually interpreted in Western idioms detached from the wider Indian contextual realities. The Eurocentric and Western interpretations of these works often disregard the time and space aspects, the sociohistorical and religiocultural inferences within the writings, and the ideological and epistemological framework of them. A decolonized reading of the GTh/ATh draws our attention toward the contextual and epistemological aspects of the Indian realia. With a critical understanding of the existing scholarship on these works, this chapter focuses on the Indian/Indo-Parthian input of these works.