The “martyred” St. Thomas has existed since the Acts of Thomas, ca. 210 CE, in which he is executed by King Mazdai for social crimes and sorcery. The… - Ishwar Sharan

The practice had indeed been followed from time immemorial, in the first Shiva temple where it originated, whose place on the beach was now usurped by the Portuguese church. The practice was to take the festival image around the temple and lower them three times to the ground, at the sanctum door before the muladeva. The Hindus were continuing the ritual in the second temple, and by taking the festival images to the church on the beach were reverencing the ancient mulasthana – even if Christians and Gaspar Correa vainly thought otherwise.

They knew Marco Polo's story and knew, too, that the "Thomas" revered by Syrian Christians at Mylapore was not a martyr. This was not a very satisfactory circumstance for them or the Portuguese. Their passionate nature and martyrolatrous religion required a sacrifice. 57 All the apostles had suffered martyrdom except St. John, and St. Thomas was not going to get away with an accidental death in Portuguese territory. Moreover, if the Portuguese knew Marco Polo's story, they knew better the Latin fables Passio Thomae and De Miraculis Thomae, which had been circulating in Europe for a thousand years. Both legends deviated from the Acts of Thomas, in which St. Thomas had been executed by king's men with spears, and described his death as being at the hands of a Pagan priest of the Sun – or Zoroastrian – who, in one, had stabbed him with a lance, and in the other, with a sword. The Portuguese preferred De Miraculis Thomae, in which the priest used a lance, and had the romance published in Portugal in 1531 and 1552 to substantiate the "discovery" they had made at Mylapore in 1523. It did not matter to them that this European story, too, had St. Thomas buried on a mountain, while they had in their possession only a seashore tomb.

Both Rufinus and Socrates would have known the Greek version of the Acts which was made immediately after the Syriac text was written (if it wasn’t the other way round as some scholars believe). They would also have known the testimony of Ephraim, Gregory, Ambrose and Jerome for St. Thomas in India. Yet Rufinus and Socrates both declare that St. Thomas went to Parthia.