The church also has paintings of St. Thomas and his Hindu assassin. One of them, on the reredos of the altar, depicts an Iyengar Brahmin with namam a… - Ishwar Sharan

Christian fanatics have sent a letter to Kanchi Kamakoti Shankaracharya Math, Kanchipuram, threatening to bomb the office of Kamakoti, a journal edited by T.S.V. Hari and published by T.V.S. Giri from Madras, if it does not stop a serial on the Hindu temples destroyed by Christians and converted into churches in the yesteryears. The journal has been publishing the serial based on authoritative historical sources and evidences produced by renowned research scholars.

The Portuguese had begun to settle around Big Mount as early as 1523 – the same year they "discovered" the tomb of "St. Thomas" – and one of the first to take up residence there was Diogo Fernandez. He would succeed in erecting a small chapel on the hill before 1545, but the construction of the church, called Our Lady of Expectation, did not commence until 1547. It was built on the east-west alignment of the temple foundation – the ancient granite base of the flag pole is on the eastern side of the church and this writer had observed it in 1991 – but the Portuguese reversed this order in keeping with established Christian practice when building on a Pagan site, and the church entrance is on the western side.

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.