In the first part of the Acts of Thomas we read that Thomas starts his journey from Jerusalem. From Jerusalem he first reached Alexandria. The classical trade route to India began from Alexandria. The purpose of the author of Acts of Thomas is neither historical nor geographical but only catechetical. That means to teach the readers that the mission of the apostles starts from Jerusalem, the Holy City of Our Lord. De Miraculis Beati Thomae writes that Our Lord asks Thomas who was at Caesarea that time to go to India. Then from Jerusalem Thomas came first in Caesarea and the real missionary journey starts from Alexandria where Habban, the trade commissioner of the Indian king Gundaphar met Thomas. That time Alexandria was the greatest port in the world and the second biggest city of the Roman Empire. India was quite possibly more open to direct communication with the West in the first two centuries of the Christian era. E.H. Warmington describes the time as an age of new discoveries and enterprises. Roman peace (pax Romana) and prosperity encouraged traders to turn east both by sea and by land – by sea through Greek and Arab middlemen, and by land through Jewish, Syrian and Armenian traders. The main channel for trade was the sea because of Roman-Persian wars along the land routes.
According to the Acts of Thomas Habban and Thomas landed in Andrapolis or Broach in Gujarat, the royal city. He then proceeded to the palace of the king Gundaphar who was searching a man to build a palace. Thomas left Andrapolis in haste, having angered the king by converting his daughter at her own wedding to a gospel of Christian virginity. The ascetic emphasis is an often recurring theme in the early apocryphal Acts of the Apostles. Thomas introduced as a carpenter, received from the king money for the erection of the palace, but spent it on the poor. The king remonstrated, but miraculous events convinced him that Thomas by spending the money on the poor had built him a palace in heaven. The wonderful deeds and the amazing words of Thomas induced the king Gundaphar and his brother Gad to become Christians.
Originally, ships from Egypt went as far as only Aden, and there exchanged their cargo for goods from India; but by the first century AD they made the complete voyage. With the discovery of Monsoon winds in 47 AD by Hippalus, a Greek sailor, one can sail straight across from the Gulf of Aden to the Indian cities of Broach or Muziris. Discovery of monsoon winds eased the traffic between the Mediterranean world and India. The monsoon winds blow strongly from the southwest every year from June to September. Making use of it one can sail straight across the ocean north-east to the mouth of Indus. The voyage from Myos Hormos, at the mouth of the Gulf of Suez, to the coast of India took about two and a half months.
