Some Notes on Andrápolis, the Royal City: Apocryphal Acts of Thomas 3

Abstract

The following paper aims to explore the meaning and significance of the so-called royal city Andrapolis (Ἀνδράπολις) within the context of the Apocryphal Acts of Thomas’s narrative (chapter 3). The identification of this Indian toponym have attracted the attention of many scholars during the last century and nowadays again, as witness of the few reliable historical traces supposedly transmitted by the apocryphal. For doing so, after a short introduction, we deal with the allegedly historicity of the text; then, we focus on the issue related mainly to the different variants of the location depending on the Syriac and Greek versions of the Acts of Thomas, and propose a new interpretation; finally, we check the rest of Greek variants among the manuscripts - collated by Bonnet and new findings -, trying to find the cause of their differences with the best attested Andrapolis, and draw some final remarks.