The community's tradition is precise where documentation is thin. Thomas landed at Muziris, the pepper port on the Malabar Coast that Roman writers knew and that trade in the first century certainly connected to the Red Sea, in the year 52. He preached, baptized Brahmin families whose descendants are named in later song, established seven churches along the coast, and then crossed to the Coromandel side, where he was killed near Mylapore and buried at the site now marked by a cathedral in Chennai.
The seven places are usually listed as Kodungallur, Kollam, Niranam, Nilackal, Kokkamangalam, Kottakkavu and Palayoor. The evidence for the list is a body of Malayalam songs, the Margam Kali and Rabban patterns, whose surviving forms are many centuries later than the events, and no first millennium document names the seven. Against that stands the oldest surviving narrative of a Thomas mission to India, the Acts of Thomas, a Syriac work of about the third century. It sends the apostle not to Malabar but to the court of a king it calls Gundaphorus, whom scholars have long identified with the Indo-Parthian ruler Gondophares, whose coins place him in the first century in the territory of what is now northwestern Pakistan and eastern Afghanistan. It is a story with its own theological purposes, not a report, and it knows nothing of the south. Two traditions, one southern and one northwestern, therefore claim the same apostle and cannot easily be reconciled.