Christianity is India's third-largest religion with about 26 million adherents, making up 2.3 percent of the population as of the 2011 census.[1] The written records of St Thomas Christians mention that Christianity was introduced to the Indian subcontinent by Thomas the Apostle, who sailed to the Malabar region (present-day Kerala) in 52 AD.
There was lots of trade in lots of places and traditionally religions spread more slowly, not just one dude going a long distance. Yes, religion spreads along trade, that's not supporting, but that is not evidence that a single dude was primarily responsible. And the evidence that is true is mostly just internal local myth making.
Any christian community needs to boost is credibility, and hype up their own history.
Peter is apparently underneath the Vatican. I’m not religious but I love history - they run a tour under the current city and it’s really quite cool if you’re into that sort of thing
Peter and Paul founded the church of Rome -- an inscription was found in the necropolis in proximity to a bone box during the excavations in Saint Peter's in 1950 as I recall -- "Peter is here".
It was always a point made from very early times that Rome was the church of Peter. As opposed to places like Alexandria for example whose status came from it being the see of a disciple of Peter.
Something else I seem to recall is that one of the leg bones was different -- what would be expected from a Galilean fisherman always putting one leg on the side of a boat to haul in a fishing net.
The final resting place of a number of Apostles is more or less known -- Ss Simon and Jude are in Saint Peter's, Saint Paul is buried in Saint Paul Outside the Walls in Rome, Saint James the Greater is at Compostella in Spain, Saint Bartholomew is in a church on an island in the Tiber in Rome, Saints Philip and James the Lesser have their own church in Rome I think.
The concept that Peter and Paul founded the church of Rome is just a bunch of later myths. We don't have much solid evidence for that, even by standards of the time.
And things like 'Peter is here' is also far from conclusive. As figures like Peter were venerated by the later church. Just as 'Jesus is here' wouldn't mean its the grave of Jesus.
> what would be expected from a Galilean fisherman
The evidence that that the apostles even were fisherman isn't actually very good. Acting like its confirmed that we know Peter was a Galilean fisherman is ridiculous.
Also a fact like that can have 100s of explanations.
> final resting place of a number of Apostles is more or less known
Mostly based on church internal story (known to be completely incorrect in many cases) and association combined with later finds. Almost none of them have solid historical bases even by standards of the first century.
The problem is that Christian scholarship for 2000 years was utterly dominated by Christians and Christian institutions with a huge amount of believe in Church history. Independent study outside of those institution is 1:100 less resourced and for every issue they have to first fight this Christian status quo. Many 'scholars' of these topics have 'faith requirements' meaning they are not actually allowed to publish anything that would go against core doctrines. How much these are enforced depends on the institution but there are known cases where people got fired. This is still bad now but it was way, way worse 30-40 years ago.
People get their careers ruined over things like this, one professor was harassed at being gay (before that was accepted) and claimed that his research was 'gay propaganda' because it vaguely talks about Jesus sleeping with another dude.
So any claims about this soft of stuff, specially if not done in the last couple decades are highly questionable at best. So I take all of these claims with a huge grain of salt.
Granted untold resources have been expended in the endeavor, but it always amazes me that 2000yr later we can piece together all the evidince and say "yup, that's probably him" for someone who was not only not a head of state (or of comparable rank) but who's followers were actively marginalized by the state.
Catholic tradition has always held that Peter moved to Rome, taught there as a teacher, and then died there.
Other Christian circles, and a large swathe of historians, disagree on this front. However, it is one of the founding points of the Petrine Primacy, or the reason that Saint Peter is seen as the First Pope of the Catholic Church.
Any history touted by the Church should be taken with a grain of salt. There are plenty of examples of how they manipulated things in their favor, and are prime examples of history written by the winner theory
If think even more important of who wrote history, is who preserved it. We know of dozens of other version of Christianity just in the second century (already around the time our gospels were written), but their writing are simply no preserved. So the power to not preserve history is just as impactful as writing your own.
This is all unconfirmed and guessing. Non of that has any actual bases in good history. This all just church internal myth and legends. Just like the Romans were not actually people from Troy. Everybody like to make up stories like that.
So much of supposed 'Christian history' is myth making based on incredibly unreliable evidence just extrapolated from other unreliable evidence.
https://www.ncregister.com/blog/where-are-the-12-apostles-no...