I'm unconvinced and so are others, others that founded the biggest church in Christendom for 1000 years. They contend that they received their teachers (Thomas, Bartholomew and Thaddeus/Addai), their teachings, and some of their texts back into the 1st century, even before the fall of the second temple,there's no such thing as there not being a historical movement, humans wrote the texts we have and there were adherents of the movement we can trace back to the 2nd century. then the trail disappears into unrecorded history.
The Catholic church tried to erase them, and their history, For a good synopsis see:
viewtopic.php?p=111567#p111567
Statistics: Posted by ebion — Wed Jan 24, 2024 6:54 pm