Apostles

THE APOSTLES : M.M.NINAN
"The Pashtuns began as a union of largely East-Iranian tribes which became the initial ethnic
stratum of the Pashtun ethnogenesis, dates from the middle of the first millennium CE and is
connected with the dissolution of the Epthalite (White Huns) confederacy. [...] Of the contribution of
the Epthalites (White Huns) to the ethnogenesis of the Pashtuns we find evidence in the ethnonym
of the largest of the Pashtun tribe unions, the Abdali (Durrani after 1747) associated with the ethnic
name of the Epthalites Hindu Kush, called all Pashtuns by a general name of Abdal still at the
beginning of the 19th century."
The Hephthalites could also have been ancestors of the Abdal tribe which has assimilated into the
Turkmens and Kazakhs. In North India, the Rajputs formed as a result of merging of the
Hephthalites with the Gurjars, though such claim is disputed.
It is very important to understand that there are three separate traditions of St. AndrewChina,
eastern-central Asia, and Kalbin (Khalbinski Hrebet, a mountainous area on the borders of
present-day Kazakhstan, Mongolia, and Russia.)
One of these traditions is from Kazakhstan,
another is Syriac,
and the third is from the Bulgars of the Russian steppes, who migrated through Greece
and eventually settled in Italy, filling their villages with churches dedicated to St. Andrew.
According to Epiphanius, a ninth-century monk historian of Constantinople, St. Andrew also went
north of China, to the land of the Scythian Massagetae and Masakas (the cradle of the Bulgarians