by Tom Bissell
“Yes.”
“So to me, as an Indian, Jesus is very Hindu.”
“Jesus is Hindu?”
“I think so, yes.”
“So by that you mean Jesus…successfully transmigrated his soul?”
Dave laughed. “Maybe this is what I mean, yes.”
Suddenly a dozen firecrackers exploded near our feet. The tiny culprits who lobbed them at us ran off, giggling like gremlins.
“Dave,” I said, “why are children throwing firecrackers at us?”
“Diwali,” he said.
Diwali, the festival of lights. Today was the first day of this extremely loud holiday, which in high Hindu style celebrates so many things at once that to say what Diwali was about seemed beside the point. What Diwali felt like from an American point of view was the Fourth of July with an extra week plus 750 million additional fireworks. (The firecracker throwing was popularly thought to hold demons at bay.) Dave told me that the big-ticket citywide fireworks displays would start today at around 4:00 p.m. and would end after midnight. “What about the firecrackers?” I asked him.
“Those don’t end,” he said as we started back to my hotel. “Not during Diwali.”
III.
The apostle known as Thomas appears in all of the New Testament’s apostolic lists. Thomas’s Greek name, Didymus, which means “twin,” derives from the Aramaic word Te’oma, which also means “twin.” Didymus was used as a name by Greeks in the first century but not, apparently, in Palestine and not, insofar as it is known, among Jews. There is a confirmed second-century Palestinian use of “Tomah,” but that is a homophonic name with different etymological roots. What this probably means is that something is textually afoot with the name Thomas.
John, the only gospel writer to give Thomas anything to say or do, is curiously adamant about Thomas’s name meaning “twin,” mentioning it three times in his gospel: “Thomas, who was called the Twin,” “Thomas (who was called the Twin),” “Thomas called the Twin.” With this triple emphasis, John’s author seems to be suggesting something to his original audience.
Some scholars believe Thomas/Twin might have its origins in a nickname, which was not uncommon among the Twelve; Simon, James, and John all are noted in various gospels as having earned their own. As it happens, the Syriac Christians who claimed Thomas seemed to think they knew their guiding apostle’s “real” name: the apocryphal Gospel of Thomas refers to its hero as Didymus Judas Thomas, and in the apocryphal Acts of Thomas we meet “Ioudas ho kai Thomas,” or “Judas, alias Thomas.” But it is only the Syriac tradition that records this name for Thomas.
If Thomas really existed and his given Semitic name was Judas, why, then, was “twin” chosen for him? One possible answer is that he needed a nickname, as the Twelve already had at least two Judases among them: other than Judas Iscariot, Luke’s gospel mentions a “Judas of James” where the other evangelists place Thaddaeus, and John’s gospel contains reference to another potential Judas, called “Judas (not Iscariot)” (who in some ancient Syriac translations of John is referred to as “Judas Thomas”). Another answer holds that Thomas was indeed someone’s twin brother, who a few early Christians believed was Jesus himself. As a postulation, this is less nutty than it sounds: Mark and Matthew record the names of Jesus’s brothers, one of whom was named Judas. Obviously, the larger Christian church has done much to suppress this tradition, which confounds virtually everything Orthodox Christianity accepts about Mary, the virgin birth, and Jesus himself. Then again, as some have argued, Thomas’s nickname could have derived from his resemblance to a person of no historical note. As one scholar puts it, “It is hard to imagine how the idea of a twin brother of Jesus could have been taken seriously in circles where the tradition of the virgin birth was current.”
Yet the notion that Jesus had a twin, or at least someone within his inner circle who resembled him, turns up again and again in various pieces of heterodox (and sometimes even proto-orthodox) Christian writing.*1 A slightly different version of this “twin” figure surfaces in heterodox stories about the crucifixion, some of which imagine someone who looked like Jesus being executed in his stead. In the heterodox Apocalypse of Peter, Jesus tells Peter that a “substitute being” was crucified for him and that the “living Jesus,” whom Peter also “saw on the tree,” is “glad and laughing.” A less ambiguous run at the same notion can be found in Sethian Christian literature, which imagines Simon of Cyrene (who in the synoptic gospels takes up Jesus’s cross for him) being crucified in Jesus’s place; this trick is assayed with the devious complicity of the Sethian Jesus, who laughs at Simon’s misfortune. The “crucified other” motif has been carried over most spectacularly into modern times thanks to the Qur’an, in which we find this passage: “And they did not kill him [Jesus], nor did they crucify him; but [another] was made to resemble him to them. And indeed, those who differ over it are in doubt about it. They have no knowledge of it except the following of assumption. And they did not kill [Jesus], for certain.”
Pretty clearly, the Christians whose beliefs informed Muhammad’s misunderstandings of Christian theology were heterodox Christians, most likely from Syria. These later stories of Jesus’s having a crucified twin or look-alike appear to be related in some way to the notion that among the Twelve was an apostle nicknamed Thomas/Twin, and Thomas, it must be remembered, has a storied place in Eastern Christianity generally and Syriac Christianity specifically. That Jesus avoided the cross with the help of an unnamed “twin” may be a theological elaboration on an earlier, heterodox notion that Jesus had a literal or possibly “spiritual” twin named Judas, alias Thomas.
In many ancient cultures, twins were looked upon as the likely result of magic, adultery, divine disfavor, or all of the above. First-century Palestine was, by all evidence, no different. As the scholar Glenn W. Most notes in his brilliant book Doubting Thomas, any man who earned the nickname Twin would almost certainly have been the younger, less favorably regarded brother. In many languages, “doubt” and “twin” have an etymological relationship, which can be seen in Greek (distazein and dis), Latin (dubitare and duo), German (Zweifeln and Zwei), and English (“doubt” and “double”).
It is thus both fitting and a little strange that we refer to Doubting Thomas, as the apostle has come to be traditionally known. Thomas’s “doubting” moniker derives from a story in the Gospel According to John in which Thomas, and Thomas alone, refuses to believe in the reality of Jesus’s resurrection. The modifier leaves Thomas perpetually stranded in doubt, even though the purported point of the story is to demonstrate Thomas’s conclusive escape from doubt. Thomas called the Twin. Twin called the Twin. Doubting Thomas. Doubting Double. Thomas, it would appear, is less an apostle than a semantic maze.
IV.
At several points in his gospel, John tries to establish Thomas’s character and set down the narrative rails that account for why he would later doubt his master’s resurrection. In John’s eleventh chapter, Jesus announces to the disciples that he would like to return to Judaea. The disciples find this announcement worrying. Was Jesus not just threatened with stoning by Jews? Never mind that, Jesus tells them. “Our friend Lazarus has fallen asleep, but I am going there to awaken him.” What follows are a few uncommonly dry New Testament sentences: “The disciples said to him, ‘Lord, if he has fallen asleep, he will be all right.’ Jesus, however, had been speaking about his death, but they thought that he was referring merely to sleep. Then Jesus told them plainly, ‘Lazarus is dead.’ ” One can almost hear Jesus’s disappointed sigh as he is reduced to explaining yet another metaphorical poeticism to his disciples.
Thomas is particularly block-headed. After Jesus suggests getting on with it and going to see their dead friend, Thomas says, “Let us also go, that we may die with him.” No other disciple in John talks in such hair-shirt terms; no other disciple claims to be willing to pay the ultimate price for Jesus’s sake. Thomas appears again during John’s Last Supper sequence, when J
esus promises he must soon depart. Thomas tells Jesus, “Lord, we do not know where you are going. How can we know the way?” He has, yet again, misunderstood what Jesus is trying to tell him, and, yet again, this failure has to do with the nature of death and resurrection.
Jesus is doubted plenty of times in the gospels. In John, we find Jews who once believed in Jesus turning against him when he appears to claim parity with God—a telling passage that suggests John’s awareness (and fear) of how a disciple can believe in Jesus sincerely yet also doubt his central claim. Matthew, too, contains a highly curious sentence near the end of his gospel, in which we learn that the “eleven disciples” go to Galilee to meet Jesus: “When they saw him, they worshipped him; but some doubted.” This cryptic sentence, landing so close to the end of Matthew’s gospel, has a strange and undeniable power. Matthew, like John, seems to recognize that belief and doubt are not always at war but kindred emotions within the same internal struggle. Note, too, that Matthew’s doubters are not passersby or curious Pharisees but Jesus’s chosen disciples. The typical scholarly argument holds that these passages exist because early Christian writers knew their stories were doubted and were forced to acknowledge that doubt as a rhetorical coping strategy.
Matthew’s brief, glancing sentence about doubts felt by unnamed members of the Eleven becomes a brief but dramatically compelling scene in John.*2 We are presented with “the disciples”—who exactly or how many is not mentioned—in the immediate aftermath of Jesus’s resurrection, holed up in a house in Jerusalem, the door of which is locked “for fear of the Jews.” Earlier in the day, Mary Magdalene had visited the disciples and described her encounter with the risen Jesus outside his tomb. During that meeting, Jesus told Mary, “Do not hold on to me, because I have not yet ascended to my Father and your Father.” Why the risen Jesus does not want to be held, and whether he could be held, John does not elucidate. His gospel nonetheless makes it clear that Jesus supernaturally enters the locked room in which his disciples hide. After greeting his disciples, Jesus blesses them with the Holy Spirit and promises that any sins they do not forgive will be “retained.” With that, presumably, Jesus disappears.
John then reveals something interesting, which is that “Thomas (who was called the Twin), one of the twelve, was not with them when Jesus came.” Where Thomas was, and what he was doing, are also not explained.*3 The disciples tell Thomas what has transpired (“We have seen the Lord”), but Thomas will hear none of it. “Unless I see the mark of the nails in his hands,” he says, “and put my finger in the mark of the nails and my hand in his side, I will not believe.” In Greek, these words, and the sentiment behind them, are even more vividly unpleasant. According to Glenn W. Most, the word Thomas uses to indicate his desire to “put” his hand in Jesus’s side is actually much stronger in Greek; the verb means something akin to “throw” or “hurl.” This is to say nothing of the pornographically ghastly vision of a man violating a friend’s open wound with his fingers, which Most calls, with some understatement, “an unforgettable yet intolerable image.”
The ideas at play here clearly have something to do with Jesus’s earlier admonition to Mary Magdalene that she not hold him, but the most basic dialectic seems to be Thomas’s desire to be convinced that Jesus is not a ghost but something tangible—someone who could be held if you wanted to hold him or touched if you wanted to touch him.
Throughout Christian history, countless works of art and exegesis have been based on Jesus’s confronting Thomas and, according to traditional understanding, allowing Thomas to touch his wounds. Probably the most famous image devoted to bringing the moment to life is Caravaggio’s painting The Incredulity of Saint Thomas or Doubting Thomas, which depicts Thomas inserting his finger into the bloodless, almost labial wound in Jesus’s side, while Jesus firmly holds Thomas’s probing hand by the wrist. Like so many of Caravaggio’s paintings, Doubting Thomas is a deliberately erotic image, a case study in sacred/profane balance-beam aesthetic gymnastics. One of the problems with the painting is that it helped popularize the notion that Thomas did, in fact, touch Jesus’s wounds. Among Christian intellectuals, the belief that Thomas touched Jesus’s wounds has been around since the second century, with Tertullian being among the first to argue as much. Origen, who was later condemned as a heretic in part for his thoughts on the materiality of Jesus’s resurrected body, seems to have believed Jesus’s ectoplasmic flesh could both resist Thomas’s touch and pass through doors. Augustine also believed Thomas touched Jesus, and the vast majority of Christian exegetes since have followed suit.
Here, though, is how the Gospel According to John actually describes Jesus’s return the following week to convince Thomas that he has been resurrected:
A week later his disciples were again in the house, and Thomas was with them. Although the doors were shut, Jesus came and stood among them and said, “Peace be with you.” Then he said to Thomas, “Put your finger here and see my hands. Reach out your hand and put it in my side. Do not doubt but believe.” Thomas answered him, “My Lord and my God!” Jesus said to him, “Have you believed because you have seen me? Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe.”
Obviously, imagining that Thomas touched Jesus’s wounds in the space between these sentences is an easy thing to do. The mind almost wants or wills it to happen, given the savage terms in which Thomas earlier framed his doubt.
Yet Most points out that “in supplying this kind of material here, such readers are overlooking a small but decisive textual fact,” which is that Thomas’s outburst is said specifically to have “answered” Jesus’s invitation. This may seem like a hairsplitting argument, but the grammatical construction used in the scene is, according to Most, quite clear. The New Testament, he notes, contains over two hundred instances in which “quoted speech B spoken by one person” comes after “quoted speech A spoken by someone else.” In every New Testament instance of this grammatical construction, “speech B is a direct and immediate response to speech A; speech B is caused directly by speech A, not by any other event intervening between the two speeches.” John is giving us a scene in which Jesus offers Thomas the luxury of touching his wounds, but Thomas is too stunned to do so. Thomas, who has demanded a certain kind of proof, relents.
What is perhaps most remarkable about the entire scene is how cunningly John appears to have escaped from the narrative corner into which he has painted himself, even though the crux of what Thomas wanted established—the nature of Jesus’s resurrected body—remains an open question. Could the resurrected Jesus be held or touched? Jesus’s offer to Thomas (“Put your finger here”) suggests that he could be. But in neglecting to depict Thomas touching those wounds, John rather enigmatically failed to resolve the issue.
The story of Thomas and the resurrected Jesus appears nowhere else in the New Testament (though there is an echo of wound touching in Luke), and Thomas has no other place within the gospel tradition. Most believes that John, in perusing lists of the Twelve, noted the etymological richness—the doubleness—of Thomas’s name, Twin, and settled upon him as a perfect vessel to explore the nature of belief in Jesus’s resurrection, which we know from asides in the gospels was being attacked by doubters from the outset: John presents us with a Jesus who is mistaken for a gardener outside his tomb; Luke gives us a Jesus who does not resemble the man anyone remembers; and Matthew describes a Jewish-devised cover story that has the disciples stealing Jesus’s body from its tomb while claiming their master rose from the dead. From this, we can deduce that the gospels’ various accounts of the resurrection were at least partly defensive.
At the time of John’s writing, there was precious little consensus about the meaning and mechanics of resurrection. The first Christians were not at all certain of what the process entailed, whether for Jesus or themselves. In John’s gospel, Thomas wants to touch Jesus’s corporeal body; he wants to make sure the body that died is the same body that has been resurrected. This is, presumably, what a
lot of Christians at the time wanted to know.
John seems to suggest that Christians have a literal, bodily resurrection to look forward to but also that Jesus’s resurrected body is not quite a literal body. Jesus’s resurrected body can eat and (seemingly) be touched, but it is also a body that can appear and disappear and pass through walls. Significantly, John’s gospel contains another resurrection scene, which involves Lazarus. Was there any difference between Lazarus’s resurrected body (which John’s gospel assures us carried a “stench”) and Jesus’s resurrected body? If so, whose resurrection did Christians have to look forward to—a smelly resurrection like that of Lazarus or a presumably pristine resurrection like that of Jesus?
Paul’s Christian friends in Corinth had their own questions about the resurrection. Prior to meeting Paul, many if not most of the Corinthian Christians had been pagans. When it came to questions of immortality, pagan ideas were less concerned with the body than with the soul. The bodily resurrection of the dead was an entirely foreign concept to pagan thought, as it derived from relatively new ideas within Pharisaic Judaism. Despite the strenuous attempts of Paul, a former Pharisee, to communicate his ideas about bodily resurrection, the Corinthians remained bewildered.
In his first letter to the Corinthians, Paul quotes one of his Corinthian doubters: “How are the dead raised? With what kind of body do they come?” That Paul deems the person who asked this question a “fool” surely says something about his frustration. In Paul’s mind, the resurrection of the dead is the soil of Christian belief: “Now if Christ is proclaimed as raised from the dead, how can some of you say there is no resurrection of the dead? If there is no resurrection of the dead, then Christ has not been raised, and if Christ has not been raised, then our proclamation has been in vain and your faith has been in vain.” The careful reader of Paul will note that whenever he hits the thrusters on circular restatement, he knows he is in a philosophical black hole and is desperately trying to escape it.