This is extremely speculative, and it casts more doubt on the straightforward reading of the Fourth Gospel than my notes usually do, but I wanted to put it out there and see what people think. The idea came to me quite suddenly as a sort of epiphany, which is why I’m posting it now rather than saving it for my notes on John 20.
One of the strange things about the “doubting Thomas” episode is that Thomas insists specifically on touching Jesus’ crucifixion wounds before he will believe. Isn’t that weird? Wouldn’t you take it for granted that the body of a resurrected person would be restored to its perfect condition, with no wounds? Herod Antipas reportedly believed that Jesus was John the Baptist risen from the dead — even though John had been beheaded, and Jesus presumably had his head firmly attached, without so much as a scar around his neck. And I’m sure it never occurred to Herod to see that as evidence against his belief. People rising from the dead still wounded or maimed as they were when they died — with all due respect to St. Denis of Paris, that’s really more the stuff of zombie movies than of divine miracles.
What I was taught in church (the Mormon Church, but I suppose other churches must say something similar) was that in general people are resurrected with perfect bodies, but that Jesus himself was an exception. He chose to keep the wounds from his execution so that he could show them to his disciples as a sign. Isn’t that still weird, though? Why would they need or expect such a sign? Again, Herod didn’t expect the risen John to have decapitation wounds. If Thomas had seen and touched the risen Jesus, but a risen Jesus whose wounds had been healed, would he really have refused to believe? On what grounds?
Well, suppose Jesus had an identical twin brother. Then Thomas’s request would make sense. The wounds would be the proof that this was really Jesus who was crucified, not his never-crucified brother who looked just like him. Well, as it happens, there are (non-canonical) stories about Jesus having a twin brother! Does that explain Thomas’s request? Well, no, not in any straightforward way, because the identity of this possible twin is none other than Thomas himself! I believe this is made explicit only in the Gnostic Book of Thomas the Contender, but we can connect the dots in other sources as well.
For starters, Thomas isn’t actually a name but the Aramaic word for “twin”; the Fourth Gospel adds that he was also called Didymus, which is “twin” in Greek. Now that is definitely not a normal nickname; twins come in pairs, making “the Twin” a uselessly ambiguous designation. It might work, though, if the other twin were someone extremely famous and important — like, oh, I don’t know, Jesus Christ.
What was his real name, then, if it wasn’t Thomas? The canonical Bible doesn’t say, but both the Gospel of Thomas and the Acts of Thomas say that his name was Judas. And what do you know, both Mark and Matthew say that Jesus had a brother named Judas. In the Fourth Gospel, “Judas, not Iscariot” is considered a sufficiently clear descriptor, so apparently there were only two Judases among Jesus’ close associates, and Thomas must have been one of them. (Against this, we have Luke's list of the Twelve Apostles, which includes both Thomas and two other Judases.)
Okay, so let’s tentatively accept as a working hypothesis that Thomas was Jesus’ twin brother Judas. How do we reconcile that with what I was saying before, about how Thomas may have been demanding proof that Jesus was Jesus and not his twin? This is where I had my eureka moment.
In the Fourth Gospel, Jesus appears to the disciples, “but Thomas . . . was not with them when Jesus came” (20:24). Jesus therefore appears again, when Thomas is among those present, and lets him touch his wounds. In Matthew, in contrast, we are told that the eleven remaining disciples (the twelfth, Judas Iscariot having hanged himself) all “saw him [and] worshipped him, but some doubted” (28:17).
In the Fourth Gospel, it’s clear enough why Thomas doubts: because Thomas wasn’t there when Jesus appeared. In the Matthew account, though, even some of the disciples who saw Jesus doubted. Why? Same reason: Because Thomas wasn’t there when Jesus appeared. Without seeing them both in the same room, they couldn’t be sure that this seemingly risen Jesus wasn’t really just Judas the Twin. Jesus resolved this problem by appearing again and letting them touch his wounds, proving that he was the crucified twin and not the uncrucified one.
Now imagine that this story gets passed on — that Jesus appeared to his disciples but some doubted because Thomas wasn’t there — but at some point the key fact that Thomas was Jesus’ twin brother is lost. Wouldn’t it be the most natural thing in the world for people to assume that Thomas, the one who wasn't there, was the one who doubted, and for the story to morph into the form in which we now have it in the Fourth Gospel?
The next question to ask, then, is why Thomas wasn’t there. Was he just busy that day? Had a bar mitzvah to go to or something? It's possible, I guess, but it doesn't seem likely. Note, though, that Matthew specifies that only eleven of the twelve disciples were present, and that the one who was absent was a fellow named Judas. We have been assuming that Judas the Twin, a.k.a. Thomas, was the disciple the Fourth Gospel calls "Judas not Iscariot" -- but supposing he were the other one? What if Judas Thomas were that Judas, and Jesus was betrayed by his own twin brother? That would certainly put a new spin on John 7:1-5, where Jesus' brothers seem to be pushing him to go to Judaea and be killed by the Jews.
One obvious objection to the proposal that Jesus and Judas Iscariot were twin brothers is that the Fourth Gospel repeatedly refers to the latter as "Judas Iscariot, Simon's son." Jesus' father wasn't called Simon, which would seem to rule out the two men's being brothers. This objection is easily dealt with, though. In every case, the Greek says Ἰούδας Σίμωνος Ἰσκαριώτου, "Judas of Simon Iscariot," and the assumption that the genitive means "son of" in this case is only an assumption. In Acts 1:13 and Luke 6:16, the grammatically parallel Ἰούδας Ἰακώβου, "Judas of James," is rendered "Judas the brother of James" in the King James Version and many other translations, although some translations go with the "son of" reading. And the same passages in Mark and Matthew (Mark 6:3, Matt. 13:55) that tell us Jesus had a brother named Judas also tell us that he had another brother called Simon. So "Judas of Simon" could well have been Jesus' brother.
I'm not sure yet how far I want to entertain this line of speculation -- it's a departure from my usual practice of taking the Fourth Gospel pretty much at face value -- but I'll be keeping it in the back of my mind for a while and seeing if it sheds light on anything else.
