Did Jesus Exist? - The Historical Argument for Jesus of Nazareth Bart Ehrman (books to read in your 20s txt) 📖

missionary endeavors of the apostle Thomas after Jesus’s resurrection, most famous for its stories of how Thomas was the first to bring the gospel to India. In this account Thomas is called the “twin” of Jesus. And why is he Jesus’s twin? For Price it is because Thomas, better than any of the other disciples, has a true understanding of who Jesus is, as indicated in yet another apocryphal book, the Gospel of Thomas (Gospel of Thomas 13). In addition, Price notes several apocryphal works that deal with James of Jerusalem, which also call him Jesus’s brother. Price argues that this is because of his particularly close ties to Jesus and his clear understanding of Jesus and his teaching.

This last piece of evidence shows where Price’s argument unravels. The reason James is called Jesus’s brother in these other apocryphal works is that it was widely believed in early Christianity that James was in fact his brother. These texts say nothing, not a thing, to counteract that view. They simply assume a sibling relationship.

So too with the Acts of Thomas. The whole point of the narrative of this intriguing book is precisely that Thomas really is Jesus’s brother. In fact, he is his twin. Not only that: he is his identical twin. This is not because he uniquely agrees with Jesus or understands him particularly well. Quite the contrary, the very first episode of the book shows that Thomas does not agree with Jesus and does not see eye to eye with him in the least. After Jesus’s resurrection, the other apostles instruct Thomas to go to India to convert the pagans, and he refuses to go. It is only when Jesus appears from heaven that he forces his twin brother to proceed against his wishes. It is only in a different book, the Gospel of Thomas, that Thomas is said to understand Jesus better than any of the others. But strikingly, the Gospel of Thomas decidedly does not say that, for that reason, Thomas was Jesus’s brother, let alone his twin.

The reality is that there was a tradition in some parts of the early church that Thomas really was the twin of Jesus. The Aramaic word Thomas, itself, means “twin.” That Jesus and Thomas were identical twins plays a key role in the Acts of Thomas, in one of its most amusing episodes. While Thomas is en route (reluctantly) to India, his ship stops in a major port city, where the king’s daughter is about to celebrate her marriage to a local aristocrat. Thomas as an outside guest is invited to the wedding, and after the ceremony he speaks to the wedded couple but in a highly unusual way. As a good ascetic Christian, Thomas believes that sex is sinful and that to be fully right with God, people—even married people—need to abstain. And so he tries to convince the king’s daughter and her new husband not to consummate their marriage that night.

But he is frustratingly unsuccessful in his pleas. He leaves the scene, and the newlyweds enter their bridal chamber. But to their great surprise, there is Thomas again, sitting on their bed. Or at least they think it’s Thomas since he does, after all, look exactly like the man they were just talking with. But it is not Thomas. It is his identical twin, Jesus, come down from heaven to finish the task that his brother had unsuccessfully begun. Jesus, more powerfully persuasive of course than his twin, wins the hearts of the newlyweds, who spend the night in conversation instead of conjugal embrace.

This tale is predicated on the view that Thomas and Jesus really were twins in a physical, not symbolic or spiritual, sense.

One wonders how the Christians who told such stories could possibly imagine that Jesus had a twin brother. Wasn’t his mother a virgin? Then where did the twin come from?

None of our sources indicates an answer to that question, but I think a solution can come from the mythologies that were popular in the period. We have several myths about divine men who were born of the union of a god and a mortal. In some of those stories the mortal woman is also impregnated by her husband, leading to the birth of twins (it is hard to know how they could be identical twins, but anatomy was not the strong suit of most ancient storytellers). This in fact is how the divine man Heracles is born. His mother, Alcmene, is ravished by the king of the gods, Zeus, and afterward she is also made pregnant by her husband, Amphitryon. And so she bears twins, the immortal Zeus and the mortal Iphicles.

Is it possible that the Christians who told stories of Jesus and his twin brother, Thomas, had a similar idea—that Jesus was conceived while Mary was a virgin, but then her husband also slept with her so that two sons were born? We will never know if they thought this, but it at least is a viable possibility. What does not seem viable, given what the stories about Thomas and Jesus actually say, is that they were unrelated. On the contrary, for these stories they were actual twin brothers.

Price claims that his view that a mortal could be a special “brother” of Jesus because he so well reflected his views is supported by a range of the Apocryphal Acts.6 He does not cite any of the others, however, only texts that deal with Thomas and James, the two figures in the early church best known precisely for being Jesus’s actual brothers. But as a clinching argument, Price appeals to the nineteenth-century revolutionary leader in China, the so-called Taiping messiah named Hong Xiuquan, who called himself “the Little Brother of Jesus.” Price says this figure provides compelling evidence of his view. In his words, “I find the possible parallel to the case of Hong Xiuquan to be, almost by itself, proof that James’ being the Lord’s brother need not prove a recent historical Jesus.”