As a follow-up to my previous thread on the Historicity of Jesus of Nazareth, I wanted to further examine a Christian tradition that, though no longer mainstream, has long intrigued me for reasons that should be fairly obvious.

During the lifetime of Jesus and in the aftermath of his death there existed a tradition that Jesus had a twin brother with whom he shared an identical resemblance. The NT is not explicit on this matter but as always, the devil is in the details. I will make reference to the apocryphal Acts of Thomas as well as passages in the NT to make the case for or against. Others can weigh in too. Just to be clear, I am not saying that Jesus definitively had a twin brother, whether he did indeed have one or not is truly lost in the shrouds of history, what is more important to me is what did the Gospel writers believe? and did they adjust their writings accordingly to account for this possibility I am simply presenting the case as is and inviting the reader to draw their own conclusions.

There is no doubt that the tradition of a twin brother to Jesus was established in early Christianity and that the authors of the gospels were aware of it. This tradition did not spring up overnight and as I hope to demonstrate, it was not without some form of an historical foundation, what Christian would have been foolish enough to invent such a story, seeing that such a story could serve to undermine the very basis of the orthodox tradition concerning the resurrection of Jesus? Clearly if Jesus were given such a double, then every adversary of Christianity would immediately jump to the conclusion that the person appearing to Peter, to the disciples at Emmaus, to the women, and to the Five Hundred, was simply the twin-brother of Jesus known as Judas Thomas (Didymus).

Cool.i hope to learn new things

It is well known from the Acts of Thomas that Judah Thauma, i.e. ' Judas the twin,' appeared to strikingly resemble his deceased brother Jesus, whose twin he supposedly was. A number of stories within the Acts serve to illustrate this resemblance. We are familiar with the story of the princess and her bridegroom who had both been persuaded by Judas Thomas to take a vow of chastity. During the wedding night Jesus himself appears to them in the shape of Thomas, and the bridegroom quite naturally observes :

'But thou hast just left ; how then art thou still here' ?

But the Lord replies to him :

'I am not Judas, I am the brother of Judas.'

He then sits down on the bed and reminds them of what Thomas had told them previously.

The Greek version of the Acts also agree. The physical likeness of the twin-brothers is emphasized in the speech of a demon driven out of a woman : ' What have we to do with thee, thou ambassador of the Most High . . . why doest thou resemble God thy Lord, who concealed his majesty and appeared in the flesh’ ?

The story of the girl saved from death is no less intriguing when she says of her saviour Jesus Christ to Thomas :
' and he took me without the place, where there were men ; but he who resembled thee took me, brought me to thee and said . .'

These stories go a long way in proving that the tradition about a twin brother of Jesus resembling him in every detail is very old. What is more? It caused no end of trouble to the early apologists, precisely because it provided a most plausible, natural, and satisfactory explanation of the appearances of the supposedly risen Jesus. Yet it was impossible to suppress it altogether, because Judah Thauma was evidently quite proud of his resemblance to Jesus, and according to the Acts of Thomas, he even had disciples of his own. Therefore so long as there were ' Thomas Christians,' Loyal members of the universal Church, such a tradition could not be ruled out. It required the various schisms and the heresy-hunting of the following centuries to establish definitely the dogma of the ' only-begotten son of God.' The obvious problem was that so long as the Church in Asia Minor remained proud of still having a striking likeness of its Founder in the person of his twin Thomas, Paul and his adherents themselves could not lay any stress on the value of their own physical likeness to Jesus of Nazareth.

Following

Interesting

In the preceding post I made mention of an obvious problem with respect to the Apostle Paul. Any readers who managed to make headway with my post on the Historicity of Jesus of Nazareth would be left in no doubt that contemporary descriptions of Jesus the Messiah and that of the Apostle Paul were curiously similar. We can be sure that the Apostle Paul and or his sympathisers were fully aware of the tradition of the twin brother of Jesus, in the Apocryphal Acts of Paul and Thecla we come across the following statement;

‘As a lamb spies around in the wilderness, so she sought for Paul. And while she let her glance move over the crowd, she saw the Lord sitting there in the form of Paul.' ch.21

The statement is not to say that Jesus and Paul were identical, far from it. That statement in reality is a passing acknowledgement of the accepted tradition that Jesus did in fact have an identical twin and that much stock was placed on this resemblance. On more than a few occasions Thomas Judas had been mistaken for his more illustrious twin brother, the tradition could not be declared heretical that statement began a process of appropriation and assimilation by Paul and his followers of the attributes of Jesus.
This consideration leads us to the curious outburst of Paul, which has never been satisfactorily resolved by Christians where he states;

'From henceforth let no man trouble me, for I bear (about with me) on my (own) body the marks of Jesus,' Gal 6:17

In light of what we now know, that verse completely out of context within the meaning of the rest of Galatians 6, we can confidently assert that Paul is saying here ' I am a marked man much like Jesus, smitten with his stigmata.' Not because of old scars from scourgings in the past, but because he, like Jesus, was an unfortunate man oppressed and burdened with bodily infirmities, he is in fact asking for some consideration for his infirmities in staking his claim as heir to the Messianic duties of Jesus.

Early Church leaders tell us very little about the tradition of the twin Jesus, no elucidations are to be found in the writings of the rabbi Tryphon, the Jewish opponent of Justinus, or of Celsus as handed down by Origen, but even so this merely demonstrates that these two polemists did not know the tradition of a twin-brother of Jesus, and his double. Yet there must have been earlier opponents of Christianity who were clearly better informed, consider the story in the Book of John Chapter 20.

In the evening, behind barred doors, from fear of the Jews, the disciples are sitting together, when suddenly Jesus stands among them, calming them with the greeting, v.21 'Peace be with you.' And the disciples are glad to see the Lord. Gratuitously the resurrected Jesus is then recognisable by his wounds. Verse 24 goes to great lengths to show that Thomas the alter ego was at that time not with the others, thereby precluding the simple explanation that in the fading light the frightened disciples might have mistaken Thomas for the risen Jesus. The last step was to make Thomas himself express the greatest doubts about the reality of Jesus' appearance and to feel the wounds of Jesus in the presence of the disciples.

The real story here is not the popular tale of the ‘doubting Thomas’ which is in fact a smokescreen, NT authors were nothing if not consistent they reacted to every form of polemic, accusations or perceived heresies real or imagined, hence my earlier statement that the devil is in the detail. The Johannine authorship community demonstrates awareness of the tradition of the twin double of Jesus and in order to ensure that it forestalls any possible future accusations, just as in John 21:2 we are presented a special mention of the initial absence and then subsequent presence and witness of Thomas to the resurrection of Jesus.

Thauma Judah (Didymus) The very man whose likeness to Jesus could have posed a fatal wound to the doctrine of the resurrection of Christ has provided de facto evidence for the resurrection of Jesus without in fact being identified as an identical twin, and in the process, the author of the Book of John has inadvertently confirmed the tradition of the twin brother. An elegant biblical solution. Thanks for reading.

Sarassin - You're about to murder christianity & her adherents

Zoharariel:
Sarassin - You're about to murder christianity & her adherents

Noooo......