The Fifth Gospel(140)

            I squinted. “Ugo, there are other reasons John could’ve put Thomas in that story.”

            “True. But recite the beginning of the Doubting Thomas story one more time.”

            “Thomas, called Didymus, was not—”

            “Stop!” Ugo said. “That’s it, right there. Thomas, called Didymus. Let’s remind ourselves what that means.”

            “Didymus is Greek for ‘twin.’ ”

            “Yes. And why?”

            “They called him the Twin. It was his nickname.”

            “Whose twin was he?”

            “The gospels don’t say.”

            “Yet the gospel of John always identifies this man as ‘Thomas, called Didymus.’ Isn’t it odd to keep calling someone ‘Twin’ without ever explaining whose twin he is?”

            I shrugged. Jesus gave many nicknames. Simon became Peter, “the Rock.” John and James became Boanerges, “Sons of Thunder.”

            “But the story gets stranger,” Ugo continued. “As I’m sure you know, the nickname Didymus isn’t the only odd thing about Thomas. The name Thomas itself is just as strange.”

            “It means ‘twin,’ too,” I said.

            Ugo lit up. “Yes! T’oma is Aramaic for ‘twin,’ just as Didymus is Greek for ‘twin.’ So ‘Thomas called Didymus’ actually means ‘Twin called Twin’! Don’t you find that bizarre? Why would John call him that?”

            I smiled to myself. If Ugo hadn’t been a museum curator, he would’ve made a very popular pre-seminary teacher. “Sometimes John gives us the Aramaic and then its Greek gloss. It doesn’t necessarily mean—”

            “Father, the other times John repeats himself like this, he’s referring to Jesus. ‘The Messiah, the Anointed.’ ‘Rabbi, Teacher.’ So why is he doing it this time for Thomas?”

            “Why don’t you tell me?”

            “Do you know,” Ugo said, “who this man’s twin was alleged to be?”

            “I do. The legend says it was Jesus.”

            Ugo smiled.

            “But that’s just a legend,” I added.

            The gospel of Mark says Jesus had brothers and sisters. Inevitably, some readers imagined that the mysterious “twin” nicknamed Thomas might’ve been one of these siblings.

            Ugo ignored me. “A twin of Jesus. A facsimile. A spitting image.” He lowered his voice. “What does that remind you of ?”

            Finally I understood. “You think people associated Thomas with the Shroud. You think that’s how he got his nickname.”

            “No. Even more than that: I think ‘Thomas’ and ‘Didymus’ are the Shroud. I think the disciples had never seen anything like it before, so they called the image what it seemed to be: reflection, duplicate, twin. Only later did the name attach to the man who brought the Shroud out of Jerusalem. By the time the first gospel was written, most Christians spoke Greek or Latin, so they had no idea what Thomas meant in Aramaic. They might’ve thought it was the man’s actual name. That’s why the gospel of John reminds them by adding the Greek word for twin: Didymus.”

            I sat back, not knowing what to say. In the hundreds of books I had read on the life of Jesus, I had never encountered anything like this idea. There are other reasons John might’ve created the Thomas story—and yet, there was something magnetic about Ugo’s idea. Something simple and elegant and grounded. For a moment, the author of John stopped being an unapproachable philosopher. He became an ordinary Christian trying to keep our greatest relic from slipping out of the memory of our religion.