Thomas the Apostle, the only pal of Jesus I could bear to have a beer with

Laundry rooms are sensory deprivation chambers of sorts. The steady whir of the machinery softens all other sensory input, leaving me alone with my brain. This is often a frightening prospect, and tonight, in my head, I found myself among the apostles a couple of hours after the Resurrection. I imagine the room that the Apostles were cowering in to be a sort of dank place with bare walls, as inconspicuous as possible. They mumble a lot.

So, Jesus comes in without knocking. "BOO!" he says. After the initial freak out, Jesus leaves to go flying around like Superman or whatever he was doing before the Ascension. The apostles are left pinching each other and recounting what just happened to each other, as if they weren't all there. This, of course, is what people do, because the Apostles were just people.

Then we pick up the story from John 20:

Now Thomas, one of the Twelve, called the Twin, was not with them when Jesus came. So the other disciples told him, "We have seen the Lord." But he said to them, "Unless I see in his hands the mark of the nails, and place my finger into the mark of the nails, and place my hand into his side, I will never believe."

Good for you, Thomas. Thomas held out for eight of what must have been the least tolerable days of his entire life, squished in with a bunch of people who could not stop talking about what they had seen. Can you imagine how shitty it must have been for him? Here are your 10 closest chums (remember, one killed himself), and they all share an experience that you didn't. You become an outsider among intimates. Usually, the way group dynamics play out like this is that Thomas would basically accept what his trusted confidants reported. I would surely be tempted to. But Thomas, the one who could think, realized the huge nature of the claim and set up perhaps the best available criteria for validating it. It's as close to an empirical investigation as would be available in a 1st-century hideout.

Imagine, eight days among enthusiastic, motivated and endlessly irritating Jesus freaks. Shit, Thomas deserves to be a saint just for surviving that! Anyway, eight days later, Jesus pops in again. "You guys wanna hang?" (Crucifixion joke here.)

Anyway, at this point, Jesus holds out his hands and says, "Check it out. Go on. Poke it." Thomas, realizing how gross that would be, falls down and worships. Then comes the biggest interpolation in the whole damned Bible, when Jesus says:

"Have you believed because you have seen me? Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed."

Yeah, not big on empiricism, Jesus is. This is a total "wink wink" passage. I suspect that it is written with to coerce people who have no chance of ever seeing Jesus into believing. I mean, if the writer mentioned Jesus turning to him and saying, "John, get this down. I just remembered a beatitude I totally forgot to mention and this is a teachable moment," then it might be a little more credible, but this was totally put in later, as far as I can tell. The character of Jesus that we see in the beatitudes, by the way, is completely different from the one here saying, "Get down and worship me." Jesus talks about all the nice things you should be doing for everyone else in the beatitudes (in 11 of the 12 beatitudes in the synoptic gospels, at least). There are no beatitudes in John. This pronouncement about who gets an intangible blessing is all about not needing evidence, and should be anathema to any thinking individual. If someone claims they have risen from dead, by God, the burden of proof is on them to prove it. You shouldn't buy off disbelief with blessings and lowering bars of evidence for your flock! What a rotten thing to do.

HJ