Everybody knows about him! He is frequently referred to when people (especially clerics) want to shut up those who ask awkward questions about Christian doctrine. Having problems with your faith? Just believe! Don’t argue. Don’t ask for evidence. Don’t be like doubting Thomas.

In fact the story of Thomas is much more complicated than that. It falls into a category of story that is very common in folklore and can be described as “The Impossible Condition”. There are two main versions. In the first, someone makes a promise which they do not wish to keep, so they set impossible conditions. But the impossible conditions are met and the promise has to be kept after all. The other version involves a threat which will only materialise under apparently impossible conditions. But the impossible conditions are met and the threat is carried out.

You can find both versions in Shakespeare as well as in folk stories all over the world. In All’s Well that Ends Well, a man is forced by his king to marry a woman he does not love. He refuses to live with her as her husband unless she fulfils certain impossible conditions. But she manages to fulfil them all and finally wins his love. In Macbeth, we have the other version: Macbeth cannot be killed unless Birnham Wood comes to Dunsinane Castle, but when Malcolm Canmore besieges Dunsinane, his men cut down the wood and carry the trees with them to the castle, fulfilling the impossible condition.

Thomas is not in fact a doubter. Doubt says, “I will believe this if you can show me reasonable evidence.” That is a perfectly rational position to take up, and anyone who tries to scold you out of it rather than providing the evidence requested is probably peddling a dubious version of the truth. But Thomas says almost the opposite: “Unless I can see the marks of the nails in his hands, and put my finger in the marks of the nails and put my hand into the wound in his side, I will not believe.” Notice how he piles up the conditions. Basically he is saying, “I will not believe.” but he doesn’t wish to look completely unreasonable, so he adds a string of conditions which he confidently believes to be impossible to fulfil. In the fairly literal translation of the Bible that we call the “Authorised Version”, Jesus says to Thomas, “Be no more unbelieving but believe.”

Why was Thomas so determined not to believe? We are not actually told, but his reaction to the good news is clearly that of an angry and deeply traumatised man. A possible clue lies in an earlier story told about Thomas. When Lazarus died, the disciples tried to dissuade Jesus from going to Jerusalem because they believed that there was a warrant out for his arrest. Thomas told them, “If he’s going, we must all go. If the worst comes to the worst, we can die with him.” Of course, when push came to shove, they did not stay to die with him; they all ran away, Thomas included. But the fact that it was Thomas who suggested this course of action may be significant. We know that there was one disciple whom Jesus particularly loved. He is usually identified as John bar Zebedee, one of the two “Sons of Thunder”. I wonder if Thomas was the disciple who particularly loved Jesus. Was that perhaps why he was nicknamed “Thomas” which in Aramaic means “the Twin” (Greek didymos)? If so, it is deeply ironic that he was the one disciple who was not present when Jesus appeared and I think he had every right to feel angry.

Another thing we are not told is how Thomas responded to the invitation to explore Christ’s wounds. There are many artistic representations of him doing so (the subject is traditionally called “The Incredulity of St Thomas”) but the gospel is silent on whether he actually did. It is however very clear on what he said to Jesus, and what he said was extraordinary: “My Lord and my God!”.

Remember that Thomas was a Jew. For Jews, as for Muslims, God is separated from all His creatures by an unbridgeable gulf. He is so holy that His very name has become unspeakable and to see him face to face is death. That is probably why Isaiah describes the seraphs who worship in God’s presence covering their faces with their wings. To describe a human being – even one who has conquered death – as “My God” is shocking. And “My Lord” is hardly less so.

The Greek word Kyrios (Lord) is used in the New Testament in several different ways. In the vocative (Kyrie) it is often just a form of polite address to a social superior or to a stranger. For example, Mary Magdalen uses it to the man she believes to be a gardener! Modern biblical translations rightly use “Sir” rather than “Lord” for these occasions. But Kyrios in the nominative case is also used (as it was in the Septuagint, the Greek Old Testament) as the equivalent of the Hebrew Adonai “My Lord”, which is itself a usable alternative to the unspeakable name of God when reading the Hebrew scriptures aloud. Latin translations of the scriptures, like St Jerome’s Vulgate, have always used the equivalent word Dominus to represent the Divine Name, and that is why it is rendered as “the LORD” in the English Authorised Version. So what Thomas has just said is pretty close to the Hebrew Adonai Elohenu “The Lord our God”, which is what God is called in the Shema, the affirmation of faith and rededication to the torah lifestyle that is made by every religious Jew every day.

And is Jesus shocked by Thomas’s blasphemy? Of course not! He blesses Thomas for having seen what none of the other disciples had yet seen. This is the point from which the doctrine of the incarnation takes its start. It was Thomas, not Peter or Paul or John the Evangelist, who was the first to realise that Jesus is not just the Messiah, not even just the Son of God, but God Himself. All Christians believe this now but it was Thomas, the supposed sceptic, who first realised and proclaimed it.

There is a hymn to St Thomas which ends like this:

Who grieves that love lies dead, on fate’s wheel broken,
And stands uncomforted by any token:
His faith shall be restored
By Christ’s compelling word
When Thomas saw the Lord
And seeing worshipped.