What do Thomas and Simon share?

Discussion about the New Testament, apocrypha, gnostics, church fathers, Christian origins, historical Jesus or otherwise, etc.
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Giuseppe
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What do Thomas and Simon share?

Post by Giuseppe »

According to Couchoud, the story in GJohn of the disciple Thomas 'touching' Jesus to prove his resurrection is an apology not only against Marcionites denying the fleshly reality of the Risen Christ, but also against a presumed 'enemy' who preached that Thomas was crucified in the place of Jesus, being his perfect 'twin' (hence the 'Risen' Jesus was really the Jesus who escaped the crucifixion).


The feeling is that, when the idea of a fully human crucified Christ was introduced (with Matthew, not even with Mark), the forced reaction was to find other candidates for crucifixion, among the apostles and the passers, in order to remove the embarrassment of the cross from Christ himself. This betrayes the weakness of a purely docetical position: against a fully identity between the crucified and Christ, it was still more useful to oppose a crucified Simon (or a Thomas, or a Judas) against a not-crucified Christ, rather than merely to insist that Jesus was without a body.

In essentia: the separationism (in the various identities of the crucified man) as the last desperate tool, used by the (otherwise) docetists, to resist to monarchianism, in terms of propagandistic efficacy.
Nihil enim in speciem fallacius est quam prava religio. -Liv. xxxix. 16.
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