Thomas and the Body of Jesus
Easter 2 2024; John 20:19-31
Nailing was common in crucifixions, but not universal.1 Neither John nor any of the other Gospels refer to Jesus being nailed to the cross in the actual crucifixion account. Nevertheless the Gospels seem to assume it, although curiously it is more significant in the Easter stories than in the Passion narratives as such.
Luke’s resurrection account makes an oblique reference to the state of Jesus’ risen body, when he shows the disciples his hands and his feet (24:39), apparently without needing to say why. Yet it is John alone among the evangelists who mentions the use of nails on the body of Jesus at all, and it is in this story with Thomas, rather than at the Cross itself.
Thomas’ very concrete reference to the wounded body of Jesus can be lost in the familiarity of a story that we take to be about proof in some general sense. The modern tendency to think in terms of scepticism overcome by Jesus’ appearance, constituting evidence that the resurrection really happened, may however mislead us here.
Doubt is recorded in all the Gospels. In the others, or at least in Luke and Matthew who have material specifically concerning the resurrection appearances, the presence of the raised Christ is not at all an effective means of overcoming doubt, but precisely the occasion for incomprehension or misinterpretation (Matt 28:17; Luke 24:37). So the presence of a risen Jesus does not necessarily amount to proof; it shifts the question from whether something has happened to exactly what that thing it was.
While we know ancients could be sceptics too, and that Jesus’ resurrection had its doubters and detractors, the weirdness of a bodily resurrection per se may have been less to them than to us. There was after all a widespread Jewish belief in a general resurrection; the issue for some will have been why this person was raised, and at this time.
With this in mind it is easier perhaps to see that Thomas doesn’t ask for evidence in general but a particular kind of evidence, in the form of wounds, or perhaps (as Candida Moss suggests) scars.2 Two issues more specific than our standard modern version of doubt seem to be raised by this emphasis on the marks of the crucified. One is identity—that it really is Jesus, since the wounds or scars here seem to function as markers that show it really is him. Second, the physicality of these marks are taken to be indicators that the risen one is actually material—an issue raised in Luke’s Gospel at least where the idea of Jesus being a phantom appears (24:37).
The emphasis on the risen one being the crucified one also connects us with John’s theology of the Cross.
John’s references to the Cross have mostly seemed triumphal up to now, in a sense that often seems to be misunderstood. While we can assume that the author and first readers knew much better than we do how bloody crucifixion was, their counter-narrative to the brutality of judicial murder was to claim that God’s sovereignty was manifested—even, and especially—in Jesus’ being “lifted up” for the salvation of the world. This is no generalized smoothing over of suffering, to be clear, but a claim that the narrative of power can be read from another standpoint, as the story of the kingdom that is “not from this world” (18:36) which has overcome the violent empire whose tagline is “what is truth?”.
There is nevertheless one aspect of John’s narrative of the crucifixion that goes further into “gory details” than any of the synoptics: the unique feature of the spearing (19:34), with the curious detail that blood and water came out, and then this aside:
He who saw it has borne witness—his testimony is true, and he knows that he tells the truth—that you also may believe.
The double resonance between this episode and Jesus’ interaction with Thomas may already be apparent: first, the emphatic connection between sight and belief; and second the wound itself as the locus of this claim. Thomas’ doubt may include the identity and materiality issues already noted, but the thing he doubts is the same thing the one who bore witness has affirmed, and of which the blood and water are signs.
Thomas’ doubt is therefore not in the fact of a resurrection but in its effect, its purpose, this triumph over the false power which vaunted itself in piercing (but not, strikingly, breaking) the body of Jesus. The wound or scar identifies the risen Jesus as the same one who was hoisted high to draw the world to himself, and alludes then to the “blood and water” of the crucifixion scene.
While these substances have been subject to many interpretations including sacramental ones, at bottom they are the guarantee of Jesus’ completion (“it is finished”) of his “[becoming] flesh and dwelling among us” as the Gospel had stated at the beginning. His mortality poured out from his side, and the unnamed witness (presumably the beloved disciple, the author) understood this event itself to be the trustworthy guarantee of God’s victory.
By asking to touch the prints of the nails and to put his hand into Jesus’ side, Thomas alludes to this same victory, the fulfillment of the incarnation, and casts doubt upon it. Can the risen really be the crucified? He discovers it is so, but the punchline about seeing and believing refers to the crucifixion story and acceptance of the faithful witness whose “testimony is true,” as much or more than to the resurrection. Blessed are those who believe without seeing, because of that testimony, not just that Jesus rose from death but that he was lifted high so that all the world might be saved through him.
John Granger Cook, Crucifixion in the Mediterranean World. Mohr Siebeck, 2018, p.107
Candida R. Moss, “The Marks of the Nails: Scars, Wounds and the Resurrection of Jesus in John.” Early Christianity (EC) 8, no. 1 (2017): 48–68.