Thomas and the Body of Jesus
Easter 2 2026; John 20:19-31
Nailing the victim was common in crucifixions, but not universal.1 None of the Gospels actually refer to Jesus being nailed to the cross in their crucifixion accounts; the state of Jesus’ body resulting from this process is more prominent in the Easter stories. Luke’s resurrection account makes an oblique reference to the wounds when Jesus shows the disciples his hands and his feet (24:39), apparently without needing to say why. Yet it is John alone who mentions nails, not at the Cross but in this story with Thomas.
Doubt about the resurrection is not a topic unique to John. In Luke and Matthew also even the presence of the raised Christ is not a completely effective means of overcoming doubt, but remains an occasion for incomprehension or misinterpretation (see Matt 28:17; Luke 24:37). So the presence in the room of a risen Jesus does not necessarily amount to proof; rather it shifts the question from whether something has happened to exactly what that thing was.
Thomas’ very concrete reference to the wounded body of Jesus can be lost amid the familiarity of a story that we take to be about proof and faith in some general sense. The modern tendency to think this is about skepticism overcome by Jesus’ appearance to Thomas, providing evidence that the resurrection really happened, may however mislead us here.
While we know ancients could be skeptics too, and that Jesus’ resurrection had its doubters and detractors from the outset, a bodily resurrection per se may have been less weird to them than to us. There was, after all, a widespread Jewish belief in a general resurrection (see John 11:24 etc.); the issue was why this particular person was raised, and at this time.
With this in mind it is easier perhaps to see why Thomas doesn’t ask for evidence in general, but a particular kind of evidence: wounds, or perhaps (as Candida Moss suggests) scars.2 There seem to be two issues for Thomas that are more specific than mere doubt that make the scars relevant. First, the marks should show that this risen one is actually material, a physical body—an issue raised more explicitly in Luke’s Gospel where we read the idea of Jesus being perceived as a phantom (24:37). The other and more significant issue is identity; was this person, whom the rest of the twelve had seen, really Jesus? The wounds or scars here function as markers for Thomas that would show it really is him. This is a trope well-known in antiquity, such as when the much older and changed Odysseus, returning from his wars and wanderings, is recognized by his old nurse from a scar.3 Yet there is no comparable elapse of time here; so why emphasize the marks of crucifixion?
The emphasis on this risen one being the crucified connects us with John’s theology of the Cross. John’s references to the Cross had mostly seemed triumphal up to now, and in a sense characteristically misunderstood. Since John 3 when he met Nicodemus, Jesus in this Gospel has been speaking somewhat cryptically—at least to the characters in the narrative—of his “exaltation,” his lifting up, which takes place there. John’s Jesus cries out in triumph, not despair, “it is finished” (19:30).
We can assume that the author and first readers of John knew much better than we do how bloody crucifixion really 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, but a claim that this narrative of power can be read from another standpoint. For John it is the story of the kingdom that is “not from this world” (18:36) which has overcome the violent cynical empire whose best effort at answering the deepest questions is “what is truth?” (18:38).
Despite this recasting of Jesus’ end as a triumph, there is nevertheless one aspect of John’s crucifixion that goes further into shocking “gory details” than any of the synoptics: the unique account 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 (19:35).
There is a double resonance between this episode and Jesus’ interaction with Thomas: first, the emphatic connection between sight, witness, and belief; and second, the wound itself as the center of this claim. What Thomas 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 so much in the fact of a resurrection, but in its nature, its purpose, this triumph over the false power which vaunted itself in piercing (but not breaking!) the body of Jesus. So the wound or scar that Thomas seeks in order to identify the risen Jesus is the sign that this is the same one hoisted high to draw the world to himself, from whom “blood and water” had come forth leaving that mark of finality.
While the blood and water remain subject to many interpretations, they are the guarantee of Jesus’ completion (“it is finished”) of how “the Word became flesh and dwelled among us,” as this Gospel had stated at the beginning. Jesus’ mortality was now poured out from his side, and the unnamed witness (presumably the beloved disciple, the author) presents this as the guarantee God’s victory was complete.
By asking to touch the prints of the nails and to put his hand into Jesus’ side, Thomas questions not so much the mere possibility of resurrections but this particular one, and the fulfillment of the incarnation. Can the risen really be the crucified? He discovers it is so, but the punchline about seeing and believing refers just as much to the crucifixion story and acceptance of the faithful witness whose “testimony is true,” as to the resurrection. Blessed are those who have not seen and yet believe, not just that Jesus rose from death, but that he was truly lifted up and pierced 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
Odyssey, 19.353-56
I'm with Thomas, the obvious scapegoat for the whole nasty affair. And we are left with the painful truth of mortality. Are we totally powerless? Surely it feels as if that is the case. Some curse. Some run away. Some weep. Some rage. Some confess as if they were culprits forever. Some write or sob in prayer. Some turn to religion. Most of us call neighbor(s) inviting her or him or them for a chat—no more or less than that. It is enough.