by David E. Anderson
Seeing is believing. Or is it? What about hearing? What about touch?
How does one come to believe what one believes, especially if, on the surface, the claim appears to be preposterous?
Saint Paul put the central declaration -- and dilemma -- of the new Christian faith in blunt but succinct terms: "If Christ has not been raised, then our proclamation has been in vain and your faith is in vain" (1 Corinthians 15:14).
Belief in Jesus' resurrection has been the central and most controversial tenet of Christianity and its core theological principle. Writers and theologians have speculated through the ages on how the resurrection should be understood. Was the risen Christ a body, a ghost, or a spirit?Some try to glide past the problem by suggesting the resurrection's symbolic or psychological nature. In his poem "Seven Stanzas at Easter," the writer John Updike echoes Paul's insistence on the resurrection's reality:
Make no mistake: if He rose at allTwo recent books take up central questions of faith and doubt in human history. With the rise of Christianity, belief itself became the central religious duty, according to poet and historian Jennifer Michael Hecht in her comprehensive book DOUBT: A HISTORY (HarperSanFrancisco, 2004). Unlike the Romans, whose civic religions were tied to rites, or the Jews, who were bound by Torah and the Law, the early Christians had neither, and instead they focused on belief, says Hecht. "With Christianity, managing one's doubt, that is, husbanding one's faith, became the central drama."
it was as His body;
if the cells' dissolution did not reverse, the molecules
reknit, the amino acids rekindle
the Church will fall.
At the same time, Hecht suggests, a new kind of doubt emerged -- the believer's doubt. Jesus himself gave rise to this new kind of doubt, according to Hecht. She points to his anguished prayers in the garden of Gethsemane, when he doubted his ability to do what was asked of him, and the moment on the cross "when he doubted God's loyalty."
In Christian history, and especially in the Easter story, no one has symbolized the so-called "believer's doubt" more than Jesus' disciple Thomas. He has become such a paradigm of the kind of doubt that assails the faithful that the very quality has been attached to his name, and he has come down to us not as one whose doubt was resolved in faith and belief but as Doubting Thomas.
In his book DOUBTING THOMAS (Harvard University Press, 2005), University of Chicago professor and ancient Greek specialist Glenn W. Most gives a close reading of the Thomas story as it appears in the Gospel of John. Most also probes the question of belief in the resurrection stories of the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke, and he examines the way the Thomas story has been interpreted and developed over the centuries, focusing with special insight on its visual depictions, particularly Caravaggio's famous painting of Doubting Thomas.
For many readers, the most startling claim in Most's analysis is that Thomas never actually touched the wounds in Jesus' hands and sides, despite centuries of both homiletic tradition and the visual tradition represented in the artworks of Caravaggio, Rubens, and many others. The crucial verses are John 20:27-28:
Then he (Jesus) said to Thomas, "Put your finger here, and see my hands; and put out your hand, and place it in my side; do not be faithless, but believing." Thomas answered him, "My Lord and my God.""This is the first time," Most notes, "in the whole of John's Gospel, or in fact in any of the New Testament Gospels, that anyone calls Jesus a god, let alone to his face." But Most argues that readers who believe Thomas's startling outcry follows from touching Jesus are mentally supplying a sentence or a thought that is not in the text. For Most, John's use of the word "answered" rather than some expression such as "said" or "exclaimed" is crucial:
The grammar of the verb used here ... is unambiguous: it occurs more than two hundred times in the New Testament, and whenever it introduces a quoted speech B spoken by one person that follows a quoted speech A spoken by someone else, then speech B is a direct and immediate response to speech A, not to any other event intervening between the two speeches. That means there is no room between Jesus' speech and Thomas's speech in which something else -- the touching of the wounds -- could happen that might spark Thomas's exclamation.
