Did Jesus Christ Have a Twin Brother?

This might sound strange to our modern sensibilities, but the fact that some of the major doctrines of Christianity are challenging to believe in (both in ancient times and today) was considered by some fathers of the early Christian Church to be an advantage. The Holy Trinity is a prime example: the orthodox belief that God is a trinity, and that one of its parts is not just the son of another part (Jesus, the son of God the Father), but an incarnation of the divine in flesh, might seem unbelievable, unphilosophical, coarse, and just plain untrue. And yet, as St. Augustine wrote in the 5th century C.E., when you step outside of your home, what do you see? Not synagogues, but churches. God does not need to make sense to human reason. God can be anything and do everything. He can even have a twin brother who, unlike Himself, is 100% human.

If you have a hard time believing that, that's okay. The twin I mentioned, known as Judas Thomas, had a hard time at first believing Jesus rose from the dead. If he can be convinced, maybe we can as well.

Alas, our first impression of Jesus' twin is not a very positive one. His story is told in a text known as the "Acts of Thomas," which is most often dated to the 3th century C.E., somewhere in the eastern part of the Roman Empire.

The story begins after the resurrection of Christ. The remaining apostles conduct a lottery to decide which apostle will go to the region assigned to him by the Lord. Judas Thomas, "who is also the twin" (Jesus' twin), is chosen to go to India, but he refuses the call.

Judas Thomas cites two reasons for his refusal: a weak constitution for the long journey ahead and the fact that he is a Hebrew man who doesn’t speak the language of the people he is sent to. While the first reason might sound like an excuse, it could be genuine, the second reason is plainly absurd: most, if not all, of the disciples do not speak the languages of the people they are sent to convert. You could even say that's the whole point – to spread the true teaching to all nations of the earth, not just to the people of Israel. Even after Jesus appears to his brother in a nightly vision to implore him to take the journey, Judas Thomas persists, saying the nonsensical phrase, “Whithersoever you will, our Lord, send me; only to India I will not go.”

We shouldn't be too harsh on Judas Thomas, as he is, in truth, following in the footsteps of other prophets from the Hebrew Bible. Like Moses, he claims to have troubles with his speech; though in his case, the excuse is less convincing. Moses was "of heavy lips and heavy tongue," while Judas Thomas simply doesn't know the languages of India. Perhaps that's why, when Habban the merchant offers to be his guide to India (and actually his new master), Judas Thomas relents without protest. You see, Jesus, identifying himself as the son of Joseph the carpenter and the owner of Judas Thomas, sold his human twin into slavery.

Jesus' story to Habban highlights a significant issue posed by the existence of his twin brother, which contradicts the Gospels' account of Jesus' conception. According to the Gospel of Matthew, Joseph was still engaged to Mary when she was impregnated by the Holy Spirit. The couple did not consummate their marriage until after Jesus was born. So how could Judas Thomas, a flesh-and-blood man, be his twin brother? And an identical twin at that? The text never explains this.

Back to our story: when Judas Thomas is brought to the city of Adrapolis, he discovers a great feast being celebrated in honor of the king's daughter's wedding. Habban tells him that all people, "both poor and rich, and slaves and freemen, and strangers and citizens," must participate in the celebration to avoid the king's anger.

Judas Thomas participates in the feast, but he neither drinks nor eats. Instead, he gives the people gathered before him a glimpse of his mission, making the sign of the cross on his heart while a "garland of myrtle is placed on his head, and he takes a reed branch in his hand”. A woman playing flute come and plays over him, revealing herself to be a Hebrew woman.

When one of the cupbearers strikes Judas Thomas on the face, the disciple's response seems to contradict his twin brother's famous teaching. While Jesus, in the Sermon on the Mount, talks about turning the other cheek, Judas Thomas tells the man who struck him that God will forgive the offense in the next world, but in this one, "He will show His wonders on the hand which smote me, and I shall see it dragged along by a dog."

Judas Thomas then begins to sing about the church of God, which he describes as the daughter of the King. In this brief song, Judas delineates a different Trinity than the one we know today: the King, who is God the Father; the daughter of the King, who is the church of God; and the Son, Jesus Christ.

It is a bit unsettling to witness the change in Judas Thomas once he arrives in India. He no longer seems concerned about the language barrier or any cultural differences with the people of India. Instead, he becomes self-assured, even somewhat obnoxious. He shows no interest in getting to know the people of the city he just arrived in but instead hurriedly tells them that the only true daughter of light is the Church of the one true God, "within truth (dwells) in humility." And he does this, let us remember, in the middle of the wedding of the king's daughter.

The author of the Acts of Thomas tells us that after Judas Thomas finished his song, which was understood by no one but the Hebrew woman playing the flute (as the song was in Hebrew), everyone in the banquet room marveled at the stranger because "his aspect was changed." Suddenly, Judas Thomas appeared as the most beautiful man of them all.

His revenge for being hit by the cupbearer soon follows. While Judas Thomas was singing, the cupbearer went to the fountain to draw water when a lion came and tore him apart. The dogs carried the dismembered man's limbs away, but not before one of them, a black dog, placed his right hand "in the midst of the banquet room."

Here the Hebrew woman played an important part. When Judas Thomas was singing, she couldn't keep her eyes off him, and now that his promise was fulfilled, she broke her flute and sat at his feet, claiming, “This man is either God or the Apostle of God.” Some were still reluctant to believe her, but not the king, who came and ordered Judas Thomas to escort him to the bridal chamber of his own daughter so the apostle could bless her. Reluctantly, Judas Thomas joined the king.

Through the prayer and praises Judas offers to his brother Jesus in the bridal chamber, we can better understand how he, or rather, the author of the text, sees the actions of Jesus and the meaning of his suffering: Jesus’ death was a victory over the evil one, followed by his descent into Hell to save the lost souls there. This act, and even more so, Jesus' promise, is the selling point Judas Thomas constantly repeats when trying to convert others to the true Church: the promise of "an inheritance in your kingdom", meaning a place in Heaven after death.

At the end of his prayer, and after Judas Thomas leaves, the groom raises the curtain to reveal his bride, only to see a man "in the likeness of Judas, who was standing and talking with the bride." This time it is Judas Thomas' twin, the Lord Jesus Christ, who proceeds to give a sermon to all gathered there.

In this short speech, Jesus talks about the evil of intercourse, a strong theme in the Acts of Thomas and other apocryphal Acts as well. All men and women should be temples of Christ, their bodies pure and virgin. In complete opposition to views expressed in the Hebrew Bible, this brand of Christianity supports not just abstinence before marriage but celibacy in general. To have sex is to be consumed by passions, to bring forth children who will only bring you sorrow. We can well imagine why this version of Christianity did not prevail: it is hard to grow a new faith if its believers are prohibited from procreating.

Yet the author of the Acts of Thomas is adamant in showing his readers just how dangerous our filthy human passions are. He does so by giving us one of the earliest accounts of the Christian afterlife known today.

In a later chapter, the sixth, a man turns to Judas Thomas for help. This unnamed man comes to one of the churches established by Judas Thomas in India, further proof of how successful he is in his mission. The young man tries to take "the Eucharist and was going to put it into his mouth, but both his hands dried up and did not come to his mouth."

Judas Thomas knows immediately that here lies a story of "a very hateful deed," which he implores the young man to tell, assuring him that the gift of Christ could help him.

As the man tells it, after he converted to the new faith, he told his female partner that he wished for her "to live with me a life clean and pure and tranquil and chaste and modest," just like the one Judas Thomas preached. When she refused, the youth, enraged by the thought of her sleeping with other men, murdered her with a sword.

We read this as a horrendous act, and it is obvious that the author agrees with us. But, I'm sorry to say, I don't think this is the point he is driving at. This isn't a cautionary tale about the dangers of being overly zealous when converting to a new faith as Judas Thomas does not fault the man for his aweful deed but instead lays the blame on lust—or as he calls it, "corrupt love, that has no shame, how it has incited this man to do these things!"

Sex in this text is essentially a demonic force in human life, and throughout the work we meet actual demons who force women to sleep with them against their will. In the case of the youth, though, while he was celibate, his corrupt passions took hold of him and incited him to kill his beloved.

Judas Thomas asks to see the woman slain. He goes to the inn where she was murdered and brings her back to life. When she awakes, she is terrified by the sight of the two men—Thomas and her killer—and immediately tells them what she encountered in the afterlife:

In each pit, the woman saw a different host of sinners being tormented. Similarly to Dante's "Inferno," in death each punishment fits the crime committed in life, though unlike that 14th-century poem, the punishments are not described in much detail. By the end of her nasty tour of hell, the woman meets Jesus, who tells her that she is a lost sheep that could be regained. This makes her awake.

Now back in the land of the living, the woman pleads with Judas Thomas to help her never to return to that place. The chapter ends with another long sermon from Judas Thomas, not to the traumatized woman but to the multitudes who gathered to see the miracle of her resurrection.

Death of Sinners and Their Resurrection

The story of the man who murdered his girlfriend reveals how the truth and power of Christ are demonstrated in the Acts of Thomas. Non-Christian characters are often given glimpses into the afterlife, and the dead are frequently resurrected to validate the teachings of Judas Thomas, which are based on those of his twin, Christ.

The second chapter in the text is another example of this mechanism. Just as Jesus is a shepherd of souls, so Judas Thomas is a carpenter who builds a palace not of wood and stone but of charitable deeds. After the feast for the king's daughter ends, Judas Thomas promises the Indian king that he would built him a palace worthy of a great monarch. But, when the king returns to see his new abode, he is furious to discover that Judas Thomas used all the gold and silver he sent to give as charity to the poor in the towns and villages, converting in the process many to "the new God"—as Jesus is referred to by the Indians. When the king demands to see his new palace, Judas Thomas tells him, “You cannot see it now, but when you have departed from this world.”

This is a clear example of a pious fraud, a type of story common in many other hagiographic tales. Yet, what is fascinating is that this is not merely a metaphor or a parable—the palace Judas Thomas promised is a real one, existing in Heaven, where the Indian king will dwell after his death. Initially furious, the king comes to realize this when his own brother returns from the dead to tell him about the beautiful palace in the sky.

This narrative device—the return of sinners from the dead to testify to the truth of the Christian gospel—can be seen as a continuation of the most important element in Jesus' life and story. In three of the Gospels (Luke being the exception), Jesus dies on the cross, comes back to life for a short time to give the apostles their mission, and then disappears again.

Unlike the later Acts of Thomas, the Gospels were written a few decades after Jesus' death and may better reveal the confusion that have prevailed among Jesus’ first believers regarding his tragic end. After all, many scholars agree that Jesus spoke of salvation in this world. Then how come he died and left us to face the same forces that took his life?

The Christian answer, which made Jesus' tragic life and death more than just "an interesting chapter in the history of first-century Palestine" (An Introduction to Christian Theology, Cambridge University Press, 2023), is the persistent claim that Jesus rose from the dead. His death inaugurates a new creation, a new life for humanity.

Why Does Jesus Even Need a Twin?

As I read the Acts of Thomas, I often wondered why Jesus has a twin brother: What does this mean? What can it teach us about Jesus or about ourselves? I came up with two contradictory possibilities, which are most likely quite anachronistic.

Around the time scholars think the Acts of Thomas was composed, the church father Origen wrote: "Very many mistakes have been made because the right method of examining the holy texts has not been discovered by the greater number of readers, because it is their habit to follow the bare letter".

I love this idea. The story of Jesus' twin brother is probably apocryphal, but so are many others found in the Hebrew and Christian Bibles. I don't mean to disrespect these great texts in any way, but we do find enough contradictory facts in them that make it difficult (and to many, impossible) to adhere to a strict and literal reading.

The Christian tradition that won out—the orthodox view—makes great strides in separating Jesus from the rest of humanity, to see him as God among men and women, even though I am not sure he saw himself in such a way. As the Christian faith hinges on the identity of Jesus, one possibility that I see, perhaps unjustifiably, is that the Acts of Thomas could provide us with a way to salvage Jesus' forgotten humanity. Truly a great man with a deep and abiding love for humanity, Jesus—like all of us—also had to deal with family issues on the side.

Or maybe it's the other way around. It is only when Judas Thomas arrives in India and starts working miracles that he earns the trust and respect of the people. By denying his earthly, all-too-human desires, and more importantly, by teaching others to deny theirs, we can see him and his community start to form an instant connection with the divine. The pure body of the believers becomes "a temple of Christ"—a place where the Lord Jesus could enter to bring forth a new life, the only one worth living according to the text. This duality between our human nature and our Godly nature—a staple of most, if not all, forms of Christianity—can be symbolized by the duality of Jesus Christ and his twin brother, Judas Thomas.

All quotes from the Acts of Thomas are taken from A.F.J. Klijn's 2003 translation of the work.