I'm gonna teach you how feel, Open your mind to something real, Take your frustration, use it up, I'm gonna teach you how to touch. --Do U, SIRPAUL
Fascinating how he twins himself and promptly attempts to seduce his "better half".
"He looks like the gay jesus" comments a listener. Which indeed he does - Jesus, seducing Thomas. Here's a hot twin on twin pic, dining on tail. Via Roids and Rants.
4 comments:
Ooops, had I said Saint Paul earlier? I meant Sir Paul. I actually (Akashally?) real-eyesed that you'd've dug that one more, so, hey, that's why the surprise. I'm glad it chimed your twanger, Mike.
Speaking of split zygotes, ever hear of the Visconti triplets before?
Seeing only one man,
Anadæ Effro ( :-)}
Thanks for the ping into SirPaul. Very interesting, and wow, what a cuty. Not heard of the V twins (isn't that a Harley motorcycle term?) But thanks. Oh yeah, they're triplets but rumor has it that they are actually a pair of twins and a brother? That is crazy.
Of all the variations Christianity had in its early years before it was codified, the tradition in the orient (Egypt and Syria) that Thomas was a special disciple, maybe even Jesus's twin brother, is one of the oddest.
Since we know absolutely nothing concrete and physical about the life of Jesus, talking about him becomes a question of "more likely" or "less likely."
In that respect, the support for the idea that Thomas was Jesus's twin is pretty flimsy, definitely on the "less likely" side.
Thomas comes from the Aramaic T'oma, which means "twin." His other name in Greek is Thomas Didymos, or Thomas the Twin. Nowhere in the New Testament does it say that Thomas is Jesus's twin.
What's more, Jesus already had a brother named Thomas on the historical record, who had a life's story totally different from Thomas the Apostle...namely, Thomas Didymos brought the Gospel to India and Persia, whereas Jesus's brother jousted with Paul of Tarsus over leadership of the early church.
It's hard to imagine a couple naming TWO kids Thomas. Maybe it's sort of like that Irish family in the SNL skit where they start re-using names over and over, as they had a lot more children than there were good proper Irish names!
Thomas was known as a twin, but it takes a very special reading to make him Jesus's twin specifically. There's only one place that he's deliberately pointed to be his twin, which is in the Nag Hammadi scrolls. This is the strongest piece of evidence for the idea that Jesus and Thomas are twins, but that can just be interpreted to mean that Jesus and Thomas had a special relationship, and also there's no corroboration for this elsewhere in early Christian canon.
One pop theory is that Jesus's "resurrection" was made possible by the death of a twin. This is a cool idea, and reminds me of Christopher Priest's science fiction novel, THE PRESTIGE.
However, it is definitely "less likely." For one thing, the only story of any consequence about Thomas in the New Testament definitively places him as still alive after the Cruxifiction! (The famous "Doubting Thomas" story.)
Second, the traditions that state Jesus survived the cruxifiction with a stand-in...never even mention Thomas. The Koran mentions Simon of Cyrene, for instance.
Jesus, EG, it's like have a walking library of Alexandria around! I was musing about this earlier, and it cracks me up to think about the holy family in the manger and how somehow they kept his twin brother hidden?!
That said, the concept of the twin is amazingly powerful in myth, and especially in homoerotic writing. A story without twins is almost rare. And the idea of the "hidden" twin fascinates me. The human race is "Thomas". Stop me before I do a Shirley McClaine.
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