John 11:14-16
Let us also go, that we may die with him
The others point out that the Jews had lately sought to stone him. Thomas does not dispute the danger, he accepts it out loud and proposes going anyway.
People of the Bible
Thomas
Is remembered for one week of doubt and never for the day he volunteered to die.
Also called Didymus, the twin
Thomas appears four times in John and the famous one is last. When the others are arguing that going back to Judea means being stoned, it is Thomas who says let us also go, that we may die with him, which is either courage or gloom and reads like both. At the last supper he interrupts to say they do not know where he is going and cannot know the way. And after the resurrection he is simply not in the room, and says he will not believe the report without evidence he names precisely.
Scroll down to the storyThe movements, in the order the text gives them.
The story of Thomas
- 01
- 02
John 14:1-6
We know not where you go
He interrupts a comfort with an objection about logistics. The reply is one of the most quoted sentences in the New Testament, and it exists because he said he did not follow.
- 03
John 20:24-25
Except I shall see the print of the nails
He was not with them. The conditions he sets are specific and physical, and they are the same evidence the others had already been shown without asking.
- 04
John 20:26-29
My Lord and my God
Eight days later, doors shut again, and the offer repeated back to him word for word. The confession he makes goes further than any other in the book.
Why it matters
What he asks for is exactly what the others were given: Jesus had shown them his hands and his side in the same chapter, unasked. A week later the door is shut again and the offer is made in his own words, reach here your finger. The text never says he took it. What it records instead is the highest confession in the gospel, my Lord and my God, from the man the church has spent two thousand years calling doubting.
6 songs
The music
Every song in the catalogue whose passage falls inside these chapters.
John 20:24-31
Blessed Are They That Have Not Seen, and Yet Have Believed
