These are hardly the words of a chronic doubter. "Let us also go," he says, "that we may die with him" (John 11:8,16). When Jesus, hearing of his friend Lazarus's sickness in Bethany, tells the disciples that they are returning there, some of them protest: people want to kill you there, Jesus. There is much that is praiseworthy in him. His identity, despite our perception and description of him, is not rooted in that moment. But it is one moment, only one, and he moves quickly beyond it. The Bible never describes Thomas this way. His name comes conjoined, hip to bone, feather to wing, with that unshakable epithet: Doubting Thomas. Thomas is a doubter, the doubter-the doubter's patron saint. What is he thinking? His silence is more inflected than Cantonese. He can unnerve you with his silence, with the depths and layers of it. And there's something else, something in the eyes: a shrewdness, a wariness, a caginess. Thomas is gaunt, his face stark and raw-edged like a Palestinian landscape.
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