Thomas/Twin in the Fourth Gospel and the Gospel of Thomas: The Mesopotamian Background of an Early Christian Motif

Abstract

This study examines the Thomas/twin motif in the Gospels of John and Thomas, which plays a significant role in each. By analyzing the motif’s meaning, deployment, and development in the two Gospels against Mesopotamian models, this study brings a fresh perspective to the much-debated topic of the Gospel of Thomas’s place of origin. This study demonstrates that Thomas betrays a knowledge of cuneiform polyvalence and argues that this corroborates the historical tradition that it originated in Mesopotamia. The findings also support the claim that the work is theologically sophisticated despite its disarming surface appearance. Similarly, Mesopotamian hermeneutics shed light on some enigmas of the Fourth Gospel’s symbolism, esotericism, and theology conveyed in the rhetorical and symbolic role of Thomas called Didymos. This study concludes that, in both Gospels, the figure of Thomas/twin is paradigmatic for every adherent of Jesus, but the Gospels have drawn on Mesopotamian sources in different ways.

May you be (a member) of a house built by twin sons (Sumerian proverb)

1. Introduction

In the Fourth Gospel’s account of the Last Supper, the onset of night occurred either shortly before Jesus and his twelve disciples gathered for the meal or early in that fateful event (13:30b). By the Jewish reckoning, nightfall marks the beginning of the new day, and the new day in question was 14 Nisan. Before night fell again, the Passover lambs would be slaughtered, and Jesus would die on a cross (Smith 1995, pp. 62, 116; Wagener 2015, p. 503).

The Fourth Gospel (FG) recounts that, very early on 14 Nisan, Judas Iscariot son of Simon left the gathering prematurely to execute his plan to betray Christ. On his departure, Jesus commenced the “Farewell Discourses”, his revelatory utterances to and exchanges with his eleven remaining disciples (13:31–17:26). For many scholars, chapters 13–17 constitute the Gospel’s “most important section” (Riley 1995, p. 71). They form the work’s theological core. Moreover, rhetorically, they represent its heart. They link the “Book of Signs”—whose seventh and final sign was the raising of Lazarus, which took place a matter of days before 14 Nisan (11:55–12:1; Wagener 2015, p. 494; Hart 2016, p. 25)—and the passion and resurrection narrative that concludes the book (Léon-Dufour 1987, p. 31).

So absorbing are the Discourses’ theological content and esoteric diction—the “veiled speech” (ἐν παροιμίαις λελάληκα) that Jesus employed (16:26)—that one is apt to overlook their careful rhetorical crafting and the layered meaning this crafting introduces (Thatcher 2001, p. 273).1 The number symbolism in the Discourses is as significant as that in the Book of Signs (Lincoln 2000, p. 97) and just as esoteric. Chapters 13–17 play with a variable geometry of threes and seven. Among the seven identified characters that the pericope cites, Jesus is the constant element. Apropos the man-born-blind pericope that repeats the name Jesus seven times, John Behr (2019, p. 169) remarks that, in John, seven indicates Christ. He is the animateur who delivers the Discourses and replies to the questions they evoke from the uncomprehending disciples (Back 2013, pp. 183–84). Three disciples figure in the first part of the pericope (chapter 13), namely, Judas Iscariot, Simon Peter, and the Beloved Disciple, here mentioned for the first time. The second part names three other disciples: Thomas (14:4–7),2 Philip (14:8–10), and “Judas not Iscariot”, a character also mentioned for the first time (14:22–24). They question Jesus on the meaning of his utterances. Thus, the number of designated participants is seven, and the name “Judas” brackets the six identified disciples.

Analysis of the broader context reveals that one of them, Thomas, participates in other plays on three and seven linked with this pericope. 14:4–7 is the second of three occasions on which the Gospel quotes him, and the name Thomas appears seven times on its pages (11:16; 14:5; 20:24, 26, 27, 28; 21:2).

According to the ancient tradition preserved in the Gospel of Thomas (GTh), the name of this disciple, whom, on three occasions, the FG dubs “Thomas called Didymos” (11:16; 20:24; 21:2; Most 2005, p. 78; Poirier 1997, p. 295; Sylva 2013, p. 1), was actually Judas (Bauckham 2004, pp. 32–36; Ehrman and Pleše 2011, p. 305; Thomaskutty 2018, p. 90; Cureton 1864, p. 141). The GTh (Coptic version) begins: “These are the secret sayings which the living Jesus spoke and which Didymus Judas Thomas wrote down” (Layton 1989, pp. 52–53).3 Helmut Koester (1989, p. 39) insists, “Judas is the original name; Thomas is from the Aramaic te’ōmā (Syriac tā[’]mā), ‘twin’. Didymus is Greek for ‘twin’, and corresponds to the Aramaic”. In other words, Thomas and Didymos are not personal names but bilingual epithets of a person who was someone’s twin (Stang 2013).4 Given the FG’s likely late first-century date (Attridge 2019, pp. 285–88; Hill 2010, p. 7; Charlesworth 2011, p. 161; Anderson 2006, p. 171) and the GTh’s possible priority (Davies 1992, p. 663; Gathercole 2012; Patterson 2011, pp. 414–15; Thomaskutty 2018, p. 91), its writer was conceivably aware of the Judas tradition surrounding Thomas, particularly if, as some scholars maintain, he was familiar with the “Thomasine community” (Riley 1995, p. 177; Pagels 1999, pp. 477–78; DeConick 1996, pp. 72–73; De Conick 1997, p. 390; DeConick 2001; Piovanelli 2010, pp. 458–61; cf. Skinner 2009, p. xxi; Poirier 2024, p. 252). This being so, chapters 13–17 describe a triad of Judases. In light of Jesus’ predictions that one of the twelve would betray him (13:21), another would repeatedly deny him (13:38), and the remainder would abandon him to his death (16:31–32), in the Discourses the name “Judas” begins to resemble a generic moniker for the entire group.

John 21 offers a variation on the number symbolism that I have discussed.5 The configurations in the Discourses rely on seven and three, and chapter 21 is likewise no stranger to triads. It recounts Jesus’ third post-resurrection appearance to the disciples (v. 14) and his thrice-repeated challenge to the three-time denier Peter (vv. 15–17; Breck 1992, pp. 40–42). But it presents eight characters, not seven: Jesus plus seven disciples. The eight alludes to this number’s association in the Hebrew Bible (HB) with new life (Baker 2022, pp. 76–77). Indeed, in John, Jesus’ resurrection was his eighth and greatest sign, a point underscored by eight being the number of days that elapsed between Jesus’ first and second post-resurrection appearances to the disciples (20:26; cf. Wagener 2015, p. 517).

Nevertheless, the chapter presents a conspicuous heptad: the number of disciples present (Schnackenburg 1982, p. 352). Rather than using triads as in the Discourses, the account evinces a 5 + 2 pattern comprising five designated disciples and two who go unnamed. This configuration recalls the five barley loaves and two small fish with which Jesus fed the multitude (6:9–13). That sign prefigured the disciples’ feeding humanity with God’s word following Jesus’ resurrection (17:18–20; 21:15–17; Wagener 2015, pp. 524–25).6 The risen Jesus’ miraculous provision of bread and fish for the disciples emphasizes the correlation between chapters 6 and 21 (21:9, 13). Fortuitously or not, the composition of seven as 5 + 2 reproduces a rudimentary Mesopotamian feature: the Sumerian term IMIN “seven” transparently derives from I “five” + MIN “two”.

The number symbolism that I have discussed comports with the FG’s esoteric character. Smith (1995, pp. 40, 56, 84–85) remarks that, when the Synoptics present Jesus instructing his disciples on what the future holds, his discourse was grounded in apocalyptic. True to the literal meaning of apocalypse, his words removed the veil that shrouds the future to prepare his followers. The FG in the Discourses, by contrast, “transposes the apocalyptic hopes and categories of Paul and the other Gospels into another key.… No longer is christology interpreted with reference to an eschatology oriented toward the future” (Smith 1995, pp. 105–6).7

Neither is the revelation that Jesus imparted explicitly disclosed. The Synoptics differentiate Jesus’ parabolic mode of teaching the crowds from his direct disclosure of the mysteries of the kingdom of God to his disciples. In the FG, accounts of Jesus’ words confusing his interlocutors punctuate the Gospel (O’Brien 2005, pp. 287–88), irrespective of who his interlocutors were. His words bewildered his antagonists “the Jews”, those neutral toward him such as Pilate, the Samaritan woman, and indeed the crowds who followed him, those inclined to him like Nicodemus, and his adherents, such as Martha, Mary, and the twelve (Léon-Dufour 1987, p. 16; Smith 1995, pp. 26–28; Thatcher 2001; Back 2013; Ashton 2007, p. 321; Skinner 2009, pp. 139–226). Even in the hours leading to his arrest, Jesus’ words were veiled (Behr 2019, p. 131).

Commentators have long recognized that the FG is an esoteric text that cultivates an opaque mode of discourse/“verschlüsselte Rede” (Back 2013, p. 179; Neyrey 2007, pp. 9–15). Double entendres and ambiguities (Attridge 2019, p. 278; Hart 2016, p. 11; Reimer 2013, p. 430; Brooke 2011, p. 65; Bonney 2002, p. 51 n. 36), riddles (Léon-Dufour 1987, p. 197; Thatcher 2001; Anderson 2011b; Sylva 2013, p. 75), and paroimias (the counterpart of the Synoptic “parable” [Ashton 2007, p. 321]) abound, as does elaborate symbolism (Smith 1995, pp. 24–25). Moreover, its structure is framed by sēmeia. This word, generally translated “signs”, also denotes “omens”. In Rev 12:1, 3; 15:1, sēmeion signifies a celestial portent. In ancient Greek usage, sēmeion can convey “a sign from the gods, an omen” (Liddell and Scott 1849, p. 1275; Dillon 2017, pp. 11–12). The omens in the FG, however, are not the apocalyptic portents of Revelation and the Synoptics (Attridge 2019, p. 271). Although they are charged with cosmic significance (Smith 1995, pp. 25–26), they are neither set in the heavens nor in the distant future. They occur on earth in the narrated present or a time shortly thereafter (Léon-Dufour 1987, pp. 197–202). They serve as “pointers that can disclose what is hidden” (Attridge 2019, pp. 273). In this respect, if they resemble portents at all, it is terrestrial omens of the kind defined and recorded in Babylonia.

The FG’s esoteric character and lack of interest in high eschatology are amplified in the GTh (Koester 1989, p. 43; Sevrin 1997, pp. 351, 359–60; Pagels 1999, p. 478; Patterson 2011, p. 419; 2013, p. 18; Stang 2016, pp. 66, 80; Thomaskutty 2018, p. 195; cf. Metzger 1997, p. 165). The (dis)organization of its logia, which are presented in a disarmingly basic list format (Patterson 2011, p. 414), serves to conceal the Gospel’s complex meaning. Jean-Marie Sevrin (1997, p. 352) avers, “it veils what it communicates; as for its use: it says nothing to ordinary Christians, represented by the disciples, but to the initiates alone”. One point, though, is unambiguously pressed in the GTh: its words are secret, hidden (Poirier 2024, p. 261); access to its truths is perilous (incipit and log. 13). In this, it stands closer to the FG than is generally recognized, for “[the truth] belongs to the special vocabulary of the Johannine group, and its inner meaning is hidden from outsiders” (Ashton 2011, p. 65). As we shall see, the GTh also encodes number symbolism, and in a sophisticated form.

Thus, the two Gospels on which this study focuses are, to differing degrees, Geheimschriften (Liebenberg 2001, pp. 408–9). This property, more than any other apart from Jesus’ centrality, constitutes their common denominator.8 They each involve, in Harold Attridge’s (2019, p. 269) felicitous phrase, a strategy of “confrontation with the unknown”. My claim begs two questions, though, which I will seek to address: to what extent are the approach to the esoteric that these Gospels adopt and the devices they employ to effect it common to both? And to what degree are the approach and the devices distinctively Mesopotamian?

This objective is, admittedly, over-ambitious for a journal article. To strike a balance between length and rigor, I limit my investigation of both works to the motif of Thomas/twin. This motif is central to the theological programs of both Gospels, and, in both, it is expressed esoterically. It also has highly developed analogues in Mesopotamian cult and lore. I begin my investigation by demonstrating that the writers of the GTh and the FG could have been exposed to Assyro-Babylonian theology and mystical speculation. Next, I examine the thesis that the GTh was written in Alexandria rather than in Mesopotamia. I present evidence that a knowledge of cuneiform informed Thomas’s “coded theology of the twin”, which Charles Stang has shown underpins its belief system. Rather than exploring evidence for Mesopotamian reflections of the motif in one Gospel in its entirety before scrutinizing the other Gospel, my approach is thematic. I compare how the two Gospels treat pertinent themes associated with the motif. As a rule, I first consider their treatment in Thomas and then compare the results with analogous features in John. In the GTh, I focus on a few logia that offer readily apparent insights into this topic. This method, to borrow an image from Thomas, leaves many stones unturned, but it clears ground for more exhaustive research in the future. My approach to the motif in the FG is more comprehensive. This study ends with a summary of my findings.

2. Discussion

2.1. Omens in Nisan

I introduced this study by sketching the temporal context of the Discourses, namely, 14 Nisan. In first-century Jewish observance, as in the Jewish calendar today, the astronomical calculations that determined 14 Nisan, like the month names themselves, originated in Babylonia (Cohen 1993, p. 298; Ben-Dov 2014, p. 223; Spolsky 2014, p. 29; cf. Al-Rawi and George 2006, p. 48). The Akkadian name for the Babylonian first month of the year is Nisannu. This reflects the absorption of Mesopotamian scholarly achievements in first-century Palestine. It also invites investigation into what the Babylonian astrologers who created the calendrical system associated with this day and month. A hemerology discovered in Assur warns, “14 Nisan: A dangerous day: wailing for the sick. The healer should not put his hand on the sick; the diviner should not speak” (Labat 1939, p. 57; for 14 Nisan as an ill-omened day, see Greenfield and Sokoloff 1989, p. 207).

The Babylonian terrestrial omen series Šumma ālu ina mēlê šakin “If a city is set on a hill” offers another apposite Nisan omen: “If the king undertakes rites in Nisan, [he will acquire] fame” (Freedman 1998, pp. 182–83 XI:5′, 13–14). Šumma ālu was consulted into at least the Seleucid period. No Gospel presents Jesus as king more powerfully and unequivocally than John does (Smith 1995, p. 89; Koester 2008, pp. 91–96; Behr 2019, pp. 180–82). The supreme rite of self-sacrifice that Christ the king performed on this dangerous day was “not only for the nation, but that he might gather all the dispersed children of God into one” (11:52), that, in being raised high on the cross, he “might draw all people to [himself]” (12:32–33), “that they might see [his] glory” (17:24; Léon-Dufour 1987, pp. 302–3).

The Qumranic corpus confirms that Mesopotamian omen compositions were known in first-century Palestine. The sectarians studied celestial, brontological, and physiognomic omina that ultimately derived from Mesopotamian diviners (Bohak 2019, pp. 464–65; Geller 2004, p. 53; Frahm 2011, pp. 370–71; Sanders 2017, pp. 152–54; Popović 2007; Jacobus 2015, pp. 7, 80–81). Evidently, works of this nature reached them in Aramaic versions (Popović 2014; Sanders 2017, pp. 20–21, 158, 188). Given that “Some combination of direct and indirect contacts between the Johannine tradition and Qumranic Judaism is likely, a reality that explains the numerous minor parallels between the Johannine writings and the scrolls” (Anderson 2011a, p. 39; see also Beasley-Murray 1987, pp. lxi–lxiii; Ashton 2011, pp. 64–65; Charlesworth 2011, pp. 161–62), if Mesopotamian material could reach Qumran (Beaulieu 2007, p. 139), it could also reach the Fourth Evangelist wherever he composed the Gospel. In this sense, it is immaterial whether this happened in Palestine or, as some scholars infer, in Syria (Schnackenburg 1968, pp. 150–52; 1980, p. 327; Kuntzmann 1983, pp. 174–75; Beasley-Murray 1987, pp. lxxix–lxxxi; Smith 1995, p. 7).

According to Acts 2:9–11, many of the Jewish pilgrims attending the Shavuot festival in Jerusalem came from the distant East. Among them were inhabitants of Mesopotamia, Medes, Parthians, Elamites (Bock 2007, pp. 147–48; these are areas traditionally associated with Thomas’s apostolic mission [Most 2005, p. 99]). This is unsurprising: major trading routes from India to the Mediterranean and south from Armenia passed through Mesopotamia (Katz 2000, pp. 26–27; Ross 2001, p. 27; Patterson 2011, p. 422; Layton 1987, pp. 361–64; Lane Fox 1988, pp. 277–78; Kalmin 2006, pp. 4–5). The Roman Empire’s eastern border in the first and second Christian centuries was open for trade—and, for much of the time, the movement of people, letters, and books. Ideas, the least encumbered of travelers, accompanied them.

This brief foray into Mesopotamian omen lore begins to suggest that Babylonian and Assyrian scholarly endeavors might be valuable for interpreting Christian writings of the first and early second centuries, though they are generally ignored (Boxall 2024, p. 26). From Nebuchadnezzar II’s reign and especially after the calamitous Jewish revolts against Rome in AD 70 and 135, Mesopotamia grew to become an eminent center of Jewish learning (Finkel 2014, p. 314).9 Its towering achievement was the Babylonian Talmud, “the most prominent text of rabbinic Judaism’s traditional literature” (Fonrobert and Jaffee 2007, p. 1). Much earlier, though, Herod the Great’s appointment of a Babylonian Jew as high priest in Jerusalem attests to the significance of the Babylonian diaspora in Palestinian affairs at the turn of the era. Perhaps it also points to the regard that Babylonian Jewish scholarship enjoyed in Palestine (Neusner 1969, p. 37; Baker 2022, pp. 1–14, 33–54). And, over centuries, Mesopotamian rabbis were exposed to Babylonian hermeneutics (Wazana 2009, pp. 129–30; Montgomery 1913, p. 26).

2.2. The Gospel of Thomas

Recent scholarship has strongly challenged the longstanding consensus that the GTh originated in Mesopotamia, very likely in Edessa (Gathercole 2014, p. 109; Given 2017, pp. 507–16; Riley 2023, p. 358). David Litwa and Ian Phillip Brown have advanced detailed arguments for Alexandria as the Gospel’s place of origin. As Litwa (2024, p. 183) asserts, accepting a “new provenance fundamentally changes our approach to [the GTh] and our understanding of the history of Christianity in the second century CE”. Although they reach the same conclusion, the arguments that Brown and Litwa deploy are different. Litwa adduces other early Christian writings that parallel elements of the GTh and asserts that each derives from Alexandria. Ergo, Alexandria was the home of the GTh. Brown argues that the content of the Gospel is so derivative of the peculiar mix of Platonic and Hellenistic Judaic traditions associated with Alexandria that it surely originated there.

This is not the occasion to critique these propositions in detail. In my view, however, they do not prove an Alexandrian origin. To deal with the awkward fact that the GTh little resembles the sophisticated literary style epitomized by Philo that he identifies with Alexandria (Horman 1979, pp. 342–43; Gathercole 2014, p. 28), Brown (2019, pp. 469–72) submits that the Gospel’s audience was “partially educated people”. This is only valid if the Gospel is as conceptually simplistic as its surface reading suggests. Brown thinks it is, but many scholars disagree, appraising it as a complex, layered composition,10 a work that “bears the mark of a learned eclecticism” (Poirier 2024, p. 261). If it can be demonstrated that its meanings are profound but not expressed in terms consistent with Alexandrian norms, Brown’s thesis collapses. Moreover, as Litwa (2024, p. 165) remarks, the parallels that Brown adduces between Philo and the GTh and on which Brown bases much of his case lack sufficient specificity.

Litwa’s marshaling of ancient sources that are likely to have originated in Alexandria is impressive. However, without a more secure dating of the Gospel and robust understanding of the composition and redaction process that formed it, what counts as “a contemporaneous document” remains uncertain (Litwa 2024, p. 183). In addition, as he concedes (2024, p. 183), the Thomas traditions “quickly became mobile”. They could have moved as easily from east to west to reach Alexandria at a relatively early date, as from west to east. The circumstance that Egypt has a better record than other locations of preserving ancient texts written on perishable materials does not confirm provenance (or priority) (Gathercole 2014, p. 110).

If an Alexandrian origin is unproven, how do Mesopotamia and specifically Edessa fare?11 Bentley Layton (1987, pp. 360–61) adduced five arguments for the Mesopotamian origin of the Thomasine corpus. Those that pertain to the GTh are as follows: “Mesopotamia is part of the geographical area traditionally associated with the wanderings” of Thomas; the church of Edessa possessed Thomas relics by the end of the fourth century; the Thomas texts are consonant with a Syrian-cum-Mesopotamian Christian ethos; and Mani, a native of third-century Babylon, was susceptible to “the model of twinship between a divine being and a wandering missionary” found in Thomasine texts.12

All these arguments are anachronistic. In 2014, Simon Gathercole (2014, p. 104) brought a fresh eye to the arguments for the Eastern Syrian origin of the GTh. He enumerated four: “(1) the Syrian character of the name ‘Judas Thomas’; (2) the earliest Syrian reception of Thomas; (3) Thomas’s affinities with Syriac text-forms; (4) the affinity of Thomas with Syriac literature such as the Odes of Solomon and the Acts of Thomas”. Gathercole (2014, pp. 103–11) demonstrated flaws in each while owning that no compelling case exists to reject an Eastern Syrian origin for another location.

2.3. New Evidence for the Mesopotamian Background of the Gospel of Thomas

In the absence of documentary sources that identify Thomas’s place of origin, the best resource for answering the question remains the text itself. It is to the text that I now turn. If the GTh evinces distinctively Mesopotamian features, this would substantiate the broad historical tradition of the Gospel’s Mesopotamian provenance, which is detailed in Thomaskutty 2018.

I submit that the GTh offers such examples. The first is log. 9 when compared with its Synoptic parallels. Logion 9 is the Thomasine version of the parable of the Sower (Layton 1987, p. 381; DeConick 2007, pp. 74–75). In the Synoptics (Mk 4:2–20/Mt 13:3–23/Lk 8:4b–15), this parable provides the context to propound the hermeneutic of parabolic discourse (Farrer 1954, pp. 9, 60–61, 92–94, 209, 228). It stands as the gateway to the genre and to the explicit conception that parables possess two levels of meaning—a surface meaning and a concealed meaning, namely, “the mysteries of the kingdom of God” (Lk 8:10a). The Synoptic versions of the Sower parable also demonstrate that the parables confront two categories of people: “those who are outside” who cannot perceive the truth (Mk 4:11c) and insiders who can or, at least, should (Ashton 2007, pp. 320–21; Liebenberg 2001, pp. 397, 401–2).

In the GTh, no such heuristic accompanies its version of the parable (Riley 2023, p. 357; cf. DeConick 2007, pp. 72–73). The Gospel’s incipit and first logion had already fulfilled this task and established the fundamental oppositions that the parable of the Sower defined in the Synoptics (cf. Stang 2023, p. 370): “These are the secret sayings which the living Jesus spoke …. (1) And he said, ‘Whoever finds the interpretation of these sayings will not experience death’”. There are two levels of meaning: the meaning that the uninitiated perceive and the secret meaning available to the adepts, and two categories of hearers: those who find the sayings’ interpretation and those who do not (Stang 2016, pp. 80–81, 95; Liebenberg 2001, pp. 412–13). Nevertheless, in the GTh, the parable of the Sower is as consequential a hermeneutical key as it is in the Synoptics, but the key lies concealed in its number symbolism.

The Synoptics and Thomas emphasize the correlation between the success of the sowing and the depth and goodness of the soil (Liebenberg 2001, pp. 357–62, 387, 394, 408–12). They agree that, in the good host, germination takes place well beneath the surface. They also agree that finders of the interpretation, recipients of the mysteries of the kingdom of God—the good—go deep and are deep. But, in three of them, some are deeper and consequently more spiritually productive than others. Matthew and Mark show this in the different yields that the good ground produces (Liebenberg 2001, pp. 372–74). Thomas does not make this point explicit in log. 9, but log. 13, which plays an overarching commentary role in the Gospel (Poirier 1997, pp. 354, 359–60; Kuntzmann 1983, pp. 165–66), leaves the matter in no doubt. Luke is the outlier; the good soil produces a hundredfold, no more and no less. The Gospels also diverge in how that productivity is measured, as shown in

Table 1. (cf. Horman 1979, pp. 334–35).

Mark 4:8, 20	Matthew 13:9, 23	Luke 8:8	Thomas log. 9
thirty	hundred	hundredfold	sixty per measure
sixty	sixty	/	120 per measure
hundred	thirty	/	/

.

Unfortunately, no Greek fragment of log. 9 exists (Attridge 1989). We are limited to the Coptic translation. It casts no light on the variation between Thomas, who speaks of “per measure”, and Luke, who uses “a hundredfold” (ἑκατονταπλασίων) (Horman 1979, p. 340); Mark and Matthew simply provide the figures thirty, sixty, and one hundred. The other distinction between the Synoptics and GTh is the base system of numbering that they use. The former employ an essentially decimal/centesimal system. The citation of thirty and sixty in Mark and Matthew derives from a triadic pattern based on one hundred as the optimal number and thirty and sixty respectively representing roughly one-third and two-thirds of that number.13

Gathercole (2014, p. 241) considers log. 9’s numbers a simple development from the Markan/Matthean pattern: “The 60 and 120 in Thomas may simply be natural variation, especially given the references to 30 and 60 in Mark, and 60 in Matthew”. The numbers in log. 9 are not a natural variation on a Markan/Matthean template. The pattern is dyadic, and the numbering system sexagesimal. Both characteristics are key to their decoding. The sexagesimal system is uniquely associated with cuneiform culture; it is a hallmark trait (Michel 2001b). The measurement numbers of log. 9 would be represented in cuneiform by a single vertical wedge for “sixty” (GEŠ) and two vertical wedges written consecutively for “120”. A Sumerian innovation, the sexagesimal system was adopted by the Babylonians and Assyrians and used not only in concrete domains of metrology, but also esoterically. For example, in Assyro-Babylonian number symbolism, which assigned specific numbers as graphic signifiers of the principal gods, the single vertical wedge designated the god Anu, god of heaven and the archetypal king of Sumer’s pantheon. Anu is lauded “the pre-eminent god, the father of the gods, 60” (Livingstone 1986, pp. 30–31).14

This explanation, however, does not elucidate why the GTh selected a doubled sixty for its second and optimal measurement. This brings us to the crux of the encryption. The vertical wedge not only signifies “sixty” (GEŠ), but also “one” (DIŠ) (Parpola 1993b, p. 184 n. 89). And, analogously, two vertical wedges, one wedge plus its mirror image written consecutively, denote both “120” and “two” (MIN).15 Therefore, the numbers that the GTh’s parable of the Sower provides as a measurement of the good soil’s yield, when transposed into the polyvalent idiom of Mesopotamia, cryptically convey “one” and “two”. But MIN additionally means “ditto”, that is, “the same” (Chen 2020, p. 160). In its symbolic treatment of two numbers, Log. 9’s secret words remarkably elegantly foreground core elements of Thomas’s theology: the all-encompassing divinity of the One and its sameness relationality—or better, twinship—with the Two.

The correspondence between this insight and Stang’s exegesis of the GTh is too neat to be coincidental. Here is his account:

I offer a close reading of this Gospel of Thomas, especially a number of its enigmatic sayings about the one and the two …. These sayings offer … a coded theology of the twin, in which the reader is asked to recognize that one is not, strictly speaking, a single self, but that one has the transcendent light of Jesus within oneself. This recognition can be said to render one into two: oneself and the indwelling, luminous Jesus. These sayings also ask the reader to transform, in light of this new duality, and to become a unity that encompasses and embraces this duality. The new selfhood, a unity-in-duality, is given the name “solitary” and “single one”. Those who succeed in acquiring this new selfhood are understood to be, like Judas Thomas the Twin, Jesus’s equals.... The way to inhabit the borderlands of the one and the two is to be simultaneously one and two, a new kind of singularity that depends on and preserves a certain kind of duality…. Paired with the attribution of the Gospel of Thomas to Jesus’s twin, Judas Thomas, is a theological thread that runs through many of these baffling, seemingly esoteric, sayings. Many of the sayings speak of the relationship of the one and the two.

(Stang 2016, pp. 14–15, 63, 66)

Stang does not refer to log. 9’s numbers. He finds compelling evidence for the coded theology of the twin elsewhere in the Gospel. In addition, he discusses near-contemporaries of the GTh writer who also subscribed to a unity-in-duality theology. Among them is Tatian “the Assyrian” (ca. 120–ca. 180; Stang 2016, pp. 107–13), whose epithet advertises his Mesopotamian background (Patterson 2011, p. 424; Piovanelli 2010, p. 445; Given 2017, pp. 505–6). But Stang (2023, p. 370) surmises that the GTh may furnish the earliest evidence of the Christian tradition of the theology of the twin.

Logion 22, which commentators recognize is of signal importance for the GTh overall (Gathercole 2014, p. 308), provides a rich vein of evidence for Stang. It reads:

Jesus saw infants being suckled. He said to his disciples, “These infants being suckled are like those who enter the kingdom”. They said to him, “Shall we then, as children, enter the kingdom?” Jesus said to them, “When you make the two one, and when you make the inside like the outside and the outside like the inside, and the above like the below, and when you make the male and the female one and the same, so that the male not be male nor the female female; and you fashion eyes in place of an eye, and a hand in place of a hand, and a foot in place of a foot, and an image in place of an image; then will you enter [the kingdom]”.

This logion teaches that it is insufficient to receive the teaching of the kingdom as a child to gain admittance to it, as the Synoptics instruct (Mt 18:1–5; 19: 14; Mk 10:15; Lk 18:16–17; Layton 1987, p. 384). In the GTh, Jesus requires an even deeper transformation, namely, the realization of “the mutual likeness of contraries” (Stang 2016, pp. 92–93). Stang shows that this is the correct interpretation of the logion, rather than the enjoining of an encratic lifestyle (DeConick 2007, p. 115; Gathercole 2014, pp. 308, 311). The “mutual likeness of contraries”—in other words, the opposite is the same16—was a tenet of Mesopotamian theology from at least the third millennium. Jean-Jacques Glassner (2003, pp. 148–49) explains: “All the figures of similitude that the Mesopotamians developed over three long millennia have as their place of origin this first fold [of the two primordial beings], where one reflects its double while being its opposite”. This conception is a sublime expression of Mesopotamian polyvalence as the following omen interpretation guidance from Assyria and Seleucid Uruk exemplifies: “[the cuneiform sign] GI means ‘favourable’, GI means ‘unfavourable’ […], ‘favourable’ is ‘unfavourable’[;] it says so in the synonym list” (Koch 2005, pp. 47, 310 33:r.39–41, 365 53:Br3’–Br5’; cf. Jn 16:16–19). As in Thomas’s logion, the ultimate manifestation of this “logical scandal” is the simultaneous identity and gendered opposition of human beings (Dumont 1980, pp. 239–42).

Logion 22 teaches that the adherent must transform so that the inside becomes like the outside, the above like the below. The notion that cosmic opposites are cosmic twins, that polarities reflect each other is consistent with ancient Mesopotamian epistemology. “The signs occurring in the sky as well as those on the earth give us signals, heaven and earth bring us omens in the same way, they are not released separately (because) heaven and earth are interconnected” (CAD 1956–2011, vol. I and J, 1960, p. 307; Oppenheim 1974, pp. 200, 204:39–42, 209; Pearce 2006, p. 15; for later articulations of the conception, see Ashton 2007, pp. 324–27; Fishbane 2003, p. 313). Or, in the words of a Sumerian incantation, “[In Heaven] [the statue] is [born] of itself; on earth it is born of itself. In Heaven it is complete, on earth it is complete” (Walker and Dick 2001, p. 119). The notion of celestial-terrestrial twinning was axiomatic in Assyrian royal ideology—and in that profound “two-level drama”, the FG (Ashton 2007, pp. 327–28).

Logion 22’s message is that, to enter the kingdom, adherents must internalize this Mesopotamian understanding of being, that they must embody the coincidence of DIŠ and MIN, where DIŠ is 1 and (as GEŠ) the divine 60, and MIN is 2 and “the same”, to produce “one and the same” (cf. Stang 2016, p. 94; Gathercole 2014, p. 310). Compare Stang’s (2023, p. 374) conclusion: “Jesus will choose one (oua) and two (snau) and they—the one and the two—will be ‘one and the same’ (oua ouōt)”. And what strengthens the case for the logion’s Mesopotamian context is that regularly in cuneiform literature, nouns denoting paired body parts, such as those log. 22 mentions (“eye”, “hand”, and “foot”), are given in singular form but with the cuneiform sign MIN appended. Typically, the MIN marks the dual number, but on occasion it was written when a single item was intended. The central apprehension at work is that 1 exists as another 1, its opposite and twin. And this is expressed by the sign MIN, which is “simultaneously one and two”: “eyes in place of an eye, a hand in place of a hand, a foot in place of a foot”. Again, cuneiform conventions elucidate this obscure saying.

For Stang (2016, p. 45 and passim), the origin of what he terms the metaphysics of the divine double lies in Plato and the Platonic tradition. In this respect, his work reflects the Western scholarly consensus (Patterson 2011, pp. 416–18; 2013, pp. 15–17, 33–59; Gathercole 2014, pp. 147, 203–4, 511–12; Brown 2019; Litwa 2024). So firmly established is this view that, when Patterson (2011, pp. 415–16, 428) posits an Edessene origin for the GTh, a major plank of his argument is that Edessa is plausible precisely because it was exposed to the wisdom theology that originated in Plato and was developed in Hellenistic Judaism, in particular in Philo’s works. The evidence we have considered, though, indicates that this Eurocentric perspective casts the net too narrowly. Core elements of the Gospel’s teaching have evident Mesopotamian antecedents, and, in some cases, they offer a more elegant and authentic solution to the hermeneutic challenges that Thomas presents than exclusive appeals to Platonic tradition do (cf. Anderson 2011a, p. 16).

Nevertheless, to be persuasive, my thesis must demonstrate that knowledge of cuneiform and the tenets of Sumero-Akkadian theology existed in Syria and Mesopotamia in the late first and early second Christian centuries and, for that matter, not in Egypt. For this we have abundant data (Parpola 2022, pp. 211–12). Texts continued to be composed and copied in cuneiform in Mesopotamia in the first Christian century. The latest datable extant cuneiform tablet was produced in AD 75. It is likely, though, that Akkadian and Sumerian were used for scholarly and religious purposes as long as temples of Mesopotamian gods existed in the region (Geller 1997, pp. 45–47; Rempel and Yoffee 1999, p. 385; Frahm 2011, p. 336). In AD 77, Pliny reported, “to this day [Babylon’s] Temple of Jupiter-Belus [Bēl/Marduk] continues entire”, a statement that Babylonian sources confirm (Natural History VI [https://ia800703.us.archive.org/3/items/plinysnaturalhis00plinrich/plinysnaturalhis00plinrich.pdf; accessed on 13 April 2019]; Linssen 2004, p. 108; George 1993, p. 140: 967). Cuneiform was, therefore, being read and inscribed when the New Testament (NT) and the GTh were being written (Clancier 2011, p. 758; Parpola 2001, pp. 191–93). The Syrian priest and Neo-Platonist, Iamblichus, who was active in the early third century (Stang 2016, p. 233), appears to have taken Akkadian lessons from a Babylonian teacher. His studies were probably prompted by an interest in Babylonian magic (Scurlock and Al-Rawi 2006, p. 379; Geller 1997, p. 50; Chadwick 2001, pp. 296–97).

The Edessene Christian philosopher Bardaiṣan (154–222), the son of a Mesopotamian pagan priest, was conversant in Babylonian astrology as well as Platonic philosophy (Ross 2001, pp. 118, 122; Parpola 2001, p. 192 n. 67). The Syrian Neo-Platonist Damascius, writing in the mid-fifth century, knew the genealogical relationship of Babylonian gods, including Anu and Bēl/Marduk. Evidently, he was also acquainted with the Babylonian epic Enūma eliš, the cosmogonic account of the divine conquest of cosmic chaos (Komoróczy 1973, p. 133). Mesopotamian deities were venerated in Edessa as late as AD 500 (Ross 2001, pp. 87–93; Dirven 1997a, pp. 160–62; Parpola 2001, pp. 191–92). According to the Acts of Sharbel, centuries after the GTh’s composition, Edessa was still hosting an annual festival in Nisan at which the entire population gathered. Its object was to honor Bēl, the king of the Babylonian pantheon, and Nabû, his divine son. The date of the festival suggests that it included the ritual re-enactment of Enūma eliš. If so, this continued a tradition first developed in Babylon and subsequently adopted by Assyria (Dirven 1997b, p. 113 n. 71; Michel 2001a, p. 554; Cureton 1864, p. 41). These gods attracted Jewish devotees in the first Christian centuries, and many ancient Jewish incantations invoked them (Kalmin 2006, pp. 104, 109, 116; Bohak 2008, p. 253). Some scholars maintain that, in the same period, the Mesopotamian moon god Sîn was also venerated in Edessa (Ross 2001, p. 101) as he was in the nearby ancient city of Harran (Novotny 2003). Echoing Assyro-Babylonian tradition, first- and second-century AD inscriptions from Eastern Syria refer to Sîn of Harran as ellahu “the god” (Beaulieu 2007, p. 152). In AD 363, the Emperor Julian offered sacrifices to him in Harran (Green 1992, pp. 49–51).

These data leave no reasonable doubt that, if the writer of Thomas was a native of Eastern Syria or elsewhere in Mesopotamia, he could have been versed in ancient Mesopotamian epistemology and esotericism and acquainted with cuneiform. The specific correlations between the framing of the logia that I have analyzed and the features of cuneiform suggest that he lived in that region. In the next section, I will investigate the extent to which Mesopotamian epistemology may have contributed to the presentation of Thomas/twin in the GTh and the FG.

2.4. Thomas/Twin in the Gospels of Thomas and John

A Babylonian commentary on the abnormal birth omen series Šumma izbu contains the equation MAŠ.TAB.BA = ši-na “two” (CAD Š/3 1992, p. 33). I noted that šina = MIN. MAŠ.TAB.BA is one of two related logograms denoting “twin(s)” in Sumerian and Akkadian. The other is MAŠ (in some contexts, such as astrological and cultic contexts, the form is duplicated: MAŠ.MAŠ17). The Akkadian māšu “twin” derives from Sumerian MAŠ. Akkadian also boasts a native Semitic synonym of māšu, which is tū’amu (Stol 2000, p. 209). This noun is frequently equated in bilingual word lists with MAŠ.TAB.BA (CAD T 2006, pp. 443–44). Its Aramaic cognate is תאום/te’ōmā (Koester 1989, p. 39; Sylva 2013, p. 1). Thomas/Θωμᾶς is the Greek rendering of תאום.

This lexicological excursus affirms that “Thomas” is the anglicized form of Greek Θωμᾶς, which derives from Aram. תאום. This noun’s Akkadian cognate tū’amu = Sum. MAŠ.TAB.BA = Akk. šina. MAŠ.TAB.BA’s semantic range also includes kilallān “pair, both” (CAD K 1971, pp. 353–55).18 Sum. MAŠ > Akk. māšu supplements the array of signifiers of “twin”. In addition, šina = MIN = 2 = “the same”. Thus, cuneiform polyvalence equates 2 and “twin” and “both” and “the same”. Moreover, šina’s cognate verb forms šanû “be changed/become different” and šanānu “become equal, match, claim equality” bear a close visual, phonological, and semantic relationship to it.

This cluster of interrelated lexemes is so rich in theological and hermeneutical possibility that it will inform my analysis of the Gospels of Thomas and John for the remainder of this study. Its value is evident in the GTh’s opening lines. The string Didymos Judas Thomas is not grammatically elegant, but it has the virtue that, from whichever end one approaches, it begins and ends with “twin”. From left to right—the Greek convention—the Greek term comes first; from right to left, following the Aramaic convention, it is its Aramaic synonym that one meets. And the terms for “twin” in the string are themselves twinned; they mirror each other. It is by the Twin’s act of writing Jesus’ words and committing them to posterity that Jesus’ adherents apprehend how to enter the kingdom. The incipit makes it clear that the Twin is the door, or more precisely, doors to the revelation, since the epithet “Twin” is doubled. It is the function of doors to enable the outside to intrude on the inside and vice versa (Pongratz-Leisten 2022, p. 228; Koester 2008, pp. 199–200). In the Gospel, it is Thomas who has made the inside like the outside and the outside like the inside (log. 13).

While the GTh’s treatment of the Thomas/twin motif is characteristically cryptic, the FG’s is more concrete. In chapter 20, Thomas is described as both outside the place where the disciples hid (vv. 19–24) and inside (v. 26). In this respect too, he resembles Jesus. The narrative furnishes no information about the space that the disciples occupied except that it had doors. On both occasions that this fact is stated, Thomas is mentioned. We may infer, therefore, that the doors were double, or twinned. And although both times the doors were locked, Thomas and Jesus could, presumably in different ways, traverse them. In one of the egō eimi sayings (Thatcher 2001, p. 272; Hart 2016, p. 17; Koester 2008, pp. 103–4), Jesus proclaimed, “I am the door” (Jn 10: 9), and then added a protasis and apodosis, namely, “If anyone enters through me, they will be saved and come in and go out”, like the initiates who unlock the GTh’s interpretation. But, in John 10, the door’s singularity is stressed. When Thomas intrudes on the narrative, the doors are doubled. MAŠ.TAB.BA/tū’amu (literally, “Thomas”) commonly signified “twin, double” of doors (CAD T 2006, pp. 443–44). And, in cuneiform culture, “doors and gateways were considered as places fraught with great and solemn significance; they were felt to be full of magic and symbolism, with potentialities either for good or evil” (Barnett 2008, p. 1; Pongratz-Leisten 2022, p. 228; Ambos 2010, p. 223).

The double doors through which Thomas passes in John represent one example of the twinnings that pertain to him. The Gospel mentions him four times: twice before the resurrection and twice after it. And he has twin epithets, “Thomas the one called Didymos”, in three of the FG’s seven references to him (contra Bonney 2002, p. 137 n. 20: “John’s reference to Thomas as ‘the Twin’ … serves no special purpose in the narrative”). The FG also attaches twin epithets, a Semitic term with its Greek translation, to Jesus, namely, Messiah and Christ (4:25). As with Thomas, they are linked by ho legomenos: Μεσσίας ἔρχεται ὁ λεγόμενος χριστός. Jesus and Thomas are the only figures to whom the FG applies this construction. Yet, a critical difference exists between them. In John, Thomas apparently has no name, only epithets (Riley 2023, p. 355; Brownrigg 2002, p. 64; Wagener 2015, p. 529; Stang 2023, p. 369), whereas Jesus’ name is revealed as the key to spiritual transformation and effectiveness (1:12; 2:23; 3:18; 14:12–14; 20:31; Léon-Dufour 1987, p. 105).

In its characterization of Thomas, as elsewhere (O’Brien 2005, p. 288), the FG employs a rhetorical technique widely attested in the HB, namely, “form follows content”. The writer organizes the text in such a way that its form mirrors and thereby reinforces the literary content (Rendsburg 2021; Baker 2024). Karolien Vermeulen (2012) has shown that this technique informed the rhetorical treatment of twins in the HB. Every utterance Thomas makes is readily parsed into two principal parts (cf. Sylva 2013, p. 15): “Let us go, that we may die with him” (11:16); “Lord, we do not know where you are going; how can we know the way?” (14:5); “My Lord and my God” (20:28). Even the “doubting Thomas” outburst is dyadic—a lengthy protasis and the brief apodosis “I will not believe” (20:25). A mark of the Evangelist’s dexterity is the grammatical variation that he introduces in their deployment. Although the four utterances comprise two parts, each utterance is syntactically different from the others (cf. Baker 2023, pp. 195–96). The first is subjunctive; the second an interrogative; “my Lord and my God” is a syndetic statement that lacks a predicate, its dyadic form underscored by repetition of the possessive adjective (Popp 2013, p. 520); and the outburst is a negated conditional with three conditions (Wagener 2015, p. 514). In relation to each other, the four utterances are opposites yet the same. Internally, each consists of unequal twins, but twins, nonetheless. Furthermore, Thomas’s four utterances comprise, in an alternating pattern, a 2 + 2 configuration of addressees. He spoke to the disciples in 11:16 and again in 20:25. His addressee in 14:5 and 20:28 was Jesus. And, in the list of disciples in 21:2, he occupies the number-two slot (Brownrigg 2002, p. 325), recalling the Babylonian equation “two = twin”.

Both Gospels go to considerable lengths to emphasize twinship and to associate it with “Thomas”. What, then, is twinship’s significance for the message that they wish to convey? Neither Gospel gives grounds to conclude that Thomas is Jesus’ biological twin (Bauckham 2004, pp. 172–73; Riley 2023, p. 356). It is other works of the Thomas literature that press this claim (Bauckham 2004, p. 33). The twinship connected with Thomas in the GTh and FG is implied, and it is spiritual (Bauckham 2004, p. 34). For example, we saw that the FG names Thomas seven times and that, in this Gospel, seven symbolizes Christ. Stang’s (2016, p. 96) exegesis helps answer the question that I posed. He asserts: “The categories of the one and two … refer precisely to the indwelling of Jesus in oneself (the one self becoming now two) and the self’s negotiated identity as a unity containing but not annihilating the duality (the two becoming one)”. In this process of transformation, Thomas is both the agent and prototype of all the initiates who unlock the meaning of the secrets he wrote down and consequently become “twins of Jesus”. Stang appeals to Jesus’ words to Thomas in log. 13: “I am not your master. Because you have drunk, you have become intoxicated from the bubbling spring which I have measured out”. This saying, Stang (2016, pp. 97–99) insists, signifies that Thomas is the equal of Jesus. In support, he cites log. 108 in which Jesus declares, “He who will drink from my mouth will become like me. I myself shall become he, and the things that are hidden will be revealed to him”. Stang argues that “Jesus and Thomas begin to merge into a single entity—on my reading a unity-in-duality”.

Stang’s analysis overlaps to a remarkable degree with our earlier lexicological discussion. Central to the polyvalent logic of cuneiform culture is the fact that 1 (DIŠ) is formally identical with 60 in the sexagesimal system, and the vertical wedge that conveys them connotes sublime divinity. According to the same logic, among the values of the sign MIN, which graphically consists of producing DIŠ’s mirror image, are “2”, “a twin” or “twins”, and “ditto, the same”. It also marks duality (and sometimes singularity) of paired body parts. Furthermore, the root of šina (= MIN) produces predicates that describe transforming, becoming equal, and claiming equality, thus reinforcing the correspondence with Stang’s interpretation of the GTh’s theology of the twin. His exegesis and the logic of cuneiform agree. The one and the two or the one and its twin, which is its mirror image, are distinct, but, in both treatments, the boundary between them is sufficiently fluid that, simultaneously, the one is one and yet can also be two, and the two is two and can also be one—and the same.

We have encountered this fluidity in number between singular and dual in the logogram MAŠ.MAŠ. Patton’s (2023, p. 4) remarks on the zodiacal sign of Gemini in antiquity echo this polyvalent logic: “It resembles the Roman numeral 2: II. As in the dókana, two signs for the numeral ‘1’ are joined together at the top and bottom by transverse lines”.

In the next section, I will compare another expression of binary opposition found in our Gospels with the Mesopotamian evidence: above and below, heaven and earth.

2.5. Twins in Heaven, Twins on Earth

John 3:31 asserts, “The one coming from above is over all things. The one whose being is from the earth is from the earth and speaks from the earth. The one who comes from heaven is above all”. Most exegeses of the verse concentrate on its celestial references, which bracket the terrestrial reference.19 However, a statement that is emphasized by its triadic, tautological intoning of the phrase “from the earth” ἐκ τῆς γῆς calls for attention. Steven Hunt (2013b, pp. 554–55) observes that the FG “teems” with allusive references to the new creation accounts in Genesis, and this is surely one of them. In Gen 3:19b, God tells Adam that, because of his transgression, he will “return to the earth for out of [the earth] you were taken” εἰς τὴν γῆν, ἐξ ἧς ἐλήμφθης (LXX). The use of “earth” in Gen 3:19b LXX projects a sense of death not as mortal decomposition but as entry into the realm of the dead. The choice of the preposition ἐκ in Jn 3:31 rather than ἀπὸ, the preposition used in Gen 2:7 LXX, is suggestive (cf. Hunt 2013b, pp. 566–67). It intimates a bounded, contained space that one departs or, conversely, enters. John 3:31’s emphasis on those whose being is “from the earth” and whose discourse is “from the earth” may carry a broader sense than purely “mundane”. After all, Jesus declared to those who wished to murder him, “You are from the nether places; I am from the upper places” ὑμεῖς ἐκ τῶν κάτω ἐστέ, ἐγὼ ἐκ τῶν ἄνω εἰμί (Jn 8:23b).

Commentators agree that Jn 3:31 restates the sharp dichotomy between heaven and earth that Jesus asserted to Nicodemus (Neyrey 2007, pp. 87, 156). In 3:1–21, Jesus told him that, unless someone is born from above, they will not see the kingdom of God. In response to Nicodemus’s failure to comprehend Jesus’ references to “earthly matters”, let alone “heavenly” ones, the FG vouchsafes “the fundamental summary of the message of this Gospel” (Beasley-Murray 1987, p. 51) and, possibly, the NT’s profoundest asseveration of salvific substitution: “For God so loved the world that God gave the only begotten son that the one who believes in him should not be destroyed but have eternal life” (v. 16).

The FG associates Thomas uniquely among the twelve with death and resurrection, “die Tod-Leben-Thematik” (Wagener 2015, p. 526). He enters the stage in the pericope recounting Lazarus’s death and resurrection, and death is the subject of Thomas’s first utterance (11:16; Wagener 2015, p. 501). His second exposes his incomprehension of Jesus’ path to death and glorification (14:5–7; Popp 2013, p. 512), of Jesus as “the life”. And his third speech concerns Jesus’ mortal wounds and exposes his incredulity that Christ’s pierced and disfigured body could overcome death (Riley 1995, pp. 4–5, 118–19; Most 2005, pp. 63–64; Sylva 2013, pp. 13, 75, 100; Thomaskutty 2020).

As explicated by Stang, in the GTh, Thomas is transformed into Jesus’ twin so that he (and all who share Thomas’ relationship with Jesus) may “enter the kingdom of heaven”, which are the Gospel’s final words (log. 114; Layton 1989, pp. 92–93). The FG inverts this image in 3:16. Here, it is Jesus who becomes the twin of Thomas (and all who share Thomas’ belief in him as Lord and God) to stand as Thomas’s perfect substitute (Ashton 2007, p. 520). But this is not a one-way process. John shows us that the metamorphosis into twinship is synergistic: Thomas is transformed in the light of revelation into Jesus’ twin (contra Wagener 2015, p. 530). Twinship is itself twinned, and the axis on which the transformative synergy takes place is vertical: the one who is from above takes the form of the one from below (as in the early Christological hymn [Phil 2:7]) so that the one from below may assume the image of the one from above (Jerumanis 1996, pp. 420–21; Riley 2023, p. 360).

The idea of death, resurrection, and the relationship of heaven and earth that John 3 projects has echoes in the Babylonian myth Nergal and Ereškigal. It recounts how Nergal, god of sudden death, plague, and the sun’s destructive power, whose symbolic number is 14 (Parpola 1993b, p. 182 n. 88), faces the wrath of Ereškigal. Ereškigal, whose name means “Lady of the Great Earth”, was queen of “the great earth”, that is, the netherworld.20 While the text at this point is hard to decipher, apparently the means for Nergal to evade Ereškigal and permanent incarceration in the realm of the dead is for him to be duplicated (Ponchia and Luukko 2013, p. 39). An identical copy of the god is therefore created as a substitute, since Ereškigal’s cult required substitutional sacrifices (Arbøll 2021, pp. 68–70; Parpola 1970, pp. 110–11; 1983, p. 127). “The theme of a substitute or of a copy that might function as a substitute is fundamental in relation to the netherworld” (Ponchia and Luukko 2013, p. 45). The fact that the duplicated logogram ^[d]MAŠ.MAŠ signifies Nergal underlines the relationship of “twin” with “substitute” in this pericope (Wiggermann 1992, p. 38; Ponchia and Luukko 2013, p. 49). Deliverance from the unending death symbolized by Ereškigal depended on the provision of a substitute, who, in all respects, resembled the intended victim. Nergal, as we shall see, represents one of the allusive threads in the tapestry that depicts the Thomas/twin of our Gospels.

In the Discourses, Jesus told his disciples that he was no longer calling them “servants” but “friends”, for whom he will lay down his life in love (15:13–15; Behr 2019, p. 183). Once he performed that supreme act of sacrifice and substitution,21 however, these same individuals miraculously became his “brothers”: “Go to my brothers and say to them, ‘I am ascending to my Father and your Father’” … “And Mary came and reported to the disciples …” (20:17–18). In the space of three days, these people, whom the Father gave Jesus “from out of the world” (17:6a, 9), underwent a transformation from “servants” to “friends”, and from “friends” to “brothers” of Christ and sons of the Father. It was as dramatic as, and inalienably linked with, Jesus’ translation from sacrificial substitute, “lamb of God who removes the sin of the world” (1:29b), to Lord and God during the same period. In the crucible of death and resurrection, these friends became his twin(s). And the disciple “the Twin”, who is the cipher for every adherent (in both Gospels: Layton 1987, p. 359; Riley 2023, p. 362; Stang 2023, p. 377; Larsen 2008, p. 217), became the first to articulate what had taken place (20:28; Larsen 2008, pp. 208–10), as he passed from the death of unbelief, by which he was separated/untwinned from Jesus and his fellow disciples (Wagener 2015, pp. 514–18), into the life that flows from faith (Popp 2013, pp. 505, 527–28; cf. 5:21, 24). In the HB, namelessness does not necessarily connote insignificance, but rather its antithesis, as the angel informed the parents of Samson, the man not born blind (Judg 13, p18; Baker 2016, p. 144; cf. Ashton 2007, p. 285). The same obtains in John, as Thomas called Didymos and the man born blind exemplify. Both are paradigms for those who will follow them in faith (Bennema 2014, pp. 255–57; Reimer 2013, p. 435 n. 22; Popp 2013, pp. 504, 518–19; Theobald 2022, p. 761) and are “parallel character[s] to Jesus” (Reimer 2013, pp. 432–36; Lincoln 2000, pp. 96–101). Indeed, the man born blind even uttered his own egō eimi statement (9:9c).

The spiritual twinship of Jesus and Thomas and its meaning for all who recognize Christ as “my Lord and my God” in John should not be abstracted from its HB background. Among the few biblical figures that the FG names is Jacob, the paramount and archetypal Hebrew twin. In fact, it mentions him three times (4:5–6, 12), directly comparing him with Jesus. In the Gospel’s references to “Israel”, the allusion is less direct but present, nonetheless. These are the nominal references. There is also a thematic—as well as nominal—allusion to Jacob in Nathanael’s call scene (Léon-Dufour 1987, p. 195; Hunt 2013a, pp. 198–99). Here, Jesus refers to Nathanael as “an Israelite indeed”, and Nathanael calls Jesus “the Son of God, the king of Israel” (1:49). The scene mirrors, and is the twin of, the climactic scene of Thomas confessing Jesus as “My Lord and my God” (Breck 1992, p. 48; Poirier 1997, p. 307; Most 2005, pp. 53–54; Knights 2014; Wagener 2015, p. 535; Thomaskutty 2018, p. 81). But it is in Jesus’ response to Nathanael’s declaration that the Jacob allusion receives its most theologically loaded formulation: “You will see the heavens opened and the angels of God ascending and descending upon the son of man” (1:51). Its final phrase closely parallels LXX (and MT) Gen 28:12, which describes Jacob’s dream at Bethel. The “Israelite indeed” would have immediately recognized the allusion. The salient difference between the Genesis text and Jesus’ quotation is that, in the former, “the angels of God ascend and descend on it [the steps]”, whereas, in John 1, their means of transition is Jesus himself, who thus reveals himself as the cosmic connector of heaven and earth, “the gate of heaven” (Gen 28:17; Léon-Dufour 1987, pp. 198–99; Kuntzmann 1983, pp. 119–20; Ashton 2007, pp. 499–500; Bennema 2014, p. 253).

The context of Jacob’s dream was his flight (to Harran) from his enraged twin, Esau. This point is stressed in Gen 27:41–45 and repeated in 35:1. While the intertextual relationship between the Jacob narrative and John 1 invites close reading, it would divert us. The point at issue is that, although Esau and Jacob were twins תואמים (MT), δίδυμα (LXX) (25:24), and this characteristic animates much of their story, they invariably referred to each other as “my brother”, not “my twin (brother)” (Vermeulen 2012, p. 136). This fact elucidates Christ’s words, “Go to my brothers”, that is, the individuals who had become his twins through his death and resurrection.

The FG provides an insight into the mirrored reality of heaven that the Sumerian incantation I quoted describes. The same two-yet-one relationship that we have witnessed in the FG and the GTh between Jesus and his earthly twin(s) duplicates a heavenly archetype. In Jn 8:16–18, the Father and Jesus are differentiated “persons”: “In your law it is written that the testimony of two people is true. I bear witness concerning myself, and the Father who sent [me] bears witness concerning me” (8:17–18). Their separate identities already begin to merge, though, in v. 19c. To his interrogators’ poignant question “Where is your father?” Jesus replied, “If you knew me, you would know my Father”. But it is in 10:30 that Jesus unequivocally affirmed their oneness: “The Father and I are one” ἐγὼ καὶ ὁ πατὴρ ἕν ἐσμεν (Jerumanis 1996, p. 304). Craig Koester (2008, pp. 105–6) remarks, “There is a double subject: I and the Father. The verb is plural: we are. But the descriptive term is singular: one. The Son is differentiated from the Father and yet identified with the Father”.

In its treatment of the relationality of the celestial deity and the divine connector, John restates the fundamental proposition of cuneiform culture: opposite yet the same, 2 = 1, and 1 = 60, pleroma (cf. Wagener 2015, p. 506). In addition to the “heavenly father” Anu, the vertical wedge could also denote the archetypal divine son Nabû (Parpola 1993b, p. 205). And, as the god of writing and the word, the wedge was Nabû’s emblem (Black and Green 2014, p. 134; Tudeau 2019; Baker 2022, pp. 282, 301).²² Late Babylonian theology identified Nabû on his exaltation as king with/as Anu (Beaulieu 2007, pp. 148–53).23

The Discourses develop the topic of Jesus’ relationality with the Father that was first introduced in Jesus’ dialogues with outsiders. Pertinently, it was Thomas who initiated the development (Popp 2013, pp. 510–13; Wagener 2015, pp. 502–10). Addressing his question, Jesus asserted, “If you know me, you also know the Father” (14:6; Koester 2008, pp. 105–7). Later, in speaking about all who come to believe in him through the disciples’ word, he prayed that “they may all be one, even as you, Father, are in me and I in you, that they might be one in us” (17:21).

2.6. Lugalgirra and Meslamtaea

The cultural associations of the “twin” motif in first-century Near Eastern society should be considered in analyzing its treatment in the FG and GTh. Graeco-Roman civilization, like Mesopotamian civilization, held that the constellation Gemini was the astral manifestation of mythological twins. For Greeks and Romans, they were Pollux and Castor; for Babylonians and Assyrians, Lugalgirra and Meslamtaea (Wallenfels 1993, p. 283; George 1992, p. 366). Lugalgirra and Meslamtaea appear in scholarly and magical compositions and seal impressions throughout the Seleucid period (Wallenfels 1993, p. 284; Brisch 2019). The NT offers a glimpse of how prominent the motif of the astral twins was in first-century life: the Alexandrian ship that conveyed Paul from Malta bore the image of the Dioscuri “the Twin Brothers” (Acts 28:11), namely, Castor and Pollux, Gemini (Bock 2007, p. 745).

The myth of the semi-divine Pollux and his mortal twin Castor is Greek, but the association of twins with α Geminorum and β Geminorum, which are among the brightest stars in the northern sky, derives from Babylon (Patton 2023, pp. 2–3). The much-copied cuneiform astronomical treatise MUL.APIN, which was probably compiled in the early first millennium BC, reads, “^mulMAŠ.TAB.BA GAL.GAL/The stars the Great Twins = Lugalgirra and Meslamtaea” (I.i.5; Watson and Horowitz 2011, pp. 1–14, 187; Reiner and Pingree 1998, p. 14; Hunger and Pingree 1999, p. 59). The principal Babylonian celestial omen series Enūma Anu Enlil (EAE) likewise associates Lugalgirra and Meslamtaea with the “Great Twins” (Reiner and Pingree 1998, pp. 27, 183; Hunger and Pingree 1999, pp. 12–14, 59). The Qumran community was evidently familiar with both works (Geller 2004, p. 53). The zodiacal Twins had great currency in Mesopotamia and the Roman empire. Given this, is their imprint visible in the FG’s and GTh’s treatment of the “twin” motif?

W. G. Lambert (1987–1990, p. 143; also Brisch 2019) translates the names Lugal(g)irra and Meslamtaea as, respectively, “Mighty Lord” and “He Who Came/Comes out of Meslam”. According to Simo Parpola (personal communication), they signify “Strong King” and “Man Emerging from the Netherworld”. In Kimberley Patton’s reading (2023, p. 3), they are “Mighty King” and “One Who Has Arisen”. Meslam was Nergal’s temple in his main cult center Cutha (cf. 2 Kgs 17:30; Lambert 1997, p. 55; Katz 2007, p. 183). It was also the name of the Divine Twins’ temple in Durum (George 1993, pp. 126–27; Ponchia and Luukko 2013, p. 50). It is plausibly a designation of the netherworld (Kinnier Wilson and Vanstiphout 1979, p. 41), as Parpola’s and Patton’s readings indicate. An inscription of Nebuchadnezzar II’s father Nabopolassar in Babylon attests to the twins as cosmic connectors: “the step up to heaven, the stairway down to the nether world, the station of Lugal-girra and Meslamtaea” (Al-Rawi 1985, pp. 4, 6). The inscription recalls the imagery of Jn 1:51. Like many Mesopotamian deities, their writ ran in the heavens (as α Geminorum and β Geminorum) and on earth (cf. Jn 20:23).

Lugalgirra, “figure full of adornment … firmly founded, strong god” (Woolley 1926, pp. 704–5), seems more representative of the celestial realm and “Man Emerging from the Netherworld” of the terrestrial. Their dichotomous relationship expresses itself in additional ways. For example, Lugalgirra is identified with the auspicious right side and Meslamtaea with the inauspicious left (Lambert 1987–1990, p. 144; Emelianov 1999, p. 74). The anti-witchcraft incantation series Maqlû (VI 148’–149’) states, “At the right of my gate and the left of my gate, I have posted Lugal[g]irra and Mesla[mta]ea” (Abusch 2016, p. 346; Wiggermann 1992, p. 31). The twins’ respective stationing was to protect the plaintiff from the intrusion of “undesirables”, including evil and sickness.24 Figurines of the twin gods were buried beneath doorways and their images drawn on gates to guard vulnerable points of access (Lambert 1987–1990, p. 145; Wiggermann 1992, pp. 58–59, 116–121; Van Buren 1947, p. 313). I noted Jesus’ identification with the “gate of heaven” in Jn 1:51’s allusion to Jacob in Bethel. An explicit statement of his guardianship of the divine sphere is contained in his reply to Thomas: “no one comes to the Father except through me” (14:6). Jesus and Thomas are both associated in the FG with doors, as I mentioned. In the GTh, they serve as the twin doors to the secret sayings and their correct interpretation. Those who find it “will not experience death”.

Intriguingly, a Sumerian hymn calls Lugalgirra a “black raven”, and Meslamtaea a “white raven” when we might expect the opposite designations (Lambert 1987–1990, p. 144; Emelianov 1999, p. 74; cf. Wiggermann 1992, p. 54). But the plot of the Esau and Jacob story hinges on the inversion of such expectations and on the “magnetic, charged ‘space between’” that it cultivates (Patton 2023, p. 15). Glenn Most (2005, pp. 79–80) states that biologically the second-born twin is often weaker and culturally less-favored, the first-born receiving greater status and advantages. In Genesis (25:21–28:22), Esau was favored by his father and was due to receive the “birthright” and the “blessing”, but Jacob acquired both. We observed a similar dialectic in the synergy between Jesus and Thomas, with Jesus taking on the form of the one from below, the raven of darkness, and Thomas assuming that of the raven of light (cf. Wagener 2015, p. 529 n. 140).

The distinction between the twin gods also operates in the astronomical sphere. A commentary on EAE identifies Lugalgirra with the benefic planet Mercury, “the star of the crown prince” and of Nabû (Parpola 1993a, p. 39 52r.:9–11, 55 73r.:7–8, 56 74r.:5–11; Baker 2022, pp. 4–5, 280, 285, 302), and Meslamtaea with the malefic Mars, Nergal’s astral hypostasis (Reiner and Pingree 1998, p. 134; Livingstone 1986, p. 190; Emelianov 1999, p. 74; Brisch 2019).25 The distinctions between Lugalgirra and Meslamtaea are expressions of opposites as the same, 2 = 1, and 1 = 60, the fulness of divinity. Each of the twins, but perhaps especially Meslamtaea, can be replicated (Wiggermann 1992, pp. 19, 21; Green 1988). In an amulet, Meslamtaea is described as ^dMAŠ.MAŠ MAŠ.TAB.BA, the divine twin (or “Nergal”) and the “both god”; the use of a duplicated predicate DU.DU in the amulet’s inscription underscores the god’s replication (Wiggermann 1992, pp. 37–38). Patton (2023, p. 7) observes, “Twins do not just double a singleton’s power, gifts, or troubles; they reduplicate these and amplify them”.

Perhaps the most profound and illuminating metaphor of the relationship between the Mesopotamian twins, though, is offered by Parpola (unpublished): Lugalgirra is the brickmold that receives and shapes the clay/mud (Sum. IM/Akk. ṭīdu), Meslamtaea is the resultant brick. In ancient Mesopotamia, including in the Harran-Edessa area (Novotny 2003, pp. 92–94, 111, 117–120), the month dedicated to making bricks and constructing buildings was Simānu (>Hebrew Sivan), the third month (May-June) (Watson and Horowitz 2011, p. 206; Cohen 1993, pp. 314–15). Indeed, a Sumerian name for the month was “Placing-the-brick-in-the-brickmold”. “(Simānu is) the month of the brick mold of the king, the king makes the brick mold, all lands build their houses” (CAD L 1971, p. 8; Ellis 1968, pp. 17–18; Emelianov 1999, p. 72; Frame 2021, p. 229 43:58). Royal brickmolds used in temple construction were made from precious material such as ivory, ebony, and cedar (Ellis 1968, p. 26; Novotny 2010, pp. 118–20).

For the Mesopotamians, Simānu was the month of the Great Twins (https://www.britishmuseum.org/collection/object/W_1885-0430-15 accessed on 2 January 2025; Lambert 1987, p. 204; Emelianov 1999, pp. 71–76; Van Buylaere et al. 2019, p. 186). Vladimir Emelianov (1999, pp. 72, 76, 265) argues that, because the brick assumes the form of the mold, “from the very beginning, the month’s essential symbolism concerned kinship/duality …. The ritual significance of the third month in the [mid-third-millennium] Nippur calendar represents the cult of kinship/duality, symbolizing the oneness of the revealed and the secret, of the image and the form”. He defines the interaction of the brick with the mold as a magical operation.

Certainly, clay was thought to possess magical properties (Van Buylaere et al. 2019, p. 182 and passim). It was, after all, able to convey the divine word (cuneiform tablets; Veldhuis 2013, p. 174; Van Buylaere et al. 2019, p. 188), be transformed to resemble something other than itself (effigies, images, bricks; Ellis 1968, p. 17; Cancik-Kirschbaum 1995, p. 11), and, by means of the mold, be worked into entities susceptible to endless reduplication. The brickmold–brick symbol combines the ideas of replication and the splitting away of the self that together epitomize twinship (Patton 2023, p. 20; Stang 2023, p. 373). Furthermore, Mesopotamians associated the brick with birth,26 and, in omens, the kiln-fired brick (agurru) was etymologically linked with death and death’s reciprocal, substitutional relationship with new life (George 1991, pp. 146–54, 161; Stol 2000, pp. 111–19; Ambos 2010, pp. 227–28).

In the FG, in the blazing kiln of the strong king’s death and resurrection, the “man” emerges from the realm of death, created in the king’s precise likeness (Van Buylaere et al. 2019, pp. 184–85). From these bricks, the temple is constructed (2:19–22), whose summit touches heaven (Gen 28:12; Novotny 2010, p. 127), with YHWH/I AM stationed above it (28:13 MT; BDB 662–63; Skinner 2009, p. 49; Hunt 2013a, pp. 200–1). Jesus is the new Bethel “house of God” (Léon-Dufour 1987, pp. 199–200). The imagery is veiled in the FG, albeit Thomas’s last meeting with Jesus took place by a fire (21:9; Anderson 2006, p. 183). Ephesians 2:21–22, however, gives it graphic expression (DeSilva 2022, pp. 152–53). Here, too, Mesopotamian beliefs and rituals offer insights. Stephanie Dalley (2010, p. 241) comments that the Mesopotamians treated temple construction as though it was a divine body. And bricks of Assyro-Babylonian temples, including in Harran, were stamped or inscribed—some in Aramaic—with the names of their constructor-kings (Walker 1981, pp. 66–68, 72–73, 79–94, 99, 101–2, 106–8, 117–119, 126–27; Sauvage 1998, pp. 150, 292–311; Waerzeggers 2015, p. 195; Novotny 2003, p. 46 n. 148, 126; cf. Jn 17:11–12). Thomas Didymos was, in this sense, the “first brick”, that is, the “brick molded by the king as a prototype of all the bricks, laid by him to mark the beginning of the temple’s construction” (Ellis 1968, pp. 26–29; Novotny 2010, pp. 119–20).

Excavating the clay to make bricks and apotropaic figurines was accompanied by theurgic rites. Victor Hurowitz (2006, pp. 14–15) details the process:

A ritual for founding a new temple called for figurines for the god Ninšubur [= Anu’s vizier Papsukkal27]. These figurines are to be of clay prepared in a brief ritual consisting of sacrifice, prayer, and gesture. Three days before founding the temple, the ritualist was to go to the clay pit. He was to take lapis lazuli, mix together roasted flour and emmer beer, throw them into the clay pit and say: “Clay Pit! Take your purchase price. Three days from now I will make a Ninšubur-figure out of your clay”. … Dedicating the clay is accomplished by purchasing clay from the pit and announcing that it will be used for making a god. The figurine is thus not of ordinary, profane clay, but of ritually dedicated/sacred clay.28

The parallel with the redemptive journey of Jesus is evident: he became flesh (<clay; BDB 9) and dwelt among us; the redemption price having been paid, he was transfigured into divine form three days later. He came up from the pit, fulfilling his promise to erect the temple in three days, namely, the “temple of his body” (Jn 2:19–21).29

The GTh presents analogous conceptions in typically Thomasine garb: “Jesus said, ‘He who is near me is near the fire, and he who is far from me is far from the kingdom’” (log. 82), and “I have cast fire upon the world, and see, I am guarding it until it blazes” (log. 10). Here, fire transfigures the initiates. It is, Stang (2016, p. 90; 2023, p. 373) avers, “a deifying reward”. In its blazing intensity, in the “ritually pure kiln” (Novotny 2010, pp. 118–20), it recreates them in the “image of God” (Davies 1992, p. 675).

Where Thomas portrays Jesus casting fire upon the world, John presents him casting light. As he fashions a miraculously healing salve from clay/mud (πηλὸς; Schnackenburg 1980, p. 248) mixed with his own saliva for the man born blind, Jesus announces, “While I am in the world, I am the light of the world” (9:5–6). The FG juxtaposes the healing that Jesus performed using clay with his opponents’ picking up stones from the earth to hurl at him in reaction to his assertion, “Before Abraham was, I am” (8:58–59). The antithetic parallelism is plain: the stones are hard and lethal, the clay soft and life-giving. Chapter 9’s four references to clay comprise, like Thomas’s utterances, two pairs of dizygotic twins that alternate between narrative account (9:6, 14) and oral report (9:11, 15; for other parallels with Thomas, see Schnackenburg 1980, pp. 253–54). Implicit in the record is that Jesus fashioned two pieces of clay, one for each eye. The narrative, though, treats the two pieces, the two eyes, and the two acts as one: “[he] anointed his eyes with the clay” (9:6). Again—this time with twinned body parts—the interplay between two and one that affirms their essential unity-in-duality underlies the scene.30

Jesus’ acts with clay and words of light are prefaced by his statement: “While it is day(light) we must work the works of him who sent me. Night is coming when no one can work” (9:3–4). Irrespective of the timing of the incident,31 this metaphor seems to evoke the summer solstice, the time of greatest daylight, of maximum working hours followed by a very short night. If so, it speaks of Jesus’ three years of ministry followed by the three days preceding the resurrection when the light was hidden (Schnackenburg 1980, p. 242; cf. Beasley-Murray 1987, p. 239). Apropos, Parpola (1993b, p. 203) takes “1 (=60) as the length of the longest day”.

I note in closing that the month of the Great Twins/“the month of the brickmold of the king” is the month in which, EAE states, the longest day occurs—15 Simānu (Hunger and Pingree 1999, pp. 47–50). Simānu is also called the month of the lunar deity Sîn, “the divine light of heaven and the netherworld” (Frame 2021, p. 229 43:57).32 Sîn’s main cult centers, Ur and Harran (Fales 2017, p. 175), were, respectively, the departure point and first waystation in Abraham’s odyssey from Mesopotamian pagan to “father of many nations” (Acts 7:2–4). Sîn’s main festival in Harran took place on 17 Simānu, which, as Tamara Green notes, is approximately the solstice. Just as Meslamtaea, “man from Meslam/emerging from the netherworld”, was syncretized with the chthonic god Nergal, so Lugalgirra was syncretized with Sîn, “god of light” (Lambert 1987–1990, p. 144; Kuntzmann 1983, pp. 73, 143–44; George 1992, p. 366; Emelianov 1999, p. 74). “The god of the underworld and the god of light seem to exist on a continuum that extends from life into death and back into life again”, remarks Green. This is another expression of “die Tod-Leben-Thematik”. She adds that the two deities were brothers, “perhaps even twins” (1992, pp. 29–30). In late Babylonian esotericism, Sîn was identified with Anu and the divine son Nabû, who was also identified with Anu (Beaulieu 2007, pp. 148–52; Baker 2022, pp. 314–15; Livingstone 1986, pp. 31, 46). Before Abraham (of Ur and Harran) was, I AM/YHWH. And, in words that uncannily echo John, EAE characterizes the solstice in Simānu as the time when urru ana mūši inappal, “day is giving way to night” (Al-Rawi and George 1991/1992, p. 60; Skinner 2009, p. 96). Returning to where I began this essay, “When [Judas Iscariot] had taken the bread, he immediately went out. It was night” (13:30).

3. Conclusions

In his substantial study of the FG, Réaliser la communion avec Dieu (1996), Pascal-Marie Jerumanis carefully considered the traditions of “la culture ambiante de Jean” to investigate their relationship with the Gospel. His conspectus includes other NT books, ancient Greek literature, the HB, ancient Judaic texts, and hermetic and gnostic literature including “Mandaic and Valentinian Gnosticism”. It ignores cuneiform culture. This omission is normative in the exegesis of the NT and the GTh. Platonism and its development in Hellenistic Judaism have shaped Thomas and John (but cf. Chilton 1992, pp. 92–93, 99; Chilton and Neusner 1995, pp. 119–120 for the FG), just as the HB has. But does their combined explanatory force elucidate fully the epistemology that informs these two very different but curiously similar Gospels? Could other major corpora illuminate them? The present study addresses these questions from the perspective of cuneiform literature. The ongoing debate about whether the GTh originated in Mesopotamia recommended it for such treatment. With the FG, the issue is not primarily the place of origin but the sources on which the Evangelist drew in devising its rich esotericism, symbolism, and theology.

I have focused on a single, but for these Gospels, central topic: the meaning, use, and development of the twin motif. I have compared their handling of the motif with Mesopotamian analogues, having demonstrated that both these late first- or early second-century Gospels could have been susceptible to cuneiform culture.

My analysis reveals differences in their appropriation of Mesopotamian material. In its treatment of unity in duality, the GTh unquestionably shows acquaintance with cuneiform. Its application of cuneiform polyvalence is combined with a sophisticated grasp of Mesopotamian hermeneutics. This study’s findings from a few logia suggest that a rigorous comparative investigation of the Gospel will expose other definitive features of Mesopotamian epistemology. The findings substantiate the strong historical tradition that the GTh originated in Mesopotamia. Its elaborate melding of conceptions derived from Greek philosophy and Hellenistic Judaism with Mesopotamian hermeneutics may point to a Western Mesopotamian origin (Riley 2023, p. 358). The environs of Edessa, long held to be its cradle, comport with the evidence.

The FG reveals a command of Mesopotamian literary techniques, mythology, and speculative reasoning akin to but different from their expression in Qumranic literature. These ingredients add color and piquancy to the FG’s narrative and depth to its theological propositions. Compared with other NT books with Mesopotamian characteristics, supremely, Matthew and Revelation (Baker 2022), John stands closest to the latter, notwithstanding Revelation’s apocalyptic character. Both are Geheimschriften, and both exploit the resources of Mesopotamian symbolism, esotericism, and mythology to achieve their rhetorical and theological ends.

What this study shows overall is that Mesopotamian hermeneutics can elucidate features of the two Gospels that have eluded Western exegesis.