Most scholars agree Jesus had a brother named James. But a bunch of ancient Christians thought he had another brother. An identical twin brother: Judas Didymus Thomas. Where did this belief come from? And what was its significance?
Bibliography:
Gregory Riley, “Didymos Judas Thomas: The Twin Brother of Jesus,” in Kimberley Patton (ed.), “Gemini and the Sacred: Twins and Twinship in Religion and Mythology,” Bloomsbury Academic, 2023.
M. David Litwa, “I Will Become Him”: Homology and Deification in the Gospel of Thomas, Journal of Biblical Literature, SBL Volume 134, Number 2, 2015. pp. 427-447.
ANDREW HENRY is a scholar of religion focusing on early Christianity and the religions of the late Roman Empire. He earned his PhD in 2020 from Boston University.
Andrew launched Religion for Breakfast in 2014 during his PhD studies when he realized that religious studies content was almost completely lacking on YouTube. Religion for Breakfast aims to remedy this by publishing introductory videos on a variety of topics related to religion.
Andrew has partnered with academic, non-profit, and government organizations to further the mission of producing freely-available religious literacy content. In 2017, he produced introductory videos for online, graduate-level classes for the Religious Freedom Center. In 2019, he partnered with Sacred Writes, an initiative based at Northeastern University dedicated to public scholarship about religion, to produce three videos on topics such as racial segregation in US religious communities, the rise of humanist gatherings on Sundays, and an introduction to indigenous religion. As a member of the Applied Religious Studies Committee at the American Academy of Religion, Andrew has organized and led workshops for scholars to learn how to better reach a broader audience.
Andrew’s academic background spans ancient history, archaeology, and religious studies. He specializes in the religions of the ancient Mediterranean world, focusing specifically on demonology and magical ritual in late antique Asia Minor and the Levant.
He worked at the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology in Philadelphia before moving to Boston. He has excavated in Athens with the American School of Classical Studies. He is a former Educational and Cultural Affairs research fellow at the Albright Institute of Archaeological Research in Jerusalem, and the former Coptic Iconography post-doctoral fellow at the American Research Center in Egypt.
RELATED CONTENT:
Portal E.M. Cioran Brasil 🇧🇷 