03 July 2020

Coming to Christ with doubts
and questions like those of
Saint Thomas the Apostle

Saint Thomas and the Risen Christ depicted in a fresco in a church in Athens … Saint Thomas comes to Christ with doubts and questions while the disciples are locked away in fear (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

Patrick Comerford

In many calendars of the Western Church, including the Book of Common Prayer in the Church of Ireland, and Common Worship in the Church of England, today is the feast day of Saint Thomas the Apostle.

He was once commemorated on 21 December, and still is in the Episcopal Church (TEC). But his commemoration was moved many years ago to 3 July, the date given in the Martyrology of Saint Jerome and the day on which his relics are said to have been moved from Mylapore, near Madras, on the coast of India, to Edessa in Mesopotamia. After a short stay on the Greek island of Chios, the relics were moved in September 1258 to the West, and are said now to be in Ortona in Italy.

I think Saint Thomas is an appropriate apostle to recall today as many of his prepare to reopen our churches on Sunday (5 July 2020) as another stage of the Covid-19 pandemic lockdown is lifted, knowing that many people are going to stay locked away for fear, and others are not going to come because they have other doubts.

Perhaps Saint Thomas reminds us too that all our planned celebrations and liturgies are meaningless without faith in the Resurrection.

In the Gospels, Saint Thomas is named ‘Thomas, also called the Twin (Didymus).’ But the name ‘Thomas’ comes from the Aramaic word for twin, T'oma (תאומא), so there is a tautological wordplay going on here.

Syrian tradition says the apostle’s full name was Judas Thomas, or Jude Thomas. But, who was his twin brother – or sister?

The Temple of Apollo in Didyma … one of the most important shrines and temples in the classical world to Apollo and his twin sister Artemis (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

I have often visited Didyma on the south coast of Anatolia. There, the Didymaion was one of the most important shrines and temples in the classical world to Apollo and his twin sister Artemis. Apollo was the sun-god, the son of Zeus; he was the patron of shepherds and the guardian of truth, and in Greek and Roman mythology he died and rose again.

Is the story of Saint Thomas’s doubts an invitation to the followers of the cult of Apollo to turn to Christ, the true Son of God the Father, who is the Good Shepherd, who is the way, the truth and the light, who has died and who is truly risen?

We can never be quite sure about Saint Thomas in Saint John’s Gospel. After the death of Lazarus, the disciples resist Christ’s decision to return to Judea, where there had been an attempt to stone Jesus. But Thomas shows he has no idea of the real meaning of death and resurrection when he suggests that the disciples should go to Bethany with Jesus: ‘Let us also go, that we may die with him’ (John 11: 16).

And, while Thomas saw the raising of Lazarus, what did he believe in?

Could seeing ever be enough for a doubting Thomas to believe?

The Apostle Thomas also speaks at the Last Supper (John 14: 5). When Christ assures the disciples that they know where he is going, Thomas protests that they do not know at all. He has been with Christ for three years, and still he does not believe or understand. Seeing and explanations are not enough for him. Christ replies to his remarks and to Philip’s requests with a detailed exposition of his relationship to God the Father.

In the Resurrection story in Saint John’s Gospel, Saint Mary Magdalene – who is commemorated later this month on 22 July – does not recognise the Risen Christ at first. For her, appearances could be deceiving, and she thinks he is the gardener. But when he speaks to her, she recognises his voice, and then wants to hold on to him. From that moment of seeing and believing, she rushes off to tell the Disciples: ‘I have seen the Lord.’

Two of the disciples, John the Beloved and Simon Peter, have already seen the empty tomb, but they fail to make the vital connection between seeing and believing. When they hear Mary’s testimony, they still fail to believe fully. They only believe when they see the Risen Lord standing among them, when he greets them, ‘Peace be with you,’ and when he shows them his pierced hands and side.

They had to see and to hear, they had to have the Master stand over them in their presence, before they could believe.

On the first Easter Day, the Disciples locked themselves away out of fear. But where is Thomas? Is he fearless? Or is he foolish?

For a full week, Thomas is absent and does not join in the Easter experience of the remaining disciples. He has not seen and so he refuses to believe. When they tell him what has happened, Thomas refuses to accept their stories of the Resurrection. For him hearing, even seeing, are not enough.

Thomas wants to see, hear and touch. He wants to use all his learning faculties before he can believe this story. He has heard, but he wants to see. When he sees, he wants to touch … he demands not only to touch the Risen Christ, but to touch his wounds too before being convinced.

And so, for a second time within eight days, Christ comes and stands among his disciples, and says: ‘Peace be with you.’

Mary was asked in the garden on Easter morning not to cling on to Christ. But Thomas is invited to touch him in the most intimate way. He is told to place his finger in Christ’s wounded hands and his hand in Christ’s pierced side.

Yet we are never told whether Thomas actually touched those wounds with his fingers. All we are told is that once he has seen the Risen Christ, Thomas simply professes his faith in Christ: ‘My Lord and my God!’

In that moment, we hear the first expression of faith in the two natures of Christ, that he is both divine and human. For all his doubts, Saint Thomas provides us with an exquisite summary of the apostolic faith.

Too often, perhaps, we talk about ‘Doubting Thomas,’ when we might better call him ‘Believing Thomas.’ His doubting leads him to question. But his questioning leads to listening. And when he hears, he sees, perhaps he even touches. Whatever he does, he learns in his own way, and he comes not only to faith but to faith that for this first time is expressed in that eloquent yet succinct acknowledgment of Christ as both ‘My Lord and My God.’

In our society today, are we easily deceived by appearances?

Do we confuse what pleases me with beauty and with truth?

Do we allow those who have power to define the boundaries of trust and integrity merely to serve their own interests?

Too often, in this world, we are deceived easily by the words of others and deceived by what they want us to see. Seeing is not always believing today. Hearing does not always mean we have heard the truth, as we know in Irish life and politics today. It is easy to deceive and to be deceived by a good presentation and by clever words.

Too often, we accept or judge people by their appearances, and we are easily deceived by the words of others because of their office or their privilege. But there are times when our faith, however simple or sophisticated, must lead us to ask appropriate questions, not to take everything for granted, and not to confuse what looks like being in our own interests with real beauty and truth.

As our churches reopen on Sunday, we need to find ways to assure people in their doubts, in their reluctance to join with us, and to find ways to invite them to see and believe again in their own time, to encounter the living Lord.

Saint Thomas … an icon in the chapel of Saint Columba House retreat centre in Woking, where USPG trustees met late last year (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2019)

Readings: Habakkuk 2: 1-4; Psalm 31: 1-6; Ephesians 2: 19-22; John 20: 24-29.

Collect:

Almighty and eternal God,
who, for the firmer foundation of our faith,
allowed your holy apostle Thomas
to doubt the resurrection of your Son
till word and sight convinced him:
Grant to us, who have not seen, that we also may believe
and so confess Christ as our Lord and our God;
who is alive and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit,
one God, now and for ever.

Post Communion Prayer:

God of hope,
in this Eucharist we have tasted
the promise of your heavenly banquet
and the richness of eternal life.
May we who bear witness to the death of your Son,
also proclaim the glory of his resurrection,
for he is Lord for ever and ever.

The font from Saint Thomas Church in Newcastle West, Co Limerick … the font is inscribed ‘One Baptism For Remission of Sins’ … the church was deconsecrated in 1958 and demolished in 1962 (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2019)

A lost manuscript tells the life
of a Portuguese secret Jew
and the Inquisition in Mexico

Diego Rivera, ‘Dream of a Sunday Afternoon in Alameda Central Park’ (a detail), 1947, Museo Mural Diego Rivera, originally Hotel del Prado, Mexico City, illustrating an account by Professor Ronnie Perelis of his work on Luis de Carvajal and his manuscripts

Patrick Comerford

During the Covid-19 lockdown, one of my very individual choices for continuing education is taking part in a series of weekly Zoom seminars or webinars on Sephardic history, organised by the Bevis Marks Synagogue and the Spanish and Portuguese Jewish Community in London.

Earlier this week (30 June 2020), Rabbi Shalom Morris was in conversation with Professor Ronnie Perelis of Yeshiva University, New York, who spoke about ‘The Sephardic Atlantic: networks of family and faith.’

Yeshiva University has grown from a small yeshiva offering some secular education to Jews on the Lower East Side of Manhattan in 1886 to a prestigious university that integrates the knowledge of Western civilisation and the rich treasures of Jewish culture.

Yeshiva University supports three undergraduate schools, including Torah studies programes, seven graduate and professional schools, affiliates such as the Albert Einstein College of Medicine and the Rabbi Isaac Elchanan Theological Seminary, scholarly centres and institutes, several libraries, a museum and a university press. Yeshiva University has four campuses in New York, and each school retains the intimate character of a smaller institution.

Professor Ronnie Perelis is an Associate Professor of Sephardic Studies at Yeshiva University. He believes that the past can inform and energise the present, and in his work he explores the complex relationship between Iberian and Jewish culture, with research that explores connections between Iberian and Jewish culture during the medieval and early modern periods.

His research interests include Jewish culture and society in mediaeval Iberia; post-expulsion Sephardic diasporas; early modern Jewish autobiography and travel literature; the Inquisition and crypto-Judaism in colonial Latin America; Atlantic studies; and Latin American Jewish culture.

His work on Sephardic history investigates the dynamics of religious transformation within the context of the crypto-Jewish experience. His conversation in this week’s webinar drew on his book, Blood and Faith: Family and Identity in the Early Modern Sephardic Atlantic (Indiana University Press, 2016), which explores family and identity in the Sephardic Atlantic world.

In this book, identity, family and community unite three autobiographical texts by New World crypto-Jews, or descendants of Jews who were forced to convert to Christianity in 17th-century Iberia and Spanish America. There he presents the fascinating stories of three men who were caught up in the persecutions of the Inquisition, expanding global trade, and the network of crypto-Jewish activity.

On Tuesday, Dr Perelis introduced us to these writings, which depict the social history of transatlantic travel, the trade between Europe and the Americas, and the physical and spiritual journeys of the age.

He told us how the oldest Jewish document of the New World has been returned to Mexico more than seven decades after it disappeared. The autobiography of Luis de Carvajal, a New Christian or converso Jew in Mexico, dates from 1595 but was stolen from Mexico’s national archives almost 90 years ago.

Luis de Carvajal was born in Portugal and became the governor of the Spanish province of Nuevo León in present-day Mexico. His enemies knew he was a descendant of conversos and bribed one of his captains to mention his name to the Inquisition in Mexico City.

The Carvajal family were conversos, descendants of Jews who converted to Catholicism often under great duress in Spain and Portugal during the late Middle Ages. A minority of these forced converts maintained their Jewish faith in secret, braving the wrath of the Inquisition. While the Inquisition only functioned in the Americas from 1571, many conversos migrated to the ports and major urban centres in the Americas.

The Carvajal family moved to Mexico seeking economic opportunities and the chance to remake themselves in a new land. Carvajal’s uncle, also Luis de Carvajal, was a decorated conquistador who became the governor of the frontier territory of the Nuevo Reino de León in the north-east part of modern-day Mexico.

He invited his relatives to join him in New Spain. While he was a devout Catholic, many of his family were crypto-Jews, including his nephew Luis, who became his main assistant.

Eventually, their secret unravelled, and the family was arrested by the Inquisition in 1589. The younger Luis, his mother, and his sisters all asked for mercy and were placed in the monastery of Santiago de Tlatelolco to serve out their penance and where he taught Latin to the Franciscan seminarians. There in the library, he also had access to classical works of Jewish scholarship, such as Maimonides, Rashi and the Midrash. He created an anthology of sources, and translates works that he shares with others, and reconstructs a form of Judaism for himself. His uncle, for his part, was stripped of his position, exiled and died in prison.

Soon after the younger Luis de Carvajal was released from the monastery, he began writing his spiritual autobiography. He was a trained calligrapher and wrote his story in tiny, lucid script in a small leather-bound book that he kept hidden on his person throughout his travels.

Carvajal wrote under a pseudonym and told of his Jewish faith. A dedication to the Lord of Hosts announces the beginning of Carvajal’s tale. He charts the guiding hand of Providence in his spiritual adventures, and his manuscripts includes memoirs, a book of psalms and commandments, and a collection of prayers.

The manuscripts also include El modo que es de Rezar, a guide to prayer for himself and others secret Jews in Mexico, and a two-page list of the acts of mercy that the ‘most high God performed for Joseph’ – a review of the major events in his short and tumultuous life. One section includes the Ten Commandments in Latin, written in beautiful large letters with gold leaf.

A page towards the end lists Jewish holidays and their corresponding Christian dates, with a column listing the names of Hebrew months and a list of transliterated Hebrew numbers from one to 10 – a Hebrew primer for a fully Latinised Converso Jew. There are some psalms in Latin, some prayers in Portuguese, and some cryptic lists that Dr Perelis thinks may be mystical codes waiting to be deciphered.

The last entry tells of his planned escape to Italy. But Carvajal and his family were arrested before they made it to safety. The autobiography that was meant to declare God’s mercies was found by the Inquisitors and used as evidence against them. In 1596, Luis de Carvajal, his mother and sisters, were condemned to the flames of an auto da fé in Mexico City for their secret adherence to Judaism.

The autobiography and some of Carvajal’s other writings were preserved with the extensive trial records in the Mexican National Archives until they were stolen in 1932. For over 80 years they were lost, until they resurfaced in New York in 2015. They were identified by Leonard Milberg, a renowned collector, who alerted the authorities and arranged to return the documents to Mexico.

Before their return, the manuscripts were displayed in New York, where Professor Perelis was able to study them. He had been working on Carvajal’s life story for the previous 15 years and had relied on a transcript of Carvajal’s autobiography by Alfonso Toro, made a few years before their theft.

The experience of the Carvajal family is often read as an exemplary tale of the abuses of religious authority and the struggle for freedom of belief. But Dr Perelis believes their story also complicates and enriches our understanding of Latin American religious history and points to the diversity of colonial society and the dynamism of religious creativity and expression that can still speak to spiritual seekers today.