3rd Day of Christmas in Shakespeare's time - Feast John the Evangelist (Series, Part 3)
Some in Shakespeare’s time may have thought that Jesus and John were homosexual - or such views may have been falsely attributed to playwright Christopher Marlowe to smear him.
Writings attributed to John speak of the “Word made flesh” [3], and of how “God is love,” so they who “abide in love, abide in God,” and God in them (1 Jn 4:16).
John’s gospel is the only one that claims Thomas was absent when Jesus first appeared in the upper room after his death, but that Jesus appears again with Thomas present, and he comes to believe [4]. From this we get the idea of “doubting Thomas,” which influenced Shakespeare’s first scene of Hamlet (1.1), portraying Horatio as a doubting Thomas who comes to believe only after he witnesses the ghost himself.
The idea of doubt was important to Shakespeare’s age: The Protestant Reformation had embraced doubt about the Catholic idea of transubstantiation of bread and wine in Eucharist [5]. While some ancient Greeks proposed a heliocentric universe (the earth going around the sun), the church had long embraced a biblical view with the earth at the center. This began to change with astronomers such as Copernicus, Giordano Bruno, and Galileo, which caused more doubt, as Hamlet says in a love poem to Ophelia:
'Doubt thou the stars are fire;
Doubt that the sun doth move;
Doubt truth to be a liar;
But never doubt I love.’ (2.2.24-27)
To doubt “that the sun doth move” in Shakespeare’s age was to embrace new scientific insights and to doubt the authority of the church and Bible.
This was connected to the doubt of Thomas alluded to in Horatio, and to John the Evangelist who portrayed Thomas as a doubter in need of repentance.
[To be continued]
POSTSCRIPT: If Elaine Pagels is right in her 2003 book, Beyond Belief: The Secret Gospel of Thomas (see footnote 4, below), and if as she speculates, John fabricated the absence of Thomas from the upper room in order to marginalize him over theological differences, this would be especially ironic:
John was "the beloved disciple," and preached "God is love," and to "abide in love" so as to "abide in God"... but perhaps John's attachment to his beloved friend and teacher, Jesus, was too great to tolerate Thomas having a theology that was more egalitarian, and not centered on John's beloved?
- We might also note that the story about "doubting Thomas" has been used by Christians and their bishops and clerics -- too often -- to shame people for their doubts, doubts which may actually be paths to other insights and enlightenment.
INDEX for posts in this series on the TWELVE DAYS of CHRISTMAS in Shakespeare’s time (and possible influences on the plays):
https://pauladrianfried.blogspot.com/2024/12/twelve-days-of-christmas-in-churches-of.html
NOTES: All references to 𝘏𝘢𝘮𝘭𝘦𝘵 (and other Shakespeare plays) are to the Folger Shakespeare Library online versions: https://shakespeare.folger.edu/shakespeares-works/hamlet/entire-play/
[1] John 19:25-27:
25 Then stood by the cross of Jesus his mother, and his mother’s sister, Mary the wife of Clopas, and Mary Magdalene.
26 And when Jesus saw his mother, and the disciple standing by, whom he loved, he said unto his mother, Woman, behold thy son.
27 Then said he to the disciple, Behold thy mother: and from that hour, the disciple took her home unto him.
(The way that people would have heard the name of Mary in Jesus’ lifetime and the time of the writing of the gospels, this repetition of the name “Mary” would have been heard as the equivalent of “Miriam,” the sister of Moses, perhaps emphasizing not only that the name and the Moses story was popular during the Roman occupation of Israel, but also that Jesus was portrayed as the new Moses, liberator and giver of the new law of love.)
[2] The first three gospels are called “synoptic” because they seem to draw upon some of the same sources, but the gospel attributed to John is considered more mystical, and was the last to be written among the four canonical gospels. Bible scholars are not sure whether “the beloved disciple” himself wrote the scriptures that bear his name, or if perhaps it was written by a follower of John and attributed to him.
- This was a common practice, so for example, some books attributed to Paul are strongly suspected of having been written by others, with ideas that sometimes seem to go against the grain of other writings that seem more clearly Pauline, as if the pseudo-Pauline authors were trying to correct and revise the more radical (and egalitarian) ideas of Paul by way of attribution.
[3] This reading from John’s gospel about the Word made flesh was the first part of the gospel reading (second lesson) for Christmas day.
[4] Elaine Pagels’ 2003 book, Beyond Belief: The Secret Gospel of Thomas, considers the possibility that the writer of the Gospel attributed to John had strong theological disagreements with Thomas: If the apocryphal gospel of Thomas is any indication, Thomas seemed to believe that Jesus meant to awaken the spirit of God in all believers as children of God, and not for the movement to center on Jesus as exclusive incarnate son of God. For this reason, the author of John’s gospel may have portrayed Thomas as being absent for the commissioning of the disciples, when the risen Jesus breathed on them and sent them in his name, in effect discrediting and excluding Thomas for his divergent ideas. This interesting 2003 theory would of course not have been familiar in Shakespeare’s time.
[5] The idea of “transubstantiation” was not universally accepted when first proposed; it was eventually a term used at the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215, and later reaffirmed during the counter-reformation, in 1551 at the Council of Trent. But various theologians pondered its implications in ways that still lead some to claim, for example, that Thomas Aquinas did not truly believe in it, because he believed the body of Jesus was in heaven, etc. See this discussion, with quotes from Aquinas: https://forums.anglican.net/threads/thomas-aquinas-passage-refuting-transubstantiation.4102/
IMAGES:
Left: Saint John the Evangelist on Patmos, c. 1553/1555.
Titian (Venetian painter), 1488/1490 - 1576.
National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.
Public domain, via https://www.nga.gov/collection/art-object-page.43725.html
Center: The Incredulity of Saint Thomas (circa 1601-1602).
Caravaggio (1571–1610).
Private collection, Firenze, Italy.
Public domain via https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/7f/The_Incredulity_of_Saint_Thomas.jpg
Right: The Virgin and Saint John (fragment of 'The Lamentation of Christ')
Hugo van der Goes (c.1440–1482).
Christ Church, University of Oxford.
Public domain via ArtUK https://d3d00swyhr67nd.cloudfront.net/w800h800/collection/OU/CHCH/OU_CHCH_JBS_231-001.jpg
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Disclaimer: If and when I quote or paraphrase bible passages or mention religion in many of my blog posts, I do not intend to promote any religion over another, nor am I attempting to promote religious belief in general; only to explore how the Bible and religion influenced Shakespeare, his plays, and his age.
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