Doubting Thomas and the Matter of Embodiment on Early Christian Sarcophagi

This essay examines how questions of evidence are brought to bear in the earliest iconography of Doubting Thomas in the Christian tradition. It is a significant and hardly coincidental fact that the very first depictions of this episode in the late fourth and early fifth centuries CE appear on Christian sarcophagi whose eponymous function as 'flesh-eating' containers of the dead makes them especially evocative objects that are well-suited to address matters of faith and flesh in Christian doctrine. Building on previous work that has located the origins of this iconography in the various 'pathos formulas' invented by Greek sculptors of the Classical period, and particularly in the figure of the Wounded Amazon, I explore how the evidentiary status of the wound fits within a broader grammar of visual and literary citations. In doing so, I emphasize significant distinctions between their tactile and optical renderings in stone and paint, and how these distinctions could be made to matter in philosophical theories of sense-perception and theological definitions of flesh.