What about the possibility that it was simply his customary designation, that he had a twin, not of The Twelve, and had acquired "Didymus" as a distinguishing appellation before running into Jesus? After all, it seems like most of the twelve had designations other than their given names, and I imagine such distinguishing tags were very necessary in the days before family names became commonplace.

Your guess is literally as good as mine, Max. It's a translation from the Hebrew or Aramaic or whatever damned language they used to write the original gospels anyway. You'd need to go back to the original manuscript to confirm that "Didymus" is actually the correct translation into Greek of whatever vowel-less Hebrew/Aramaic adjective was used in the first place. It could have been the Hebrew word for "plonker" for all we know now.


The idiot also known as Capfka ...