The cover illustration, a colour reproduction of Caravaggio's ‘Doubting Thomas’ (c. 1601), boldly sticking his finger into the wound in Jesus' side, immediately takes the reader to the heart of this compulsive book: the two-millenium literary and iconographic reception and transmission history of what is not said in John xx. 27–8, but what most people think they know about Thomas, namely that he actually touched the wounds of the risen Christ. In an exciting multidisciplinary mix of biblical exegesis, philosophy, hermeneutics and religious and art history, Glenn Most, Professor of Greek Philology (Pisa) and of Social Thought (Chicago), analyses, in order, the textual basis of the ‘Doubting Thomas’ stories in the Gospel of John, the narrative elaborations upon it in the New Testament Apocrypha, its exegesis from the patristic era to the Counter-Reformation, and finally its iconography from late antiquity through to the early seventeenth century. What unfolds is a fascinating process of ‘unceasing falsification without renouncing altogether its fundamental identity’ (p. xi); in this process there was not only an exegetic crux at stake, but also the questions how bodily resurrection was to be envisaged and how faith, doubt and persuasion were related to each other. Unlike the non-Gnostic texts, the Gnostic Apocrypha, in which ‘Doubting Thomas’ figures as a Gnostic saint, followed the narrative in John in that Thomas does not touch the risen Christ's material body, thereby confirming a dogma of incorporeality. In order to reclaim Thomas for the orthodox camp, late antique and medieval Christian exegesis emphasised that the Apostle not only could have touched, but actually did touch Christ's body, a view put into question again by a major Protestant exegetical tradition. Caravaggio's painting, sensitively interpreted by Most as a dramatisation of the conflict between faith and scepticism, appears to make strategic use of a German Renaissance iconographic tradition in a way that is at variance with the German Protestant return to the letter of the holy text. The author's argumentation is clever and erudite; his prose is elegant and eloquent; his argument is well-structured and manages to combine depth with accessibility. Just one small comment: Most does not devote a single word to the question why in most of the iconography the wound, made by Roman legionaries who would pierce with their spears the hearts of those crucified (cf. John xix. 34), is shown on Jesus' right side rather than the left: see on this Raymond E. Brown, The death of the Messiah: from Gethsemane to the grave: a commentary on the passion narratives in the four Gospels (New York 1994), ii. 1176–8.