John 20:28

John 20:28 is the twenty-eighth verse of the twentieth chapter of the Gospel of John in the New Testament. It is part of a description of what the book says is Jesus' reappearance to the disciples, including Thomas, eight days after his resurrection.

Content
The original Koine Greek, according to the Textus Receptus, reads:
 * καὶ ἀπεκρίθη ὁ Θωμᾶς, καὶ εἶπεν αὐτῷ, Ὁ Κύριός μου καὶ ὁ Θεός μου

The transliteration of the original Koine Greek to Latin script is:
 * kai apekrithē ho Thōmas, kai eipen autō, Ho Kyrios mou kai ho Theos mou

In the King James Version of the Bible it is translated as:
 * And Thomas answered and said unto him, My Lord and my God.

The modern World English Bible translates the passage as:
 * Thomas answered him, "My Lord and my God!"

For a collection of other versions see BibleHub John 20:28

Analysis
In Jesus used the term 'teacher' and 'lord' as synonyms, but here 'my Lord' is designated to the risen Christ, and 'my God' resumes Jesus' description in the Prologue as 'God' (John 1:1, 18). This is the only time in the four canonical gospels that Jesus is addressed as God.

Suetonius records that the Roman emperor Domitian (AD 81–96) wished to be addressed as dominus et deus noster, "our Lord and God", so the statement in this verse 'may on a secondary level be designed to counter Roman emperor worship'.

The declension of the Greek words 'Lord' (Κύριός) and 'God' (Θεός) used in this verse is in the nominative case - the one that marks the subject of a verb. Greek, like Latin, has a vocative case for addressing someone directly. In the New Testament, the vocative case of the words 'Lord' (Κύριε) and 'God' (θεέ) is used 120 times and twice, respectively. Therefore, an argument could be made on syntactical grounds that Thomas's expression was an exclamation of astonishment spoken to Jesus but actually directed to God, and that John would have had to use the vocative case instead if Thomas's words were directed to Jesus. However there are many objections to this. Besides the explicit phrase “said to Him”, Murray J. Harris, for example, claims that we can find a lot of similar constructions, the closest of which is in the Psalm 34(35):23. He writes: “My suggestion regarding the genesis of Thomas's confession is this. In his attempt to depict the significance of the risen Jesus for himself personally, Thomas used a liturgical form ultimately drawn from the LXX, which later came to serve admirably as the crowning christological affinnation of the Fourth Gospel”.