Elaine Pagels...

...is one of my new heroes. Check this out: The Politics of Christianity.

Here's something to get you going:
"Some of the most fascinating discoveries in this find include the Gospel of Thomas, a collection of early sayings attributed to Jesus—it starts out with the words "These are the secret words which the living Jesus spoke and which the twin Thomas wrote down."

Now we know there was a disciple of Jesus called the twin, and this is a series of secret sayings which are claimed to be transmitted through this disciple, this one favored for secret teaching. The teaching we find in the Gospel of Thomas is very much like some of the teaching in other Christian texts, like the Gospels of Matthew and Luke in the New Testament. But some of it is radically different. Some of it looks like Buddhism, and may have in fact been influenced by a well-established Buddhist tradition at the time that these texts were first written. There were Buddhist missionaries in Alexandria, coming from Egypt, at the time.

The name Thomas is an Aramaic term for twin. It's just a nickname, really, and the given name of the disciple was Judas. Some people thought it meant that Jesus had a twin brother. But this is a very literal rendering. In fact it's meant to interpret the reader's situation; that is you, the reader, are in effect the twin brother of Jesus. And what you discover through the Gospel of Thomas is that you and Jesus on a deeper level are identical twins." (from the interview cited above, in Edge)

Identical twins. Go figure. I always wanted a twin.