Cambridge sermon: Jesus may have been trans

[flyingbuttress43]

www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2022/11/26/jesus-could-have-transgender-claims-cambridge-dean/

Jushua Heath, a junior research fellow, guest preacher at evensong at Trinity College chapel displayed Renaissance and Medieval paintings of the crucifixion, which depicted a side wound he likened to a vagina, and said Christ had a trans body.

Dr Michael Banner, dean of Trinity College said such a view was "legitimate" in a response to one anonymous worshipper who said the audience and choir were "visibly uncomfortable" and upset at the sermon. Dr Banner said the sermon "suggested that we might think about these images of Christ's male/female body as providing us with ways of thinking about issues around transgender questions today".

He added: "For myself, I think that speculation was legitimate, whether or not you or I or anyone else disagrees with the interpretation, says something else about that artistic tradition, or resists its application to contemporary questions around transsexualism."

I'm not even religious, but I seriously wonder if there is anywhere the trans movement won't go in support of their ideology.

This takes me back to some of the arguments against women priests back in the dark ages when I were a lass - I recall someone called Tom Stacey wittering on in the Telegraph about the ‘eternal feminine’ giving life and giving suck, in a rather creepy fetishistic sort of vein (the priest was apparently the ‘eternal masculine’ and only men could be priests because logic and words and reason were masculine). I rolled my eyes at this as a teenager and wondered if he could tell the difference between religious faith and sexual fantasy.

Of course, the terms of discourse have shifted somewhat and women are now trying to take back ownership of the arguments around biological definitions of femaleness - but the above illustrates the dangers in allowing ourselves to be exclusively defined by male ideas of our biology.

Correct me if I'm wrong but:
It's a bloke in the picture
It was blokes painting the pictures
It's blokes analysing the picture

And have any of them ever been near an actual vagina? They are not actually blood weeping gashes.....

And as if medieval painters thought about Jesus embodying the female as well as the male. I'm pretty sure women weren't very important at all in these periods. Why on earth would this be a thing? Do art historians even contemplate wider historic context, or do they just make things up to, I dunno, get a PHD.

Hey Cambridge, I can make stuff up too!! Give us a Doctorate!

You are right Magpie, I will educate myself and try to do better in future!! 😂

I do like the idea of God - as opposed to Jesus - being essentially non-binary though.

@Ginmonkeyagain No, it doesn't. But sometimes historians (including within theology and art) get rather too comfortable with the awful things they're discussing (like doctors, I suppose). Think of all the praise we heap on Classical Civilization, which was entirely built on slavery.

As someone who sometimes writes short talks in an academic kind of setting, I can easily see how this particular bit of nonsense happened. "Oh! Isn't this fascination with vaginal imagery fascinating? I never knew about that, I should share it in this sermon!! Now, how I can I make it more of a sermon; oh yeah, bodies transcend the male/female distinction, so we're all part of Christ. Oh, I know, I know! I can widen this to include trans issues too."

Nothing is sacred (literally) any more.

Isn't there that advice to writers, something like 'kill your darlings'? This bloke should have heeded that, then gone for a lie down.

@KatMcBundleFace "And as if medieval painters thought about Jesus embodying the female as well as the male."

Well, there was the whole Roman Catholic obsession with making everything about Mary...? The art-historians are firmly placing things in that context.

The art history I've studied has been pretty rigorous, and I'm somehow who is all about seeing things in context.

Leaving aside the deepy iffy theology, since when was a vagina under the ribs?

🤣🤣🤣🤣

I think that you'll find that it can be wherever you want to pretend that it is these days!

He had long hair so he was obviously trans innit.

This just sounds like some bloke wanted to put forward a theory that Jesus was trans for some attention and publicity, and so just tried to come up with anything to make it fit.

Gash, wound, hole - totes the same as a vagina. Bingo!

@DatasCat That's been orthodoxy, at least in theory, for thousands of years. Plenty of female imagery of God in the Jewish scriptures, too. Doesn't translate to actual religious practices though!

On another note, is that little man going to try and climb into the medieval vulva wound with that ladder? And what does that symbolise?

Is this them jumping the shark? Is this it?

@Oioicaptain I think that is showing Christ's wounds together with the instruments of the passion, which are a common subject for medieval Christian art.

Thing on the far right which looks like a cloth on a stick is the Holy Sponge. It's hard to make the others out, can see the Lance and the Cross. There might be pincers as well in the top right.

The ladder might be the ladder used for the Deposition.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arma_Christi

The Bible tells us that a soldier put a spear in His side and blood and water gushed out. I've read they did this to hasten the demise. How renaissance painters then represented this in images says more about them than about Jesus. It's not very well thought out to say this meant He was trans.

Maybe I missed that bit in the bible where Jesus asked to be referred to a Ze/Zey. It probably got lost in translation.

Come to think of it both Jesus and John the baptist (& Peter and Paul) all not keen on sex at all. Or how they dressed and looked!

God as the mother hen, protecting her chickens under her wings, is one I like a lot.

Bwahaha…..

Oh synchronicity how I love thee…..

Am laid up on day 6 of hideous virus, probably delirious and have been sleeping and going down a Dan Browne adjacent YouTube rabbit hole encompassing all sorts of bloodline and Templar related speculation cos my idea of fun…..

Not two hours ago, as The Last Supper was being dissected, the thought crossed my mind - how long before it’s claimed Jesus was trans….. or MM…..

And hey presto, I open up this board and my question is answered 🤣

Ask and ye shall receive indeed……

Ah yes. Although Mary always absolutely definitely not sexual in any way, immaculate, definitely not anything dodgy happening getting her pregnant via the holy spirit/Archangel Gabriel.... I doubt you'd find much in 2000 years of Roman Catholicism about her vagina.

With the Romans also vigorously not looking at all the pagan goddesses they kind of sellotaped Mary over the top of who were a lot less nice and perfect womanhood thing. Pagan women were druids, warriors, bards, a whole lot more equality, and the goddesses did the whole maiden mother and crone thing, a lot more fertility, healing, wisdom and death. Can't really envisage Mary in a chariot, with a sword, actively doing things instead of sweetly and obediently carrying what she's told.

God forbid that Jesus could have been a woman. Instead he could have been a woman-hating anti-equality trans person - great. Lets entrench misogyny as deep as we possibly can in our culture and dress is up under a guise of academia. Some people are loathsome.

Strangely (or is it) the one time I've been to a service at Trinity, a little while ago, the sermon was also about an old painting. It was the painting of a black man. I can't remember what the sermon, by the usual Trinity person apparently, was about really, but remember thinking that it was both Woke and foolish. A Trinity student sitting near me commented that they were getting thoroughly fed up with the constant woke sermons from this individual.

“Can't really envisage Mary in a chariot, with a sword, actively doing things instead of sweetly and obediently carrying what she's told.”

Oh, you should have a look at the Magnificat (Luke 1:46-55) sometime. It’s practically a call to the barricades.

Then there’s the juxtaposition of Mary getting pregnant by the Holy Spirit and then ‘with haste’ deciding to visit her cousin a hundred miles away…

If Luke was basing this on actual stories about the actual Mary, she sounds like quite a character.

How interesting!

I sang the magnificat with a choir as a kid, and the bits I remember are terribly naice and well behaved.... there must have been all the good bits cut out!

Yup. Without the naice music and the tradition of ‘gentle Mary Meek and Mild’, lines like:

“He has shown strength with his arm; he has scattered the proud in the imagination of their hearts. He has brought down the powerful from their thrones and lifted up the lowly; he has filled the hungry with good things and sent the rich away empty.”

Sound a bit more like an enthusiastic young revolutionary than ‘sweet, harmless young mother’.

It is offensive, and wtf does "valid" mean in this context? Ideals like Jesus being both male and female were rejected as heretical pretty early in the history of the Church, if it's now valid so is pretty much any bs someone says at a sermon.

But it reminds me of a church a friend of mine visited, where she was shocked to see a depiction, in the style of an icon, of Mary holding a giant penis wrapped in swaddling clothes.

Some people are so desperate to be edgy it's pathetic.

@Anactor puts me in mind of the Che Guevara-esque poster the C of E did many years ago: ‘Meek. Mild. As if.’