Plan B Forum

Cast him as a woman, and you see immediately that women are the Jesuses of history.


Indeed, Jesus' role and resonance are so intensely female it makes me wonder. Was Jesus actually a woman?



Nonsense, you'll say. We know Jesus was a man. Know as in fact, written and drawn. Even those who reject Jesus' divinity take his Y chromosome on trust. But still, witting or unwitting, the margin for error is considerable.

Admittedly, much of the chatter around this is nutty. On the other hand there are the semantic vapours of misunderstood biblical texts – mention of Jesus' "breasts", for example, in Revelations. And there's half-plausible archaeological evidence, like the Christ figure (said, at AD30, to be the earliest known) adorned with lipstick, garlands and a pearl necklace.

But if postmodernism has taught us anything, it's that representation is perceptual. History is told by the victors and the victors who, for at least the last two millennia, have been male. So, just as early Australian painters found it impossible to paint Indigenous people as they really were; just as Napoleon is shown tall and imposing and Jesus is shown white Aryan, the familiar depictions of Jesus as a man could be, simply, wrong.

I've argued before that God, if we're to have just one, should be un-gendered. Christ, however, is essentially embodied. Indeed, he could be hermaphroditic or intersex. Religious types might point out here that gods are given; they're not exercises in design. And really that's my point. Any numinous reading of the given shows that, psychologically and symbolically, the Jesus figure is profoundly female.

Consider Easter. We know that Easter shares an etymology with oestrus – probably (according to Bede) also with Eostre, the Germanic goddess of spring and possibly with Ishtar, the 4th century BC Babylonian goddess of fertility (and war). Hence, Easter eggs.

We know, too, that Easter brilliantly conflates three separate strands of ancient pagan myth: the blood sacrifice, the thanksgiving for spring and the dying-and-rising saviour (such as Osiris, Dionysus, Adonis and Baal).

The continuity of these traditions doesn't make Christianity fake, or its appropriation of them theft. By my reckoning, the very universality of these mythic themes is their validation. But Jesus' take on these myths, and his role in their extraordinary synthesis, is conspicuously, undeniably female.

At every turn, the Jesus version inverts the heroic male mode into its yielding, female counterpart.

Jesus' sacrifice is of self, not of others. It is accepted but assiduously not willed. His resurrection results not from his warrior skills or strategic cunning, but from his refusal to exercise power that is in his grasp. His godly promise is not to help mortals win in war or life, as Zeus or Heracles might, but to teach us to reconceive the paradox of loss.

At every point – pun notwithstanding - Jesus is the penetrated, not the penetrator. This was the revolution. Christ doesn't simply oppose male power structures. He insists that the old power model – aggressive, domineering, objectifying – is illusory; that real power is openness, vulnerability, love. This is what made them so angry. It's why he had to die.

Even the way the death itself is turned into a parodic test, where the official lynch mob mocks the dying man by suggesting he prove his divinity by saving himself, became, in history, the woman's test - the ducking stool. Only by dying can Jesus show his persecutors their mistake.

The point here is that might cannot equal right. Torture cannot produce truth. Force can produce the appearance of harmony, but not its fact. You can't force the land into fertility, women into love or children into goodness.

This is self-evident. Yet for 2000 years we have accepted religious structures based on might. In her book When Women Were Priests, writer and scholar Karen Jo Torjesen argues convincingly that the early church, until the 3rd century, included numbers of women priests, but that this was stamped out by the hierarchy of 4th century Christian polemicists by exploiting the idea that a public woman was a sexual woman, and therefore to be derided.

This was by no means a Christian invention. The ancient cities of Greece and Rome strongly identified the citizen-hero of public life with maleness, reason, agency and religious leadership. Public women were prostitutes. Good women were shrouded in domesticity. Male honour, female shame.

The pre-existence of these paradigms might explain the church's perpetuation of them, but also makes more blindingly obvious that Jesus' virtues – the humility, modesty, chastity, patience, compassion and love he consistently opposes to male agency - are the virtues of womanhood.

The church's exile of women is surely itself a heresy, exiling Jesus.

Even the way the death itself is turned into a parodic test, where the official lynch mob mocks the dying man by suggesting he prove his divinity by saving himself, became, in history, the woman's test - the ducking stool. Only by dying can Jesus show his persecutors their mistake.

omnipotent being that way. By dying he proved his persecutors right.

By dying, he did not prove his persecutors right. His body experienced thirst, hunger, as any human body would. It also (obviously) could suffer death. His resurrection is what proved them wrong.

MajGenl.Meade wrote:
By dying, he did not prove his persecutors right. His body experienced thirst, hunger, as any human body would. It also (obviously) could suffer death. His resurrection is what proved them wrong.

This kinda is Christianity 101 - basic stuff. It's part of what Christians believe and what non-Christians don't believe.

Big RR wrote:While I can understand your questions and doubt, it hardly seems like a charade.

charade
/ʃəˈrɑːd/
noun
1. an episode or act in the game of charades
2. (mainly Brit) an absurd act; travesty

would need to opt for such a stupid charade to prove something, is a never ending source of befuzzlement to me.

Lord Jim wrote:What's a never ending source of befuzzlement (and bemusement) for me is folks who are presumably not omnipotent nevertheless being absolutely cocksure of how an omnipotent being should operate...

Gob wrote:

Big RR wrote:While I can understand your questions and doubt, it hardly seems like a charade.

charade
/ʃəˈrɑːd/
noun
1. an episode or act in the game of charades
2. (mainly Brit) an absurd act; travesty

Works for me.