You can thank reader Pyers for the links to two—count them, two—articles about how a student at Cambridge claims that Jesus was a transsexual male, which of course caused a huge fracas. Pyers added this to his links:
And this one must be for the 5* treatment as being idiotic on just so so many levels. When I read it I just, to use a piece of internet shorthand, PML. [JAC: inquiry reveals that this stands for “pissed myself laughing”]. It is the craziest of the crazy, looniest of loons …Just do what I was tempted to do and bash your head against a wall. It is at moments like this that you thank God you are an atheist! (Big grin for that one.)
It’s widely reported in the UK media:
The first article’s from the Torygraph:
A quote and picture (bolding is mine):
Jesus could have been transgender, according to a University of Cambridge dean.
Dr Michael Banner, the dean of Trinity College, said such a view was “legitimate” after a row over a sermon by a Cambridge research student that claimed Christ had a “trans body”, The Telegraph can disclose.
The “truly shocking” address at last Sunday’s evensong at Trinity College chapel, saw Joshua Heath, a junior research fellow, display Renaissance and Medieval paintings of the crucifixion that depicted a side wound that the guest preacher likened to a vagina.
Worshippers told The Telegraph they were left “in tears” and felt excluded from the church, with one shouting “heresy” at the Dean upon leaving.
The sermon displayed three paintings, including Jean Malouel’s 1400 work Pietà, with Mr Heath pointing out Jesus’s side wound and blood flowing to the groin. The order of service also showed French artist Henri Maccheroni’s 1990 work “Christs”.
Heath, whose PhD was supervised by the former Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams, also told worshippers that in the Prayer Book of Bonne of Luxembourg, from the 14th century, this side wound was isolated and “takes on a decidedly vaginal appearance”.
Heath also drew on non-erotic depictions of Christ’s penis in historical art, which “urge a welcoming rather than hostile response towards the raised voices of trans people”.
“In Christ’s simultaneously masculine and feminine body in these works, if the body of Christ as these works suggest the body of all bodies, then his body is also the trans body,” the sermon concluded.
A congregation member, who wished to remain anonymous, told Dr Banner in a complaint letter: “I left the service in tears. You offered to speak with me afterwards, but I was too distressed. I am contemptuous of the idea that by cutting a hole in a man, through which he can be penetrated, he can become a woman.
“I am especially contemptuous of such imagery when it is applied to our Lord, from the pulpit, at Evensong. I am contemptuous of the notion that we should be invited to contemplate the martyrdom of a ‘trans Christ’, a new heresy for our age.”
Here is PROOF—one of the pictures shown during Heath’s sermon. You have to do a really logical stretch to see that as a vagina. It’s not even in the right place!
And here’s how Dean Banner defended the claim. Note that he often gives BBC Radio 4’s “Thought for the Day”, which is usually a religious homily. Dawkins did it once, and that was the last time they used an atheist!
Dr Banner’s response to the complaint, seen by The Telegraph, defended how 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”.
“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,” Dr Banner added.
Dr Banner, who frequents BBC Radio 4’s Thought for the Day, said that while the views were the speaker’s own, he “would not issue an invitation to someone who I thought would deliberately seek to shock or offend a congregation or who could be expected to speak against the Christian faith”.
Click to read the more heated piece from the Daily Fail:
The Fail doesn’t add much to the above, but does give an official quote form the Uni:
A spokesperson for Trinity College said: The College would like to make clear the following:
‘Neither the Dean of Trinity College nor the researcher giving the sermon suggested Jesus was transgender.
‘The sermon addressed the image of Christ depicted in art and various interpretations of those artistic portrayals.
‘The sermon’s exploration of the nature of religious art, in the spirit of thought-provoking academic inquiry, was in keeping with open debate and dialogue at the University of Cambridge.’
Now it’s barely possible that some randy medieval artist deliberately painted Jesus’s wound to resemble a vagina. But since I’m not convinced that Jesus really existed as any real person, much less as a divine human/son of God/part of God, I can’t be bothered worrying about his gender. The whole fracas is simply hilarious, instantiating what happens when one religion, Christianity, collides with another—wokeness.
Believers sure have a lot of ways to waste their time.
Theology, the very definition of worthless work.
Or as Dan Barker likes to say, “Theology: the only subject without an object.”
I’d never heard that until just now. That is so good. Thanks for sharing!
“One aspect of the paranormal versus real science should not go unremarked. As in other forms of obscurantist pursuit, such as religion, it is so easy to make time-wasting speculations. The paranormal is effectively unconstrained whimsicality. Original suggestions in real science emerge only after detailed study and the lengthy and often subtle process of testing whether current concepts are adequate. Only if all this hard work fails is a scientist justified in edging forward human understanding with a novel and possibly revolutionary idea. Real science is desperately hard work; the paranormal is almost entirely the fruit of armchair fantasizing. Real science is a regal application of the full power of human intellect; the paranormal is a prostitution of the brain. Worst of all, it wastes time and distorts the public’s vision of the scientific endeavour.” (Peter Atkins, 1995))
This Michael Banner speculated like ufologists do when looking for “ufos” in medieval and renaissance paintings.
As a christian l personally don’t give a bugger what sexuality Jesus was, and his teaching in itself can be summed up as much the same as that of all great teachers and philosophers, ie we should treat others as we would want them to treat us: “Do that,” Jesus said, “and you will obey all the laws of God”. The one and only question about Jesus that is relevant here is this: did He, as Christians believe, rise from the dead, or was that a lie perpetrated by His infatuated pals? There’s a book called “Who Moved the Stone?”, the author of which wrote to prove that the resurrection of Jesus was a myth: when he had finished he had become a Christian because he got stuck on the question that became the title of his book: l can’t remember the author’s name which will be on the internet (l can’t look it up without losing this page – but if you Google the title it’s there). PS re the unbelievably idiotic question also posed about Jesus’ wound resembling a vagina !!!?!? Whoever writes this stuff must have a difficult time eating – the most innocent vegetable on his/her plate probably strikes them as horribly reminiscent of the human body’s sexual apparatus.
Oh – and PS – on the question “did Jesus actually exist?”, as an intelligent teenager l long ago looked in my local library to see if he was mentioned by non-religious contemporaries around his time and found that around AD30/40 the renowned Tacitus wrote with great irritation about some dead Jew’s followers who were making a bloody nuisance of themselves all over Middle East. No one questions Tacitus’ existence so l think we can assume he was telling the truth.
The passage you refer to was written in 116 AD. I’ll let other readers comment on it.
Huh! I didn’t know that!
Here’s the Bible quote I think we are discussing :
“Do to others what you want them to do to you. This is the meaning of the law of Moses and the teaching of the prophets.
– New Testament, Matthew 7:12”
I’m not sure it’s accurate – but wait there’s more!
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Rule
^^^source of quote – an “infographic” comparing quotes appears to be inaccurate.
… and bonus : you can learn about oil piston technology, including the parallel linkage the “sucker rod”! Such is Our Modern World…
Sorry, which passage? And as a Christian l can confidently tell you the theory of evolution is l’m sure the truth, and it’s very exciting. I was practically brought up in the Natural History Museum, which as a child l found infinitely more exciting than going to church.
Then the Bible you read and mine is different. Where in the Bible do you read about us coning from monkeys? Maybe is just because you did not go to church.
That’s a pathetically thin reed to hitch belief too. And speaking of Hitch, he would have said “all your work is still ahead of you”. And… it is!
I will pray for you all. HE is real, HE knew intellectuals would reject HIM. You are reading all of these books yet you haven’t mentioned reading a real Bible? I am a John The Baptist personality type, Psalm 58 10, JESUS CHRIST is visible from Genesis to Revelation. HE will not be mocked. I am saddened for you all, you can talk about people like me all day long, but Dear Lord, JESUS will destroy HIS enemies, and it’s not going to be pretty. Buy or download a NKJV study Bible, it has Hebrew in the back, which the Old Testament is written, and Greek which the New Testament is written. All of us who believe are not ignorant as intellectuals like Cambridge would have you think. The Holy Spirit will lead you into all Truth. It’s up to you to believe Him, or reject Him, your life depends on it.
Boy has this post brought out the faithful!
Umm. . . I think you’re on the wrong site. Although you won’t be commenting here again, you might ponder the question: “Why do you think that our lives depend on accepting Christ when millions of Muslims reject that, and insist that accepting Allah is the key? What makes you so sure you’re right and the Muslims are all wrong?” I suspect you’re a Christian because you grew up Christian. If you don’t realize how that’s conditioned what you said, I can’t help you.
Bye.
“I will pray for you all.”
Awww, hey, thanks!
In return, I’ll solve some good mathematics problems for you, do or apply some science (if funded), apply some medicine (if available at the drug store), some computation, some writing…(goes on and on)…
Margaret B — up until fairly recently, the twin problems with what learned people have said about the historical Jesus have been that (a) people who devote their careers to studying the topic were almost all devout Christians, and (b) generalist historians, and specialists in other areas, naturally deferred to the authority of these “experts”. The result is that the devout have been able to control the message for many centuries. However, in the last few decades some excellent, peer-reviewed scholarship has cast serious doubt on the gospel stories. There are far better explanations for how they were created and came to be regarded as unquestionable than “it really happened”.
In contrast, the historical Jesus camp is conspicuously lacking any modern, serious, peer-reviewed scholarship — nothing has been published in nearly a century! Admittedly, the theory that Jesus was a mythical savior deity who was turned into a living, breathing historical figure (by accident or design or both) is still a minority view, but it’s gathering considerable strength.
For the record, Jesus was not recorded by non-religious contemporaries — in fact, he wasn’t recorded by religious ones either! The earliest Christian writings, the letters of Paul, probably date from the AD 50s — and he seemed to be totally unaware that Jesus was ever a living, breathing human being. Paul clearly “knew” Jesus only as some kind of spirit entity, revealed to him privately in visions or in esoteric readings of scripture. The kicker is that Paul felt he had to reassure his readers of this, that he never learned anything about Jesus from any living person — which means of course that at that time the rest of the Christian world likewise believed in a remote, spiritual Jesus, and not in a person who had disciples and preached to crowds. The human teacher Jesus figure didn’t show up until the gospels were written, decades later.
We could debate whether he rose from the dead, but first we have to establish that he was ever alive to begin with!
Nicely said, Peter.
Just before the pandemic, I challenged a couple of Jehovah’s Witnesses about the evidence for historical Jesus – not least that Herod died in 4 BC, etc. They eventually came back with ten pages of irrelevant stuff about how evil Herod was according to Josephus that on page 9 or so then dismissed Josephus on the crucial timing, saying, in effect, that Josephus is unreliable on dates and we should defer to the Bible about those.
The evidence for “historical Jesus” is non-existent, as anyone with an open mind acknowledges (unless their mind is so open that their brains have fallen out, of course).
I could add, regarding that little remark by Tacitus, that the best anyone can say is that it only describes a Christian belief (that Jesus was executed by Pilate) — it’s not an independent confirmation of anything in the gospels. Since we already know that by the 2nd century Christians believed that Pilate executed Jesus, it doesn’t add anything.
The following is from memory so if you’re interested I urge you not to quote me but to verify and investigate for yourselves!
For the curious — in his Annals Tacitus wrote that the great fire of Rome in AD 64 was caused by a mob “at the instigation of Chrestus”, and he (allegedly) went on to say (in a very brief incidental remark) that they got their twisted beliefs from their founder who had been executed in Judea under Pontius Pilate. Then the emperor Nero instituted a draconian punishment of these “Chrestians”.
The problems with using that as an external validation of the gospels are many! Jesus of course wasn’t in Rome in the 60s, so whoever it was who “instigated” the fire, it couldn’t have been Jesus. Tacitus doesn’t even say “Jesus” — he blames someone called “Chrestus”. Chrestus (meaning “happy”) was a common name, especially for slaves, so Tacitus could well have been referring to some local troublemaker, is which case the story would have nothing to do with Jesus or Christians (and the reference to Pilate and Judea could be a later insertion by some “helpful” medieval Christian copyist). And “Christ” was Jesus’ title — “the anointed one”, i.e. “the Messiah”, not his name — so Tacitus would hardly call a local arsonist “Christ”.
Also the Christian writers of the time never mentioned any connection with the fire, nor a persecution by Nero (that is, the fire happened, but there were no Christians involved). The manuscript evidence of Tacitus’ book is poor — there’s only a medieval copy that has been revealed to have been tampered with at some point. So connecting Christians with the fire, a Neronian persecution, and echoing something from the gospels could very well all be later embellishments to Tacitus’ book.
The interesting thing about the ancient Roman historians (Tacitus and Suetonius) is that the volumes of their works that cover the supposed lifetime of Jesus have not survived. The suspicion is that they were made to disappear — because they would have covered the first decades of the common era in Judea and (embarrassingly, for Christians) said nothing about Jesus.
It’s like that phenomenon when a guy is stranded on a desert island and their compatriot looks like a turkey.
Good analogy
Equating the labia and vagina with a bloody slash wound is a disgusting notion. Speaking as a woman, I have never looked at a gashing wound and thought it reminded me of my genitals. What an unpleasant imagination this fellow has. If others can call this is pro-trans, then I can call it anti-woman.
When I read the story earlier, my first thought was that the researcher in question had never seen a vagina.
In person or in a photo.
Which is exactly what pro-trans ideology is.
The wound is so far removed from the genital area that only someone with a truly disgusting misogynistic imagination could see it as a vagina, even allegorically. And besides, even if the artist in the 15th Century had painted Jesus with a vagina in the right place, or if we imagine that the blood trickling to the groin is intended to hide not a discreetly tucked penis but a vagina, what provenance does that have as to the true body of Jesus even if indeed he was a real person crucified or not? Jesus was somehow a clownfish?
I feel unclean even taking the time to ridicule the whole notion but I wanted to support your perspective.
Thank you.
Remember when people made fun of the New Right for latching on to “truthiness” 20 years ago? We’re seeing the same thing from the New Left now. What they consider to be relevant is not factual truth, but human-created meaning. We see the same thing from the religious; when I discuss religion with them, I talk about how their ideologies have evolved, from Early Judaism that was polytheistic and henotheistic before eventually becoming monotheistic, how it syncretically adopted elements of other religions (the memetic equivalent of horizontal gene transfer) – and they don’t want to hear anything about it because their religion is their truth.
I am sick the the phrase “my truth”; the truth is the truth, it has no owner, there is no “my” trusth. (File that under “Words and phrases I detest”)
Most of those commenting on this story on Mumsnet strongly agree with you, Emily: https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/womens_rights/4686329-cambridge-sermon-jesus-may-have-been-trans?page=1
Thanks for the link-
You’re very welcome, Emily.
At a time when such thoughts could not be expressed elsewhere, Mumsnet has been a vital space in the UK for having (reasonably) free discussions about women’s rights and the need to defend them from encroachment by those who place the feelings of men who identify as women over those of women themselves. It shouldn’t need saying, but simply being pro-women is not to be anti-trans.
That’s hilarious! Pass the popcorn!
Michael Banner is indeed a regular speaker on “Thought for the Day”, a three-minute slot inserted into BBC Radio 4’s morning ‘Today’ programme. The Beeb defends it against all comers and refuses to allow any comment or criticism. The producers and presenters of ‘Today’ occasionally get their own back by placing a serious science piece immediately before or after TftD.
This gives me an opportunity to plug the website ‘Platitude of the Day’, curated for nearly 20 years by the indefatigable and heroic Peter Hearty, the main purpose of which is to critique and satirise TftD. Some of Dr Banner’s recent offerings, plus a few comments, are here: https://platitudes.home.blog/?s=Michael+banner
The whole fracas is simply hilarious, instantiating what happens when one religion, Christianity, collides with another—wokeness.
Yeah, it is simply hilarious. It also reminded me of the unstoppable force hitting the immoveable object paradox.
Let me understand. Some paintings, painted at the very least one thousand years after the supposed event, by people that were not there and don’t give citations for their work, may possibly suggest that a possible historical figure was transsexual. If there is a homeopathic recipe for ‘flimsy evidence,’ it has been used here. Trying very hard to make a narrative fit doesn’t make you a scholar, it just makes you look desperate to please a paticular group, idea or ideology.
Pretty much said what I was planning to say.
Ditto. A couple of points: none of the painters ever saw this figure alive (if he even existed at all) and if the family actually existed, they would have been Arabs, not lily white as most of the figures in the painting are. How ludicrous the whole things is (in addition to the vagina claim). Maybe we can get Christians all excited about such things so they stay out of politics.
This just shows that, with g.o.d., all things are possible.
One Maya Deane has published a novel in which Achilles is a transwoman. I’m not buying it. Bisexual maybe, but not trans.
Could’ve just been an ancient Greek thing. Or, what the heck, maybe Achilles simply got lonely laying siege to Troy for a decade — kinda like what Willie says happens to cowboys spending all those lonely nights out on the west Texas range. 🙂
What do you think the row about Briseis (or was it Chryseis? I forget which came first) was over? Sex slaves captured at sword point. If he got it on with Patroclus, it was because he wanted to, not because he didn’t have any options. Including abstinence or masturbation.
Projecting modern Western battlefield puritanism onto other armies, with their trains of “camp followers” often outnumbering the troops themselves – is just irrational.
Still giggling.
Now, if the painting is accurate and we assume Jesus existed and was transgender, then he apparently got gender affirmation therapy in early puberty because not only does he lack breasts but his pelvis is narrow, male-type.
I mean, it makes the parthenogenesis more reasonable, right?
Meshuggeneh on all sides, from top to bottom. Painted pictures from centuries later of a fictional character used as evidence…LOL
As usual, Jerry, you hit it out of the park.
But, as observed, you use the capital ‘G’ for the Christian deity, when at no time does it deserve it. The christian god is made up like every other god invented by man.
Comments?
In the usage “son of God/part of God”, “God” is a name, so the usage is akin to “son of Zeus” and so takes a capital. If it were “son of a god” you’d have a point.
Two word rebuttal: Harry Potter.
That said, I also don’t capitalize ‘god’, a common noun. I do capitalize proper nouns, even imaginary ones, like “Jehovah”, “El”, and “Thor”. When I hear the word ‘god’, my go-to response is “Which of the gods do you mean?”.
I’m still wondering about the historicity of Jesus. I’ve heard various theories about there having been zero or several people named “Jesus” (Or the local equivalent, “Jeshua”, related to our name “Joshua”) in the region at the time. The Great Wiki says that historians now dismiss Jesus Ahistoricity Theory.
There is no conclusive historical evidence that Jesus existed, and a reasonable argument that he was a myth can be made, in part based on that lack of evidence. So whichever historians dismiss such a lack of evidence are not interested in historical accuracy.
As with science, it’s up to the claimers to present the evidence, not the other way around.
Clearly myth is an enormous feature of the JC idea. All of the interesting things (walk on water, get resurrected after 3 days, etc.) are pure story-telling. At the end of it you might have “a guy once lived in Palestine and maybe his name was Jesus”. There’s little reason to care one way or the other about such a person.
Whenever I run into a discussion about the historicity of Jesus, I always think of the short story: “The Procurator of Judea,” by Anatole France. (Spoiler alert!) Where even Pontius Pilate, as the retired prefect, can’t remember Jesus of Nazareth.
As Joe E. Louis told Jack Lemmon in the last line of Some Like It Hot, “Nobody’s prefect.”
Or somethin’ like that. 🙂
Touché
And I thought the previous post was about something insane…
Wouldn’t this be more analogous to an ambiguous genitalia situation? I mean, having both a penis and a vagina is really not representative of the transexual state, as far as I am aware.
Dean Banner is obviously right. Not only is the wound in J’s side a vagina, it is bleeding–J was clearly menstruating. I am a little concerned about J’s beard, though.
Could be worse. Think of all those Indian statues of the androgynous Shiva — half Shiva and half Parvati.
Tony Soprano’s Vishnu-come-lately sister, Janice? 🙂
Yet more evidence that we create our gods in our own image(s).
Isn’t it enough to suggest that Jesus would have been welcoming and supportive of transgender people? Why does he need to be transgender “themselves”?
I find it extraordinary how Jesus can be made relevant to every situation in life. In a rush and can’t find your door key? Jesus was always losing his etc etc. When Jesus is everything to everyone, he almost he comes meaningless.
Every party has a pooper and w/r/t this party, I’m one.
In the field of art history, the Christ’s-wound-as-vagina interpretation has been around for a while now, I’d say since the 1980’s at least, so it’s pretty old hat. Christ-as-transgender is simply a new twist on that.
As for the absurdity of either of these interpretations, take a look at Caravaggio’s treatment of the subject and tell me that it doesn’t seem a bit … sexual. Recall that Jesus makes Thomas, who is doubting the whole resurrection thing, THRUST his FINGER (paging Dr Freud!) into his WOUND. (John 20:26)
Whether any of it actually happened is beside the point. Star Wars never happened but for our autistic Silicon Valley overlords it’s their primary cultural reference.
“Recall that Jesus makes Thomas, who is doubting the whole resurrection thing, THRUST his FINGER (paging Dr Freud!) into his WOUND. (John 20:26)”
Actually, Jesus supposedly INVITED Thomas to thrust Thomas’s finger into Jesus’s wounds, but there is nothing in the Gospels to indicate that Thomas actually took him up on the offer.
It is also possible that Jesus is who he said he was, the son of God!
First you have to prove that a Jesus person existed, and the only evidence for that is the assertion of the Bible, which is hardly a book of nonfiction. It’s also possible that monkeys could fly out of Donald Trump’s butt today, but that has a likelihood on the order of Jesus (IF he existed) being the son of God–a god for which there’s no evidence.
A character in fiction “talks” and we should think it might be true?
Speaking of gash wound resemblances, has any one ever noticed Trump’s throat?
I googled it. Looks like he has a fanny up there.
Fanny has different meanings depending on your country. However, both are appropriate 😆
It is a fair thought. I too was thinking of country matters 🙂
It was only a matter of time..
You can always count on academia for absurdity.
‘Academia’ includes an enormous number and diversity of people engaged in scholarly pursuits. Granted, you can readily find some whose ideas are absurd (and certain disciplines are rich sources of absurdity) but many academics – including our host – are engaged in perfectly sensible, rational work that in no way merits this accusation.
Quite aside from paintings, the doctrine of Virgin Birth means that Jesus must have been X0 in regard to the sex chromosomes. In fact, some used to assert that the H in Jesus H, Christ stands for Haploid.
Jesus the hapless haploid trans-man. Ya gotta love it! A perfect melding of two absurd dogmas.
I have a hypothesis, which is that the student was very clumsily trying to bring trans activists into the fold. This by looking for something – anything that the transes could relate to. So the savior had a slash. Yeah. Go with that.
Well, it _is_ (_was_?) a “front hole”.
Wow, the misogyny in equating a bleeding wound to a vagina.
Right up there with guys who refer to it as “gash.”
One has to wonder what this theologian thinks that the Feast of the Circumcision was all about.
PML!
For the record: Dawkins has never spoken during the Thought for the Day slot. Back in 2002 the BBC arranged some kind of TFTD-adjacent codge-up as a sop to critics, but the TFTD slot is always strictly for “believers”. Indeed it is restricted to a small pool of believers who can be guaranteed to be anodyne and not rock the boat.
I’m assuming that painters surely put in a lot of thought in what they made, especially when it came to religious iconographic art. They were fully aware that masses and masses of believers would look to it with deep reverence but would also try to “read” in it their views of how they understood their own Christian beliefs. In that religious context, that kind of a painting should somehow evoke and reinforce the underlying Christian narrative they all (mostly) accepted. It’s not impossible that the artist was trying to make reference (maybe awkwardly in our eyes) to the virgin Mary whose son he was meant to be. The bible is often at pains to emphasize that Jesus was both fully human but also fully divine, and that he was born of a woman, but yet a virginal birth. Obviously, there are all sorts of contradictions with all that, and that engendered all sorts of debates and schisms over the centuries. I’m guessing that religious artists were surely aware of the religious debates, the competing narratives, and may well have either tried to reinforce one side of the narrative vs. another side; or they might even chime in with their own sometimes very subtly “transgressive” commentary of their own, if they could get away with it, especially if they dared suggesting a potentially heretical idea. That the wound is “vagina-like” I can understand, but the only sensible interpretation I can make of it is that it might have been as some kind of reminder of the virgin Mary and of his (alleged) virgin birth. I might even go out on a limb and could even suppose that the artist could have been ever so slightly mocking the very idea of a “virgin birth” by giving the viewer a very bloody vagina! Yes, that’s a speculative stretch, but not nearly as much of a stretch as “Jesus was a trans”.
“It’s not impossible that the artist was trying to make reference (maybe awkwardly in our eyes) to the virgin Mary whose son he was meant to be.”
Surely the fact that the Virgin Mary features as a whole person in the painting makes the idea that a wound in his side is supposed to be a reference to her a little far-fetched. Surely the explanation for the the picture of the wound that Occam would have approved of is that the account of the crucifixion believed by Christians includes John Wayne – sorry the centurion piercing his side with a spear. The artist was simply trying to be ‘true’ to the event as he believed it.
There is just a lot to unpack in this.
Jesus was transmogrified, so would technically qualifies as “trans,” if not in the sense that we think of it.
I find it funny that the worshipers felt “excluded.” That literally is the basis of christianity. Either your “in” or your “out” (and burning in hell – can’t get much more exclusionary that than).
I notice the depiction has the “vaginal” hole between the ribs. I don’t think a spear is going to be thrust, from the ground level up, between the ribs into the heart and not break a bone, which is, as my preacher once told me, one of the “prophesied” requirements as an unblemished lamb. I’m also not sure how someone would – eghemm – penetrate the hole between the ribs. It’s akin to UFO believers declaring the clouds in old paintings to be “proof” of extraterrestrial visitations. Which makes me wonder, if Jesus is from heaven, wouldn’t that make him extraterrestrial?
Next thing they’ll be claiming is that this guy was born of a virgin and rose from the dead…
I see this as yet another way a human is rewriting the ideology to suit a modern environment… one further proof of religion as human in origin.
Interpreting, reading into, tampering, bending, and WTF! stretching, to stay current and meaningful.
Zombie Jesus is just about right since both are a fiction.
Talking of zombies I hear there are zombie satellites obiting the earth. They shut down and in some cases for years and then suddenly start transmitting data.
‘…and the stone was rolled away and they entered the tomb, only to find it empty with no trace of Jesus’ body…just half of Mary’s chromosomes piled into a little mound of dust.’