About a month ago, a whole host of right-wing media outlets, including The Daily Telegraph, the Daily Mail, the New York Post, NBC Montana, and Fox News, published a flurry of wildly sensationalist articles claiming that a dean at the University of Cambridge said that Jesus was transgender. As Candida Moss, a scholar of the New Testament and early Christianity who is the Edward Cadbury Professor of Theology at the University of Birmingham, points out in this article she wrote for The Daily Beast, however, and as I will discuss further in the first section of this post, this claim is entirely false; the dean in question actually said no such thing.
At the center of this controversy, however, stands a very strange and fascinating fact, which is well known to scholars and students of medieval western European art and mysticism, but which is not well known to the general public. As bizarre and improbable as it may sound, medieval western European Christians frequently depicted the wound that Jesus is said to have received in his side on the cross in a manner closely resembling a vulva. Although scholars disagree about what exactly these depictions indicate, most agree that the medieval people who made them and venerated them were conscious of this resemblance. In this post, I will explore the history of these depictions and what they may tell us about late medieval gender and sexuality.
What really happened at the University of Cambridge
As Moss discusses in her article for The Daily Beast, the following is what really happened in the incident that right-wing media outlets have been promoting such hysteria about: Joshua Heath, a PhD student and Junior Research Fellow in the department of Divinity at the University of Cambridge, whose doctoral dissertation adviser is Rowan Williams (a highly revered Anglican theologian who served as the Archbishop of Canterbury from December 2002 until December 2012), delivered a guest sermon in the chapel of Trinity College.
In this sermon, Heath never at any point tried to claim that Jesus of Nazareth was literally, historically transgender while he was alive as a human being on earth. Instead, he discussed the long tradition in western Christian art and mysticism dating back to the Middle Ages of envisioning the side wound that Jesus received on the cross either as a vulva itself or as visually similar to a vulva. He argued that this tradition reflects the mystical notion that the body of Jesus is “the body of all bodies” and that it therefore encompasses both traditionally masculine and feminine characteristics.
Heath concluded his sermon with an impassioned call for Christian believers today, particularly those affiliated with the Church of England, to accept and include people who are openly transgender within the church instead of rejecting and marginalizing them as sinful, declaring:
“Christ is representative of all humanity, his saving work embraces all people, insofar as his body is sexualized in both masculine and feminine terms.”
To support this argument, Health pointed out that, if the body of Jesus is really “the body of all bodies,” “then his body is also the trans body, and their word is his word,” because trans people are human beings.
In other words, Heath was not making any historical claims about the gender identity or the literal, physical body of Jesus of Nazareth, but rather making an argument based on an age-old Christian mystical tradition in favor of trans acceptance and inclusion in the contemporary church.
ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons showing the exterior of the Trinity College Chapel at the University of Cambridge, where Heath delivered his sermon
Unfortunately, at least according to the Daily Mail (which is a highly untrustworthy source to say the least), Heath’s argument for inclusion and acceptance fell upon a deeply hostile audience. The Mail claims that members of the congregation were absolutely furious; some people shouted “Heresy!!!” while others left the sermon in tears. Within a matter of days, right-wing media outlets turned Heath’s sermon into an international news story, vilifying him as a dangerous idiot, a heretic, and (worst of all) a proponent “wokeness.”
The “Cambridge University dean” that all the right-wing media outlets vilify (and devote even greater prominence to than Heath himself) in their articles is Dr. Michael Banner, the Dean of Trinity College. Contrary to how all the media outlets make it sound, Banner absolutely did not say that he believes that Jesus was trans, nor did he say that Jesus had a trans body, nor did he even say that he agreed with any part of Heath’s lecture. Instead, Banner merely offered a very brief, carefully couched defense of his decision to allow Heath to give the sermon, saying:
“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 [sic].”
In other words, no one involved in this episode ever said that Jesus of Nazareth was literally trans. A PhD student merely argued that, if Jesus’s body mystically represents all human bodies, then that includes trans people’s bodies, since trans people are human, and a dean of Trinity College merely said that he thinks that this is “legitimate . . . speculation.”
Unfortunately, as I have previously discussed in several blog posts, including this one from November 2021 and this one from January 2022, British anti-trans media outlets will seize literally any story that involves anyone in any position of authority expressing even the most tepid support for allowing trans people to exist and turn it into an international scandal. This is yet another case of them doing exactly that.
ABOVE: Screenshot from this YouTube video of Dr. Michael Banner, the dean of Trinity College at the University of Cambridge, delivering the Charles Gore Lecture 2019 at Westminster Abbey
How the idea of Jesus’s side wound as a vulva arose
I can understand how, to people who aren’t historians of medieval religion or art, the suggestion that medieval Christians in western Europe frequently imagined and depicted Jesus’s side wound as looking like a vulva might sound bizarre and ridiculous. Nonetheless, this is something that they incontrovertibly did. To understand why they did this, we must first take a look at their historical and cultural context.
The Gospel of John 19:32–37 describes Jesus’s side wound as follows, as translated in the New Revised Standard Version Updated Edition (NRSVUE):
“Then the soldiers came and broke the legs of the first and of the other who had been crucified with him. But when they came to Jesus and saw that he was already dead, they did not break his legs. Instead, one of the soldiers pierced his side with a spear, and at once blood and water came out. (He who saw this has testified so that you also may believe. His testimony is true, and he knows that he tells the truth, so that you also may continue to believe.) These things occurred so that the scripture might be fulfilled, ‘None of his bones shall be broken.’ And again another passage of scripture says, ‘They will look on the one whom they have pierced.’”
It is not very difficult to see how medieval Christians might have perceived an opening in a person’s body that bleeds, secretes a clear liquid, and is penetrated as in some sense analogous to a vagina—especially when you consider the fact the Latin word vulnus, meaning “wound,” sounds very similar phonetically to the word vulva, meaning “vagina.”
On top of all this, in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries CE, the metaphorical idea of Jesus as a mother became extremely popular and influential among western European Christians, especially among those who were more mystically inclined. Female mystic writers seem to have found this idea particularly appealing.
The classic study on medieval conceptions of Jesus as a mother is Caroline Walker Bynum’s book Jesus as Mother: Studies in the Spirituality of the High Middle Ages, published by the University of California Press in 1982. In her book, Bynum identifies an array of tropes and images that are associated with this metaphor, including the image of Jesus nursing an individual believer’s soul from his side wound like a mother nursing an infant at her breast.
For example, the English Cistercian abbot Aelred of Rievaulx (lived 1110 – 1167 CE) writes the following advice to his sister of how she should imagine the moment when the Roman soldier pierced Christ’s side in his De Institutione chapter 31, deliberately echoing the erotic language of the Song of Songs, as translated by M. P. Mcpherson in The Works of Aelred of Rievaulx, volume one, pages 90–91:
“Then one of the soldiers opened his side with a lance and there came forth blood and water. Hasten, linger not, eat the honeycomb with your honey, drink your wine with your milk. The blood is changed into wine to gladden you, the water into milk to nourish you. From the rock streams have flowed for you, wounds have been made in his limbs, holes in the wall of his body, in which, like a dove, you may hide while you kiss them one by one. Your lips, stained with his blood, will become like a scarlet ribbon and your word sweet.”
Writing a couple of centuries later, the Dominican writer Raymond of Capua (lived c. 1303 – 1399 CE) describes the following vision of the female mystic Catherine of Siena (lived 1347 – 1380) in his Life of Catherine of Siena, as translated by Conleth Kearns:
“With that, he tenderly placed his right hand on her neck, and drew her towards the wound in his side. ‘Drink, daughter, from my side,’ he said, ‘and by that draught your soul shall become enraptured with such delight that your very body, which for my sake you have denied, shall be inundated with its overflowing goodness.’ Drawn close in this way, . . . she fastened her lips upon that sacred wound, . . . and there she slaked her thirst.”
Some of the earliest surviving unambiguous artistic depictions of Christ’s side wound as vagina-like occur in the context of the metaphor of him as a mother. Specifically, a number of manuscript illustrations dating to the thirteenth century depict Jesus as giving birth to the personification of the church through his side wound. In the real world, of course, people give birth through vaginas, not side wounds, but, in these artistic depictions, Jesus’s wound takes on the life-producing, generative capacity of a vagina.
ABOVE: Illustration from French Gothic Bible Moralisée, dating to around the year 1225, depicting Jesus giving birth to the personification of the Church through his side wound
ABOVE: Illustration from the Bible Moralisée Codex 1179, folio 3v, currently held in the National Library of Austria, Vienna, depicting Jesus giving birth to the personification of the Church through his side wound
Venerating images of Jesus’s vulvic side wound in the Late Middle Ages
From around the 1320s onward, artistic depictions of Jesus’s side wound in the approximate appearance of a vulva, isolated from his body, and rotated into a vertical orientation to look as much like a vulva as possible began to proliferate, appearing in Books of Hours, prayer rolls, and widely-reproduced woodcuts all across western continental Europe and Great Britain.
These images frequently appear alongside the arma Christi (i.e., the instruments that were used in Christ’s passion). People throughout western Europe and Great Britain continued to produce and venerate these images throughout the rest of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.
ABOVE: Folio from the Psalter of Bonne de Luxembourg, most likely commissioned in around 1348 or 1349 for Bonne de Luxembourg, Dutchess of Normandy, currently held in the Cloisters collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, depicting Jesus’s side wound in a manner strongly reminiscent of a vulva
ABOVE: Illustration of Jesus’s vulvic side wound surrounded by angels from a manuscript held in the Bibliothèque nationale de France, Département des manuscrits, dating to around 1369
At this point, I’m sure that some people will accuse me of being completely insane, of seeing a resemblance to vulvas where obviously none could possibly exist, and of only relying on the work of “woke” scholars who have (supposedly) been indoctrinated into “gender ideology.”
The problem with this accusation is that it actually seems to be pretty close to universally agreed in the field of medieval studies that these depictions do indeed resemble vulvas and that the medieval artists who made them and the people who venerated them were conscious of this fact.
Even Dr. Rachel Fulton Brown—an Associate Professor of Medieval History at the University of Chicago who is a hardline traditionalist Roman Catholic known for, among other things, her outspoken far-right political views, her seething hatred for trans people, her close personal friendship with the far-right provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos, and her involvement with open white supremacists, misogynists, and other right-wing extremists—acknowledges in a highly politically-charged post she wrote on her blog in January 2017 that late medieval depictions of the side wound are vulvic.
Thus, basically everyone in the field, whether they are pro-trans or anti-trans, seems to agree that medieval Christians knowingly depicted Christ’s side wound as resembling a vagina; what scholars disagree on is what this association means.
ABOVE: Illustration in MS Auct.D.4.4 in the Bodleian Library at the University of Oxford, dating to around 1373, depicting the Jesus’s vulvic side wound
Right-wing and conservative scholars such as Fulton Brown don’t see any queer significance to these depictions, while many other scholars, especially young queer scholars, do see them as having queer significance. In particular, one scholar who has produced some excellent work on medieval depictions of Christ’s side wound is Sophie Sexon, who is a PhD candidate at the University of Glasgow.
Sexon has an excellent chapter “Gender-Querying Christ’s Wounds: A Non-Binary Interpretation of Christ’s Body in Late Medieval Imagery” in the edited volume Trans and Genderqueer Subjects in Medieval Hagiography, edited by Alicia Spencer-Hall and Blake Gutt, published in 2021 by Amsterdam University Press, on pages 133–154, in which they argue (convincingly, in my opinion) that representations of Jesus as having a vagina-like side wound “incorporate aspects of femininity, masculinity and aspects that signify as neither” (p. 133), thereby producing a body that signals as “non-binary” in the sense that it does not conform to traditional notions of discrete maleness or femaleness.
ABOVE: Illustration of Jesus’s vulvic side wound from a Book of Hours made in England or the Netherlands in 1410
Medieval depictions of Christ’s side wound, however, bear further potential queer implications. In particular, these depictions sometimes bear messages written around them instructing the viewer that the image is the true size and shape of Christ’s actual wound and that, by rubbing it, kissing it, and praying to it, they can receive certain indulgences. Some images of the side wound bear specific patterns of wear which indicate that the image’s owner touched and/or kissed the image of the wound on a regular basis.
Medieval manuscripts were written on vellum, which is made from animal skin (usually the skin of a calf, sheep, or goat) and has a skin-like texture. Touching and kissing an image in a manuscript therefore would have actually physically felt like touching and kissing skin.
Both men and women regularly rubbed and kissed these vagina-like images of Christ’s wound. In both this blog post from August 2017 and their chapter that I have already referenced, Sexon comments on the potential homoerotic aspect of a woman rubbing and kissing an image that looks like a vulva, especially if it is drawn on skin.
ABOVE: Illustration from a medieval Book of Hours showing an image of Christ’s side wound with a pattern of wear indicating that it was frequently rubbed and kissed
The image of Christ’s side wound on birth girdles
In Late Medieval England and to a lesser extent other parts of western Europe, when a woman was pregnant or in labor, it was common for her to wear a long, thin roll of parchment around her stomach or waist with prayers, names of saints and holy figures, and sacred images written on it. These rolls of parchment were known as “birth girdles” and were a form of popular charm or amulet meant to ensure that the woman would give birth safely.
As it happens, these birth girdles frequently bear the image of Jesus’s side wound in all its vulvic glory. The association between the side wound and the vulva would have been especially obvious in this context, given the fact that women wore these girdles specifically in order to ensure that they would give birth (from their vaginas) safely and the fact that they wore these girdles in relatively close proximity to their own genital areas.
ABOVE: Image from the Wellcome Collection website showing a portion of a medieval birth girdle made in England, most likely in the late fifteenth century CE, depicting the side wound of Jesus
ABOVE: Detail from this webpage by Cambridge University Press showing a portion of a birth girdle from late medieval England bearing the image of Jesus’s vulvic side wound
Conclusion
Whatever you make of them, Christians in late medieval western Europe made and venerated these images for literally hundreds of years and it’s safe to say that they knew full well which human body part they resemble.
As most of my regular readers are aware, I am not a Christian. Nonetheless, as a trans woman, I do very much hope that mainstream, institutional Christianity will become more accepting of queer people, including trans people. I think that working to increase public awareness of historical Christian traditions and ideas that are open to queer interpretations may help to pave the way for better relations between institutional Christianity and the queer community.
Other examples of these kinds of traditions are relatively easy to find. For instance, as I discuss in this post I wrote back in August 2020, medieval Christians widely revered and told stories about multiple saints who were assigned female at birth and yet chose to live their lives as men by adopting traditionally male names, clothing, presentation, and identities until they died.
The most famous of these saints is probably Saint Marinos the Monk, whose story is first recorded in a Byzantine Greek hagiography dating to around the early seventh century CE or thereabouts. It is hard to describe these saints in contemporary English as anything other than trans men.
ABOVE: Fourteenth-century French manuscript illustration of Saint Marinos (in red) and his father Eugenios (in blue) joining a cenobitic monastery together
In my most recent post before this one, which I posted only a week ago, I discuss the history of how Jews and Christians have imagined the appearance of angels and, in that post, I discuss the long Christian artistic tradition of depicting angels as androgynous to show that they are incorporeal beings who are without sex. There is also a long tradition of Christian artists portraying the apostle John as androgynous or downright feminine in his appearance, which I will probably discuss in a future post.
Returning to the main subject of this post, it is worth noting that Jesus’s side wound has taken on new meaning for many transmasculine people in the twenty-first century due to its resemblance in many artistic depictions to the scar that is usually left by chest masculinization surgery or transmasculine “top surgery.”
Admittedly, trans people usually make this association only in jest. (Memes and jokes about Jesus’s “top surgery” always abound on trans Twitter, Reddit, and other social media sites around Easter.) Nonetheless, especially for trans men who are Christians, the association can be something deeper—a reminder that, at least in one small way, the trans man’s body, which transphobic society so often portrays as mutilated and “irreversibly damaged,” actually mirrors the body of Christ himself.
ABOVE: Detail from the Maestà, painted by the Italian painter Duccio di Buoninsegna in Siena between 1308 and 1311, showing the apostle Thomas touching Jesus’s side wound
Excellent work as usual, Spencer!
Congratulations on your coming out in your blog, as well. If you had done so before, I missed it. The Medieval period is such an amazing time to study for people who are also interested in Gender Studies. I am looking forward to your future articles and I have no doubt there will be a book at some point after you have completed your dissertation, if not a podcast or television show!
Thank you so much for the positive feedback! I’m truly glad to hear that you enjoyed my post and I totally agree that gender in the Middle Ages is an absolutely fascinating topic!
I first began seriously thinking about coming out as trans in around summer 2020, I finally came out to my immediate family in spring 2021, I began socially transitioning in summer of that year, I came out to all my extended family, professors, and classmates in August of that year at the beginning of the fall 2021 semester, and I’ve been living openly as a woman for over the past year and a half.
I’ve actually reached a point where I pass as though I were a cis woman all the time. I haven’t had a single stranger clock me or misidentify me as a man at any point in the past year, everyone automatically treats me as a woman, and many people I know in person whom I’ve told that I’m trans have told me that they never would have guessed in a million years from my appearance or voice that I was anything other than a cis woman.
I’ve been out online, including on this blog, since June 2022. I believe that the earliest post in which I expressly mention that I am a trans woman is this one I made on June 10th. It’s easy to see how you could have missed it, though, since I deliberately didn’t make any kind of big announcement and I’ve only expressly mentioned that I am trans in a few posts. I generally tend to avoid talking about being trans online because I want to avoid transphobic harassment as much as possible. I only ever mention it if I think that my own personal experience as a trans woman is directly relevant to the specific point that I am trying to make.
As a grad student, I wrote a paper about “Dream of the Rood” that took into context the stone it was on which addresses someone’s marriage — I have kind of forgotten the details several decades later, but I argued that the violence and use of gender in the language describing the experience of the Cross or Rood, normalized, minimized and oddly spuritualized the rape of women who were to be sacrificed for peace or other political or economic benefit in arranged marriages. Lying back and thinking of the Crucifixion was supposed to give strength through faith and the comforting (?) idea that worse was suffered for salvation on the Cross.
My professor was a Catholic and a Medievalist through a fairly conservative lens. He assigned an A- to the paper and told me it was a “strong misreading” and tried to explain there were other ways to see the blending of sex and violence, giving as an example, “What if someone is making love to his wife and someone stabs him in the back?” To which I could only ask in bewilderment if that is what he thought the poem described as an analogy for Jesus’ relationship with the Cross and the Church? He wasn’t really able to explain an applicable alternative. In those days, people allowed different ideas and didn’t punish you so much for them, but they also didn’t always encourage you too much, either. Fortunately, I had some other professors, one woman in particular who was very supportive, but I lacked the temperament to be able to discipline myself further than grad school in academia. Never applied for even one academic job after the dissertation. I shall enjoy watching you, another, younger woman, go far.
Thanks for a fascinating dive into an area that was entirely unfamiliar with. This was not discussed when I studied medieval art in 1970! Happy New Year.
You’re welcome! Thank you so much for the positive feedback. I’m glad to hear that you enjoyed the post!
I’m not surprised that you didn’t hear about this back in 1970; that would have been long before scholars really became interested in gender in the Middle Ages at all, let alone this particular topic.
My understanding is that there has long been theology to the effect that God had to become fully human in order to redeem humanity. Many groups — especially oppressed ones — have run with this idea and depicted Christ as being of their ethnicity: it’s inspiring to believe that God was one of us — not just human, but *our* people specifically, sharing *our* struggles. Christ is someone *we* can identify with, the “Emmanuel” — “God with us”. You’ve pointed out here that the medievals were doing the same with femininity. All that Heath seems to have done is to push that envelope a little further.
Amazing how what was at root a theological point (in which I, as an atheist, have no personal stake) got blown up by the idiot faction of the media into a historical claim.
Wow! What an eye-opening and fascinating excursion into aspects of Christian spirituality. If only more Christians could be aware of how diverse and creative their own religious past is, they might be less rigid in their thinking today.
Thanks for unearthing all this!
You’re welcome! Thank you so much for the positive feedback! I’m really glad to hear that you appreciate my post!
Spencer, thanks for the sake of mankind You exist to take the work to explain about this kind of topics.
Seriously the mass media and press on this times leave to much to desired when “informing”.
Any way good article and have a Happy New Year. I will waiting the new one.
Thank you so much for the positive feedback! I am so glad to hear that you’ve enjoyed my post! Happy New Year to you as well!
For all we know Jesus could have been an hermaphrodite, with complete sets of both male and female genitalia. Are there any scriptural descriptions of Jesus’ “package”? I am unaware of any such.
Grab any close battle spear (i.e., not a pilum) and stick it into someone. What will the resultant wound resemble? A vulva. You’re seeing vulvae where there are only vulnera.
Yes, it is true that a real wound left by the thrust of a spear might, at least in some cases, bear some resemblance to a vulva. That does not, however, explain why Aelred of Rievaulx describes Jesus’s side wound using erotic language cribbed from the lover’s descriptions of the beloved’s body in the Song of Songs, nor does it explain why medieval Christians depicted Jesus as literally giving birth through his side wound, nor does it explain why medieval Christians made and venerated images of the side wound isolated from Christ’s body and rotated into a vertical orientation in such a way that seems to deliberately emphasize its vulvic appearance.
Again, I’m really interested to hear what you make of the depictions I discuss above that show Jesus as giving birth through the side wound? Surely you must acknowledge that it would be rather difficult to artistically represent someone as giving birth through a certain opening in their body without seeing any analogy whatsoever to the bodily opening through which humans normally give birth?
I think the point is that the *medievals* saw a vulva there. Yes, from our POV it’s a bit ridiculous and bizarre and maybe kind of creepy, but that’s what they did.
Happy New Year, and thanks for your work so far on several important topics.
Happy New Year to you as well and thank you so much for your positive feedback!
I was aware of this, probably from seeing it mentioned on r/AskHistorians, but had not seen a detailed explanation of it before. But when I had an elective course on “Mediaeval food, fashion and material culture” the view of Jesus as motherly was mentioned,and my teachers showed us a picture of Christ displaying one nipple as if about to breastfeed. We also discussed these “transvestite saints” (some of whom should probably be described as transgender, as you mention).
I am once again impressed by how much scholarship you can cite for a subject different from your own studies! Do you search for it on Google scholar and JSTOR or find it in some other way?
Lastly, I would personally be very interested in a post about John the Apostle from you, and am now looking forwards to it! I hope you may both discuss the androgynous depiction of him and how the idea of him as beloved by Jesus has been interpreted historically (though perhaps those topics are connected with each other)
I heard of the whole Jesus trans thing almost a month ago and decided to be silent about it, mostly because I didn’t think I’m one to talk about such an issue and also because seeing reactionary bigoted stuff tends to negatively effect me mentally (and I can imagine it’s worse among people who are trans). Nevertheless, it’s still nice to learn an aspect of medieval Christianity that I never knew before.
In terms of trying to reappropriate such traditions into modern times in order to make more Christians accepting of LGBTQ+ people, I can only hope it succeeds. I can’t help however imagine some conservative protestant conclude the whole Christ vulva-wound being the product of the corrupt pre-reformation Catholic church who borrowed it from some unspecified pagan belief and therefore a Satanic thing to teach. Not to mention they’re Sola Scriptura notion of the Bible saying nothing of Jesus’s wound having some resemblance to a vulva, and interpreting it otherwise as “twisting” the word of God in favor of non-cis people who they consider sinful for not conforming to their notion of cis-gender norms.
The shape of mandorla (or “vesica piscis”) is very common in cristian iconography and it comes from prehistoric times. It is a symbol of wholeness, that is a synonym of divinity since god is the world, and it means something valuable hidden inside a hard shell (like an almond, and that is why it is called mandorla which in Italian means almond) and as such very often it is used as a symbol of the true divine nature of Christ hidden inside his mortal body. Mandorlas are used in buddhist iconography as well and it is the symbol of the yoni, the female genital, because the world is supposed to have originated from the female creative energy. Almonds are holy symbols because they are associated with virgin births. For example, in a myth the goddess Nana gave birth to the god Attis with her own almond. In ancient religions the bleeding mandorla was the image of the bleeding female genital because the blood of the period was thought to be the source of creation. Later christianity transformed it into the bleeding wound of the Christ because they wanted to symbolize the life-giving effect of Christ’s resurrection which resembled female reproduction. That is they did it on purpose, not because they did not realise the mandorla looked like a vulva. They consiusly wanted to incorporate into the Christ iconography the female iconography.
And as a side note, Christ was also thought to be a hermaphrodite (at a philosophical level) because the divine being was supposed to be both male and female and complete as only a being which is both male and female can be. So all the people who claim that the christian church should exclude homosexuals or trans people or non-binary people in general are very far away from the christian spirit.
Spencer, you are simply GOATED. The level of insightful and erudite content here is enough for nerds like me to soil ourselves. This is all fascinating, stuff I was wholly unaware of before I clicked on this page. Now, this might be a bit off-topic on in regard to your article on slavery here: https://talesoftimesforgotten.com/2019/10/24/abolitionism-in-ancient-greece-and-rome/,
You mention the “others” Aristotle argued against in favor of slavery. These “others” that opposed slavery were apparently so fringe that not a single sentence more about them can be mentioned by Aristotle. Could this possibly mean that these “others” are merely a rhetorical flourish for Aristotle to get his points across?
Thank you so much for the complement! I really appreciate it!
Aristotle actually spends quite a bit more time arguing against the view of the “others” he mentions. I simply didn’t quote his entire argument because it was too long and only the part where he describes the view of the people he is arguing against was really relevant to my article.
Ahh, I see. Well, cheers to more great historical content!
Comments are closed on that slavery article (which I seem to have missed at the time), so I’ll drop this here: Thanks for that. I’ve been thinking lately about what sort of moral judgements we should make about historical figures — how do we avoid falling into uncritical presentism on the one hand, and complete moral relativism on the other?
Slavery is of course one of the issues we want to judge people over, and some recent posts I’ve seen tend to fall on the presentist side, based on assumptions of what the slaves would have thought about it. This (and here is my metaethics hobby coming in) fails to distinguish between what we want, and what we think is right. No doubt a Black African or a Roman freeman, having fallen in to slavery through capture or debt, would have considered that they had suffered a grave misfortune. But would they also consider that they had suffered an *injustice*, that they had been *wronged*? Because those are not the same. I think the Epictetus excerpt (I turned in 3000 words on the Enchiridion for a term essay a few years ago, so I have some familiarity with the guy) is telling: he, a former slave, doesn’t seem to think slavery was an evil institution. Of course, his radical Stoicism seems to be on display there, so perhaps we shouldn’t take his views as representative of Roman slaves generally. But it shows that historical attitudes had some complexity, and we can’t just assume we know what the slaves thought about the institution, so that argument loses its force.
I’m gonna say the joke since no one has:
Of course Jesus was a woman, she was born from a truly single mother, she had no Y chromosome. So, anti-trans Christians should deny Jesus the right to refer to herself as male, since she very clearly was biologically a woman.
We should start editing the Bible now.