13 essays on Christian mythology and taboos

As another Easter approaches, I'm breaking from tradition and addressing taboos. Isn't that unsurprising! I've never been one for orthodox thought. Politically, I advocate the separation of church and state, for government that's impartial, neutral, that doesn't favor one belief over another, and fully respects those who don't believe in a Creator at all.

Spiritually, I find inspiration in nature, in people, in art, in music, in the expanding universe, and in a diversity of sacred texts. But I won't deny the influence of Christianity in the world--good and bad--or its patriarchal roots. So I tend to delve into its mythology. At the risk of getting flamed, I'll venture to crash some taboos with this post.

From The RealSpiel archives, 13 essays on Christian mythology and its impact on politics and culture.

The Passion of Christ for today
Why glorify the death and suffering of Jesus? If we explore the reasons for Christ's crucifixion and chose to change the "systems of oppression that brought about his demise, violence against marginalized people would cease to exist."

Did Jesus live the down low?
It's entirely possible that Jesus was a married, closeted gay man. But the bigger issue is homophobia in today's Church, the false socialization of who we are as male and female, and ultimately the challenge is to peel away a false spiritualization.

Biblical sexism and vagina resentment
The role of women was liberated by Christ's egalitarian teachings but the Bible has been edited and used as a patriarchal tool to oppress the feminine.

Armageddon: Bible literalists got it wrong
A majority of Americans believe in The Rapture based on a Bible that's fraught with errors. A footnote to copyists in the Book of Revelations has been interpreted to heed the texts as if they were the literal word of God.

The Bible is not the source
A woman's responsibility is to listen to her Inner Source--not to the Bible, not to the alleged "headship" of men, not to a patriarchal church with an ax to grind. Women have equal access to the Creator, the Source of All Life, for divine guidance. Looking to men for women's roles in life, church, and family, is asking the wrong source.

Angelic lesbian, one of RealSpiel's most popular
Why don't angels have genitals? Who stripped them of sexuality? I suppose Christian orthodoxy, which divides sexuality from spirituality and promotes the idea of a celibate Christ, offers the main reason for the absence of angelic sexuality. In my belief system, there's a guardian angel for everybody--gays, lesbians, bisexuals, asexuals, transsexuals, transgendered people, hermaphrodites--everyone and every creature.

The Bible as fountainhead of sexism: money, lesbian power and visions
Guest columnist Genet offers a lesbian feminist viewpoint into gaining success, money, and power. "It is something every lesbian spiritually alive needs to address -- dollars are a spiritual issue!"

In support of Kittredge Cherry
When Kitt Cherry, author of Jesus In Love, Art That Dares, and At The Cross, was attacked by the conservative Institute on Religion and Democracy for her beliefs in a queer Christ, the right to freedom of religion needed to be defended. Included are factors destroying marriage in America. And it's not the perceived threat of gay marriage.

The crucifixion of Madonna
The Material Girl's mock crucifixion received the scorn of Christian critics. Those who defended free speech of the Danish cartoons that set the Muslim world on fire suddenly went mute. Are western liberal values to be shared or hoarded by the religious right? Of course not.

Mel Gibson, hate speech, and media
"Lately this Republican political era of 'compassionate conservatism' has brought forward an unabashed no-holds-barred attitude when it comes to passionate invective hurled at queers, African-Americans, and Jews." Features The Stoning of the Drag Queen.

The Vatican v. Creationism
Vatican astronomer Guy Consolmagno denounced creationism but Biblical literalist Ken Ham chooses the Genesis story over science.

Richest nation on earth and the most Christian but...
Could have supporting the Iraq War offered a method of penance for American Christians who felt guilty and feared retribution for being so well off when so many people in the world languish in poverty? It's an odd concept but fear and guilt have spawned the most atrocious events in history.

Fateful faithful: "American Theocracy"
On Easter Sunday 2006, a lament for the demise of the separation of church and state and the dangerous influence of Christian evangelical extremists on American politics.

Coming soon to celebrate the spring solstice: The Second Coming: The Return of the Goddess. [Update: Essay is here.] The link to the oil painting available at my artist website is here.

UPDATE: I meant spring equinox. I'm already looking forward to summer, but better to be here now.

The Bible is not the source

Reviewing Wayne Grudem's book, Evangelical Feminism & Biblical Truth: An Analysis of More Than 100 Disputed Questions, more errant Biblical literalism:

Click here for the first post in this series.

Chapter two looks at what roles Scripture states men and women ought to perform in the church. This week, we’ll look at the theoretical case now, and then next week we’ll look at the second half of the chapter’s practical application.

The first point, as it ought be, is that the church should recognize the equal value and dignity of men and women. “Both men and women are in God’s image, and we share that status equally. We are equally valuable to God and equally important to God’s work in the world and in the church. In the New Testament, the Holy Spirit is poured out in a new kind of fullness on both men and women.” (62) However, equal value does not mean equal function. [With emphasis added in boldface.]

I disagree with the equal but separate function philosophy. When did Christ present two separate roles: One for women and one for men? He didn't as best as we can tell given the way the church patriarchy altered New Testament scriptures. More from the review:

With Scripture as our foundation, we should consider where the lines in church practice should be drawn. “We should not make rules that the Bible does not support, and we should not add restrictions to ministry positions when the Bible does not justify these restrictions. Where the Bible allows freedom, we should encourage ministries by women as well as men.” (63)

I strongly disagree with "Scripture as our foundation" thinking. God is the source--not the Bible. From the first post in the series comes...:

This Biblical model can only be worked out when husband and wife each avoid errors of distortion in either being too passive or too aggressive with their roles. Apart from headship, the man’s responsibility is to provide for and protect his family. Apart from support, the woman’s responsibility is to care for the home and nurture the children.

Wrong. The woman's responsibility is to listen to God--not to the Bible, not to the alleged "headship" of men, not to a patriarchal church with an ax to grind. Women have equal access to the Creator, the Source of All Life, for divine guidance. Looking to men for women's roles in life, church, and family, is asking the wrong source. And that's a sin and a waste of time.

People taking the Bible literally without knowledge of how the New Testament was edited by scribes who had a particular sexist viewpoint of women's roles in life and the church is tragic. To cling to the ancient past not realizing the agenda that men had in writing, copying, and altering the Gospels for ideological purposes is truly sad. A reminder from textual scholar Bart Ehrman (an evangelical who started his training at the Moody Bible Institute, not exactly a hotbed of subversiveness) not to take the Bible literally:

I became interested in the manuscripts that preserve the New Testament for us, and in the science of textual criticism, which can supposedly help us reconstruct what the original words of the New Testament were. I kept reverting to my basic question: how does it help us to say that the Bible is the inerrant word of God if in fact we don't have the words that God inerrantly inspired, but only the words copied by the scribes––sometimes correctly but sometimes (many times!) incorrectly? What good is it to say that the autographs (i.e., the originals) were inspired? We don't have the originals! We have error-ridden copies, and the vast majority of these are centuries removed from the originals and different from them, evidently, in thousands of ways.

God is still speaking and alive in our hearts and minds. Why turn to a document that has no original manuscript and is a reconstruction filled with tens of thousands of errors from 1000s of years ago for spiritual guidance when we have access directly to the Living God today? Puzzles me. Do some based-on-the-Bible-only Christians think God is dead and the Bible is the only source of wisdom? I rely on the Living Word of God directly given, inspired, moment by moment of everyday. Look within. Pray and listen. That's my advice. I don't need a flawed idiomatically peculiar book written by men with their agenda to tell me how to serve God or what a woman's role is. That's for God to say.

UPDATE: I realize that atheists or agnostics who may wander in here may take issue with some of my statements because I believe in God as the source of All That Is. The context of my post was addressed to believers. However, I am clear that my personal faith is not scientific fact. I don't believe in imposing my spiritual ideas on anyone, and that freedom of religion and free speech are best served under the separation of church and state. Substitute the word, God, with the word, Self, and that's the common ground we share. Bottom-line for me...does one's belief or non-belief serve us in making our world loving, peaceful, just, more prosperous, and free from fear for us all equally? Doesn't matter to me if you believe in 20 gods or none at all, to paraphrase Jefferson. The God I hold in my being offers no condemnation either way.

Next, I recognize that some Christians do not follow the Bible word for word. But if you have questions, pray, meditate, and listen to the inner voice. You will get answers by calling forth the Christ that is within you. Seek and you will find. Peace be unto you.

Armageddon: Bible literalists got it wrong

The recent events in Israel, Lebanon, and the Mideast have stimulated media coverage on the subject of eschatology--the End Times, Armageddon, the Rapture, and the Second Coming. Media Matters reported:

On July 31, Paula Zahn Now featured a segment on "whether the crisis in the Middle East is actually a prelude to the end of the world," marking the third time in nine days that CNN has devoted airtime to those claiming that the ongoing Mideast violence signals the coming of the Apocalypse.

MM has more on the ravings of Tucker Carlson on the subject.

For an enlightened take on the Apocalypse, in What's the Matter with Jesusland?, Rev. Irene Monroe illuminates:

I agree with my neighbor that America is at an End Time, but for different reasons. The nation has not been so polarized since the Civil War. Bush's win has politically realigned the Old Confederate South. We are at a nadir with respect to religious plurality and tolerance. We have confused prejudice for moral values, and we have hearkened back to an era of anti-intellectualism, pre-Enlightenment, where the theories of creationism are played in oppositional discourse with those of evolutionism.

And while America tramples into foreign lands to obliterate the terrorism fueled by the religious rhetoric of Muslim fundamentalists like al-Qaeda and Sunni hardliners, America fails to look into its own backyard to see the deleterious effects of its tyranny of Christian fundamentalism.

End Timers say the Real ID Act sets up the mechanism for the "mark of the beast" mentioned in Revelation 13. The Book of Revelation! Oh, for God's sake. Here we go again with the Biblical literalists' error in promoting an interpretation of a translation based on faulty ancient manuscripts that in no way offers us the truth about God or the teachings of Jesus. Why do Christians still rely on a book littered with mistakes when they have access to God directly for instruction and inspiration moment-by-moment in their lives? Do they think God is dead, deaf, or mute? I believe that God is a Living Presence that still speaks to us if we but listen.

Johann Albrecht Bengel, a German Lutheran minister and professor, acted as the Hal Lindsey and the Tim LaHaye of the 1700s. He believed that the end of world would occur in 1836. He was wrong! It's now 2006 and we're still here on the planet nearly 200 years later. Numerous people have erroneously prophesied the End Times and they were wrong too. Televangelist and former Republican presidential candidate Pat Robertson foretold that "the world would end in the fall of 1982." See! What did he know? Amazingly, the Armageddon myth persists.

Citing MM on "a CNN Harris interactive poll back in 2002, almost 60 percent of Americans think that the end of the world, as predicted in the Bible's Book of Revelation, will happen, and 17 percent believe it will happen during their lifetimes." Such poppycock has stubbornly endured for centuries and indeed has caused some dangerous implications for the future of American democracy, the impact of global warming on the environment, U.S. foreign policy, the economy, and our stability as a nation. Like extremist Muslims who terrorize and murder in the name of Allah, radical forms of wacky doodle Christianity may inadvertently kill hundreds, thousands, perhaps tens of thousands (or worse!) of our most vulnerable by deferring responsibility for the health and well-being of our citizenry to an imaginary Rapture that never happens; by abandoning sound ecological, social, and fiscal programs deemed unnecessary due to the presumption of an impending Armageddon. If we don't take action to minimize these virulent, destructive forms of Christian theocon influence in American politics before it's too late, we may not avert the nightmarish results of an aggressively zealous and extreme aberration of Christ's teachings that GOP strategist Kevin Phillips outlined in his book, American Theocracy. You think I'm joking? So far, this summer's heat wave has killed more than 160 Californians--"greater than other, better-known natural disasters, including the Loma Prieta and Northridge earthquakes"--and 12 Missourians. Between the unresolved energy crisis, the dismantling of government, the erosion of Medicaid/Medicare funding, VA cuts, the uninsured, the decline of a living wage, the aversion to science, and the effects of global warming, to name a few, it's irresponsible to think that more won't die in denial of the crises we face in being hamstrung by theocon fundamentalists looking for Jesus to return at any minute. Using the Bible as justification, particularly the Book of Revelation, leads into temptation to look the other way when so much is at stake. But worse, the Armageddon concept has been based on fallacious interpretations of the literalist's view of the Bible.

Bart Ehrman, who I earlier quoted on the textual changes altered to subvert the role of women in the church, writes (page 109) in Misquoting Jesus that 18th century apocalyptic Johann Albrecht Bengel (with emphasis):

. . .became disturbed by the presence of of such a large array of textual variants in the manuscript tradition of the New Testament, and was particularly thrown off as a twenty-year-old by the publication of Mill's [1707 Greek New Testament] edition and its thirty thousand places of variation. These were seen as a major challenge to Bengel's faith, rooted as it was in the very words of the scriptures.

So Bengel set about to correct a multitude of errors. Only one problem, which needs repeating ad nauseum until people who rely on the literal words of the Bible finally understand--and that issue is there is NO original manuscript of the New Testament! Nada. Zilch. It does not exist! What we have are reconstructions developed over the centuries--not in Jesus' days or even in the decades that followed him--from thousands of manuscript copies, none of which match word for word. As textual scholar Ehrman explained (page 7, with emphasis):

I became interested in the manuscripts that preserve the New Testament for us, and in the science of textual criticism, which can supposedly help us reconstruct what the original words of the New Testament were. I kept reverting to my basic question: how does it help us to say that the Bible is the inerrant word of God if in fact we don't have the words that God inerrantly inspired, but only the words copied by the scribes––sometimes correctly but sometimes (many times!) incorrectly? What good is it to say that the autographs (i.e., the originals) were inspired? We don't have the originals! We have error-ridden copies, and the vast majority of these are centuries removed from the originals and different from them, evidently, in thousands of ways.

The New Testament apocalyptic prophesies and pervasive thinking that evangelical eschatalogists proselytize are based on errors!

I'll give you a few examples specifically from the Book of Revelation. Sometimes the scribal copyists made mistakes because words sounded alike and in Revelations 1:5, we have such a discrepancy where (page 93, Misquoting Jesus):

. . .the author prays to "the one who released us from our sins." The word for "released" (LUSANTI) sounds exactly like the word for "washed" (LOUSANTI), and so it is no surprise that in a number of medieval manuscripts the author prays to the one "who washed us from our sins."

OK, a quibble, "released" versus "washed," but the greater implication, which is true throughout the Gospels, is that you cannot take the Bible's words literally. Another more serious example from Revelation hails from Dutch scholar, Desiderius Erasmus, who published an edition of the Greek New Testament in the 1500s (page 78-79 Misquoting Jesus):

For the book [sic] of Revelation he had to borrow a manuscript from his friend the German humanist Johannes Reuchlin; unfortunately, the manuscript was almost impossible to read in places, and it had lost its last page, which contained the final six verses of the book. In his haste to have the job done, in those places Erasmus simply took the Latin Vulgate and translated its texts back into Greek, thereby creating some textual readings found today in no surviving Greek manuscript. And this, as we will see, is the edition of the Greek New Testament that for all practical purposes was used by the translators of the King James Bible nearly a century later.

It is important to recognize that Erasmus' edition was the editio princeps [first published edition] of the Greek New Testament... ....became the standard form of the Greek text to be published by Western European printers for more than three hundred years. Numerous Greek editions followed... ...all those go back to the text of Erasmus, with all its faults, based on just a handful of manuscripts (sometimes just two or even one––or in parts of Revelation, none!) that had been produced relatively late in the medieval period.

Ha! The Book of Revelation in the KJV was based on faulty texts and yet we have Christian evangelicals hanging on its every word as it it was the absolute truth. Bleh! What a farce! The folly of Biblical literalism goes a step further in the Book of Revelation considering this historical anecdote. Because scribes and copyists did alter the texts, sometimes authors added warnings (page 54 Misquoting Jesus):

. . .authors would sometimes call curses down on any copyists who modified their texts without permission. We find this kind of imprecation already in one early Christian writing that made it into the New Testament, the book [sic] of Revelation, whose author, near the end of the text, utters a dire warning:

I testify to everyone who hears the words of the prophecy of this book: If anyone adds to them, God will add to him the plagues described in this book; and if anyone removes any of the words of the book of this prophecy, God will remove his share from the tree of life and from the holy city, as described in this book. (Rev. 22:18-19)

This is not a threat that the reader has to accept or believe everything written in [Revelation], as it is sometimes interpreted; rather, it is a typical threat to copyists of the book, that they are not to add to or remove any of its words.

I remember hearing this scriptural admonition in church from preachers who cautioned that to ignore the words of the Book of Revelation would invite a trip to Hell and eternal damnation in the lake of fire. Did they know it was essentially a footnote? They didn't say. Check your Bible but I bet you won't find a reference that explains this particular text. At the Bible Gateway, the New International Version (NIV) carries the Revelation author's warning to copyists (as if readers should heed it as the word of God) as does the King James Version (KJV):

18For I testify unto every man that heareth the words of the prophecy of this book, If any man shall add unto these things, God shall add unto him the plagues that are written in this book:

19And if any man shall take away from the words of the book of this prophecy, God shall take away his part out of the book of life, and out of the holy city, and from the things which are written in this book.

Well, now. Since the KJV warns men not to add or subtract from Revelation, the irony of literalism exempts women, (praise, God!) from their adherence to the story of Armageddon, the Tribulation, and all the foretold plagues and destruction...I mean if we are to take the Bible precisely at its word, wouldn't you say? Ha! Celebrate, women of the world. We have been excused from the End Times and can delete the entire prophecy. Whew! What a relief! Such a terrible idea of God's atonement and judgment for the human species!

UPDATE: Hat tip to Jacqueline Keeler for her comments and link to this scary news: Lobbying for Armageddon by Sarah Posner.

Biblical sexism and vagina resentment

Mary Magalene as Melancholy
by Artemisia Gentileschi, c. 1621-22, oil on canvas

In the coming weeks, I hope to post a series that will include powerful words, ideas, and criticism from Rev. Irene Monroe, Bishop John Shelby Spong, and others on feminism and lesbian feminism. I'm hopeful that Genet will join me by adding her insights as a voice for the illustrous Lesbianati. This entry, the first of the series, addresses the Bible--the authoritative source of Christianity--as a fountainhead for sexism in America, a previously expressed blog topic I wanted to undertake.

Excerpts from Bart Ehrman's bestseller, Misquoting Jesus illustrate:

1. How errant Biblical literalism is

2. The lack of understanding among laypersons that scribes revised manuscripts to reflect their bias, which were then translated into today's modern Bibles

3. The resultant sexism in the New Testament and

4. How textual alterations by scribes covered up the prominent roles women held in the early church that were equal to men. One woman, Junia, Paul described as "foremost among the apostles."

Women were integral to Christ's mission and later to the apostle Paul, [pages 178-181, Misquoting Jesus]:

Modern scholars have come to recognize that disputes over the role of women in the early church occurred because women had a role––often a significant and publicly high profile role. Moreover, this was the case from the very beginning, starting with the ministry of Jesus himself. It is true that Jesus's closest followers––the twelve disciples––were all men, as would be expected of a Jewish teacher in first-century Palestine. But our earliest Gospels indicate that Jesus was also accompanied by women on his travels, and that some of these women provided for him and his disciples financially, serving as patrons for his itinerant preaching ministry (see Mark 15:40–51; Luke 8:1–3). Jesus is said to have engaged in public dialogue with women and to have ministered to them in public (Mark 7:24–30; John 4:1–42). In particular, we are told that women accompanied Jesus during his final trip to Jerusalem, where they were present at his crucifixion and where they alone remained faithful to him to the end, when the male disciples had fled (Matt. 27:55; Mark 15:40–41). Most significant of all, each of our Gospels indicates that it was women––Mary Magdalene alone, or with several companions––who discovered his empty tomb and so were the first to know about and testify to Jesus's resurrection from the dead (Matt. 28:1–10; Mark 16:1–8; Luke 23:55–24:10; John 20:1–2).

Why were women so connected to Jesus's ministry when the Jewish tradition at that time treated women as underlings to men?

It is intriguing to ask what it was about Jesus's message that particularly attracted women. Most scholars remained convinced that Jesus proclaimed the coming Kingdom of God, in which there would be no more injustice, suffering, or evil, in which all people, rich and poor, slave and free, men and women, would be on equal footing. This obviously proved particularly attractive as a message of hope to those who in the present age were underprivileged––the poor, the sick, the outcast. And the women.

[...]

But we do not need to wait until the late second century to see that women played a major role in the early Christian churches. We already get a clear sense of this from the earliest Christian writer whose works have survived, the apostle Paul. The Pauline letters of the New Testament provide ample evidence that women held a prominent place in the emerging Christian communities from the earliest of times. We might consider, for example, Paul's letter to the Romans, at the end of which he send greetings to various members of the Roman congregation (chapter 16). Although Paul names more men than women here, it is clear that women were seen as in no way inferior to their male counterparts in the church. Paul mentions Phoebe, for example, who is a deacon (or minister) in the church of Cenchreae, and Paul's own patron, whom he entrusts with the task of carrying his letter to Rome (vv. 1–2). And there is Prisca, who along with her husband, Aquila, is responsible for missionary work among the Gentiles and who supports a Christian congregation in her home (vv. 3–4: notice that she is mentioned first, ahead of her husband). Then there is Mary, a colleague of Paul's who works among the Romans (v. 6); there are also Tryphaena, Tryphosa, and Persis, women whom Paul calls his "co-workers" in the gospel (vv. 6, 12). And there are Julia and the mother of Rufus and the sister of Nereus, all of whom appear to have a high profile in the community (vv 13, 15). Most impressive of all, there is Junia, a woman whom Paul calls "foremost among the apostles" (v. 7). The apostolic band was evidently larger than the list of twelve men with whom most people are familiar.

Women, in short, appear to have played a significant role in the churches of Paul's day. To some extent, this high profile was unusual in the Greco-Roman world. And it may have been rooted, as I have argued, in Jesus's proclamation that in the coming Kingdom there would be equality of men and women. This appears to have been Paul's message as well, as can be seen, for example, in his famous declaration in Galatians:

For as many of you as were baptized into Christ have put on Christ. There is neither Jew nor Greek, neither slave nor free; there is not male and female; for all of you are one in Jesus Christ. (Gal. 3:27–28)

The equality in Christ may have manifested itself in the actual worship services of the Pauline communities. Rather than being silent "hearers of the word," women appear to have been actively involved in the weekly fellowship meetings, participating, for example, by praying and prophesying, much as the men did (I Corinthians 11).

Being unusual in the Greco-Roman world, women playing a significant role created debate and disputes among church leaders (prejudice dies hard) that ultimately impacted Biblical interpreters. Ehrman goes on to write [pages 181, Misquoting Jesus]:

At the same time, to modern interpreters it may appear that Paul did not take his view of the relationship of men and women in Christ to what could be thought of as its logical conclusion. He did require, for example, that when women prayed and prophesied in church they do so with their heads covered, to show that they were "under authority" (I Cor. 11:3–16, esp. v. 10). In other words, Paul did not urge a social revolution in the relationship of men and women––just as he did not urge the abolition of slavery, even though he maintained that in Christ there "is neither slave nor free." Instead he insisted that since "the time is short" (until the coming of the Kingdom), everyone should be content with the roles they had been given, and that no one should seek to change their status––whether slave, free, married, single, male, or female (I Cor. 7:17–24).

My, my, have times changed but not without resistant Biblical literalists using key Scriptures to sustain their bigotry. The world no longer condones slavery although some Christian congregations attempted to justify the slavocracy of the ante-bellum South. Politically and culturally, through the misuse of an errant religious tradition, a Jim Crow hegemony affirmed that people of color were inferior to whites and should be segregated, which excused discrimination against them.

Not until the civil rights movement of the 1960s did legal and cultural racist constructs recede although sadly we can still witness the legacy of America's racism. Yet, under the emergence of the Religious Right, women face formidable challenges in overcoming obstacles to reproductive health, financial parity, autonomy, and in avoiding the epidemic of rape and domestic violence. For an insightful look into the war on women at The Nation, read Martha Nussbaum's review of Catherine A. MacKinnon's book, Are Women Human? Add another book to my wishlist.

The patriarchy still remains King of the Hill, and in my opinion, anti-feminist bias rooted in a persistence of an errant Christian tradition insidiously underpins an unspoken prejudice--in some cases, an explicit calling--that women submit to men.

Ehrman elaborated about the divergent role of women in ancient Christianity that ultimately resolved in a subversion of the sacred feminine [pages 181-182, MJ] with my emphasis added:

At best, then, this can be seen as an ambivalent attitude toward the role of women: they were equal in Christ and were allowed to participate in the life of the community, but as women, not as men (they were, for example, not to remove their veils and so appear as men, without an "authority" on their head). This ambivalence on Paul's part had an interesting effect on the role of women in the churches after his day. In some churches it was the equality in Christ that was emphasized; in others it was the need for women to remain subservient to men. And so in some churches women played very important, leadership roles; in others, their roles were diminished and their voices quieted. Reading later documents associated with Paul's churches, after his death, we can see that disputes arose about the roles women should play; eventually there came an effort to suppress the role of women in churches altogether.

This becomes evident in a letter that was written in Paul's name. Scholars today are by and large convinced that I Timothy was not written by Paul but by one of his later, second-generation followers.3 Here, in one of the (in)famous passages dealing with women in the New Testament, we are told that women must not be allowed to teach men because they were created inferior, as indicated by God himself in the Law; God created Eve second, for the sake of the man; and a woman (related to Eve) must not therefore lord it over a man (related to Adam) through her teaching. Furthermore, according to this author, everyone knows what happens when a women does assume the role of teacher: she is easily duped (by the devil) and leads the man astray. So, women are to stay at home and maintain the virtues appropriate to women, bearing children for their husbands and preserving their modesty. As the passage itself reads:

Let a woman learn in silence with full submission. I permit no woman to teach or to have authority over a man; she is to keep silent. For Adam was formed first, then Eve; and Adam was not deceived, but the woman was deceived and became a transgressor. Yet she will be saved through childbearing, provided they continue in faith and love and holiness, with modesty. (I Tim. 2:11–15).

This seems a long way from Paul's view that "in Christ there is . . . not male and female." As we move into the second century, the battle lines appear clearly drawn. There are some Christian communities that stress the importance of women and allow them to play significant roles in the church, and there are others that believe women must be silent and subservient to the men of the community.

The scribes who were copying the texts that later became scripture were obviously involved in these debates. And on occasion the debates made an impact on the text being copied, as passages were changed to reflect the views of the scribes who were reproducing them. In almost every instance in which a change of this sort occurs, the text is changed in order to limit the role of women and to minimize their importance in the Christian movement.

Now to examine the anti-feminist scriptural alterations that scribes made to diminish women (with my emphasis added) from Bart Ehrman [pages 183-184, MJ]:

One of the most important passages in the contemporary discussion of the role of women in the church is found in I Corinthians 14. As represented in most of our modern English translations, the passages reads as follows.

33 For God is not a God of confusion but one of peace. As in all the churches of the saints, 34 let the women keep silent. For it is not permitted for them to speak, but to be in subjection, just as the law says. 35 But if they wish to learn anything, let them ask their own husbands at home. For it is shameful for a woman to speak in church. 36 What! Did the word go forth only from you, or has it reached you alone?

The passage appears to be a clear and straightforward injunction for women not to speak (let alone teach!) in the church, very much like the passage from I Timothy 2. As we have seen, however, most scholars are convinced that Paul did not write the I Timothy passage, because it occurs in a letter that appears to have been written instead by a second-generation follower of Paul in his name. No one doubts, however, that Paul wrote I Corinthians. But there are doubts about this passage. For as it turns out, the verses in question (vv. 34–35) are shuffled around in some of our important textual witnesses. In three Greek manuscripts and a couple of Latin witnesses, they are found not here, after verse 33, but later, after verse 40. That has led some scholars to surmise that the verses were not written by Paul but originated as a kind of marginal note added by a scribe, possibly under the influence of I Timothy 2. The note was then inserted in different places of the text by various scribes––some placing the note after verse 33 and others inserting it after verse 40. There are good reasons for thinking that Paul did not originally write these verses. For one thing, they do not fit well into their immediate context. In this part of I Corinthians 14, Paul is addressing the issue of prophecy in the church, and is giving instructions to Christian prophets concerning how they are to behave during the Christian services of worship. This is the theme of verses 26–33, and it is the theme again of verses 36–40. If one removes verses 34–35 from their context, the passage seems to flow seamlessly as a discussion of the role of Christian prophets. The discussion of women appears, then, as intrusive in its immediate context, breaking into the instructions that Paul is giving about a different matter.

Not only do the verses seem intrusive in the context of chapter 14, they also appear anomalous with what Paul explicitly says elsewhere in I Corinthians. For earlier in the book, as we have already noticed, Paul gives instructions to women speaking in the church: according to chapter 11, when they pray and prophesy––activities that were always done aloud in the Christian services of worship––they are to be sure to wear veils on their heads (11:2–16). In this passage, which no one doubts Paul wrote, it is clear that Paul understands that women both can and do speak in church. In the disputed passage of chapter 14, however, it is equally clear that "Paul" forbids women from speaking at all. It is difficult to reconcile these two views––either Paul allowed women to speak (with covered heads, chapter 11) or not (chapter 14). As it seems unreasonable to think that Paul would flat out contradict himself within the short space of three chapters, it appears that the verses in question do not derive from Paul.

And so on the basis of a combination of evidence––several manuscripts that shuffle the verses around, the immediate literary context, and the context within I Corinthians as a whole––it appears that Paul did not write I Cor. 14:34–35. One would have to assume, then, that these verses are a scribal alteration of the text, originally made, perhaps, as a marginal note and then eventually, at an early stage of the copying of I Corinthians, placed it in the text itself. The alteration was no doubt made by a scribe who was concerned to emphasize that women should have no public role in the church, that they should be silent and subservient to their husbands. This view then came to be incorporated into the text itself, by means of a textual alteration.4

On page 185, Ehrman describes the woman Junia who was "foremost among the apostles" but she was magically transformed into a man (with emphasis):

We might consider briefly several other textual changes of a similar sort. One occurs in a passage I have already mentioned, Romans 16, in which Paul speaks of a woman, Junia, and a man who was presumably her husband, Andronicus, both of whom he calls "foremost among the apostles" (v. 7). This is a significant verse, because it is the only place in the New Testament in which a woman is referred to as an apostle. Interpreters have been so impressed by the passage that a large number of them have insisted that it cannot mean what it says, and so they have translated the verse as referring not to a woman named Junia but a man names Junias, who along with his companion Andronicus is praised as an apostle. The problem with this translation is that whereas Junia was a common name for a woman, there is no evidence in the ancient world for "Junias" as a man's name. Paul is referring to a woman named Junia, even though in some modern English Bibles (you may want to check your own!) translators continue to refer to this female apostle as if she were a man named Junias. 5

Some scribes also had difficulty with ascribing apostleship to this otherwise unknown woman, and so made a very slight change in the text to circumvent the problem. In some of our manuscripts, rather than saying, "Greet Andronicus and Junia, my relatives and fellow prisoners, who are foremost among the apostles," the text is now changed so as to be more readily translated: "Greet Andronicus and Junia, my relatives; and also greet my fellow prisoners who are foremost among the apostles." With this textual change, no longer does one need to worry about a woman being cited among the apostolic band of men!

Ha! A quick Bible Gateway search of Romans 16:7 in the New International Version (NIV), the New American Standard Bible (NASB), the Contemporary English Version (CEV), the Worldwide English (New Testament) (WE), the Holman Christian Standard Bible (HCSB), and other versions name Junia the woman as Junias or Junia the man.

In the King James Version (KJV), the New King James Version (NKJV), and other Bible editions, we can read a derivative of the latter alteration that changes the text to eliminate any reference to Junia as among the apostolic band of men.

Again on page 185, Ehrman points out another textual change to reduce women's stature (with emphasis):

A similar change was made by some scribes who copied the book of Acts. In chapter 17 we learn that Paul and his missionary companion Silas spent time in Thessalonica preaching the gospel of Christ to the Jews of the local synagogue. We are told in verse 4 that the pair made some important converts: "And some of them were persuaded and joined with Paul and Silas, as did a great many of the pious Greeks, along with a large number of prominent women."

The idea of women being prominent––let alone prominent converts––was too much for some scribes, and so the text came to be changed in some manuscripts so that we are told: "And some of them were persuaded and joined with Paul and Silas, as did a great many of the pious Greeks, along with a large number of wives of prominent men." Now it is the men who are prominent, not the wives who converted.

Among Paul's companions in the book of Acts were a husband and wife named Aquila and Priscilla; sometimes when they are mentioned, the author gives the wife's name first, as if she had some kind of of special prominence either in the relationship or in the Christian mission (as happens in Rom. 16:3, where she is called Prisca). Not surprisingly, scribes occasionally took umbrage at this sequencing and reversed it, so that the man was given his due by having his name mentioned first: Aquila and Priscilla rather than Priscilla and Aquila. 6

In short, there were debates in the early centuries of the church over the role of women, and on occasion these debates spilled over into the textual transmission of the New Testament itself, as scribes sometimes changed their texts in order to make them coincide more closely with the scribes' own sense of the (limited) role of women in the church.

To this day, we witness the subversion of women in religion. The Vatican continues to ban women from the priesthood. In June 2006, U.S. Episcopalians elected Katharine Jefferts Schori as the first female bishop of the national churches in the worldwide Anglican Communion. What took them so long!? And what mindset and attitude questions why the "choice" of a female bishop complicates the already difficult relations between the American denomination and its fellow Anglicans? Has male resentment over an alpha vagina leeched its poison into our marrow with the diseased thought that women are trouble and less desirable leaders than men? Where's the missing positive, the balance to the bias of a subservient women's role in church and beyond? How have women come to accept second best as if they lived in an Updike world as "house slaves of the A&P?"

I remember clashing with a southern gay gent over the admittance of Shannon Faulkner into the Citadel and I was surprised at anti-feminine bias spouted by an effeminate male. I could have had a more enlightening conversation with a brick wall sans the graffiti smear, "Bi-yotch." How inconvenient for men when women rock the boat with their audacity--demanding that an institution supported by their tax dollars ought to include them! Such a quibble. The whining hurts my ears went the dismissive male harumph.

I'm sure if I dug around I could google up statistics about the state of women's affairs--the assault on contraception, women's health, wage discrepancies, sexual harassment, violent and sex crimes, leisure time, wealth distribution, and positions of power--I could prove that it's still a man's world overlaid with quotes from misogynist prose you can hear on TV and the radio out of the mouths of the Limbaugh punditocracy and religious wacky doodles. I don't accept factoids and artificial rhetoric disguised as a string of pearly wisdom as permanent feminine reality. Yes, we can change the systems that underpin sexism, racism, and all the other hang-ups. The path of adversity, of resistance, the bigger challenge cuts through a landscape of single-issues to the source--the heart and mind that assigns value to men more than women. To transform beliefs, a revolution would entail both one-on-one interactions and collectively as an interlaced unified force. Isn't it time we seriously got to work on healing vagina resentment and the false aggrandizement of penis? Doesn't the error emphasize the flesh over the spirit?

I entitled this post within the context of Biblical sexism but the better frame--now that I have processed my thoughts on this subject and I'm sure more will evolve--is how sexism as male superiority and domination has invaded even our sacred texts in the annihilation of the sacred feminine and women's voices. With a religious authority such as the Bible deposited into the collective mind receptacle, the traditional church has taught the American layperson what the Scriptures were edited to dogmatize. We can understand the powerful influence that these beliefs have had on men's and women's attitudes and the consequential probable reality. Relegated to a secondary place in God's world, trickling down from a Godhead across the land to the tiniest shopping mall berg, women have been defined in society, industries, professions, and politics as less than, not good enough, not as valuable as men. How can we change it? By heightening the awareness of who and what is responsible for the gender gap in a no holds bar riffing of the truth is the first step. Secondly, overhaul the legacy that promotes woman as Adam's Rib, that says Eves derive their source from Adams, that Eves aren't a primary first-born gender but a sex created from Man in not being deemed worthy to spring directly from God. Surely, no one would suggest that God isn't omnipotent enough to fashion two unique primogenital sexes endowed with divine power at the same time?

In political circles, executive boardrooms, and polite gatherings, no one dares to assert that women aren't men's equal and gals were made for guys unless one is rude, arrogant, or spoiling for a lawsuit. The need to appear civilized, therefore, has shifted sexists to adopt an underground of code words--radical feminism, feminazis, androgynous society, social experimentation, political correctness, academic intolerance, to name a few terms that target stereotypical female behavior.

I hope brave women and men of all ilks--religious and secular--will compassionately and fairly examine the facts to no longer accept a false perception and a greediness of one's gender turf to continue to forge divergent realities for the sexes. Ha! Perhaps in our examination of the institutional face of religion and the stories of our culture, we ought to reverse the paradigm to expose the supposition behind the lie: Why are men inferior to women?

It's time, as Rev. Irene wrote, for a different hermeneutic than [the] classically held one, a faith in which God created the human genders simultaneously and both in divinity. It's time for new stories. Scriptures contain a male bias constructed in the past that's been perpetrated generation to generation for centuries. Why not listen anew to the Living Presence? For there's no better Source for the believer of today than the kingdom of God at hand, alive within us.

FOR THE RECORD: I'm a strong advocate of the separation of church and state. My religion nor should any other religion be imposed upon anyone. Funny how we hear about free will, and then those who espouse it, work tirelessly to end it. God save us from your people.

The Passion of Christ for today

The Crucifixion of Christ, oil on canvas, 1993

When Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ first released, I was asked if I was going to see the film to which I retorted, "No, it's heresy. Masters do not suffer," a reaction of anger at the glorification of the suffering of Christ. If one believes in the New Testament stories--Jesus who raised the dead, Jesus who walked on water, Jesus who worked all manner of miracles--how can one logically deduce that Jesus suffered greatly on the cross? What kind of Father God would demand such agony? And why embrace the crucifixion as a tribute to Jesus when his life (not his death) offers so much more appropriately attuned narratives for believers to eulogize and edify?

For now, I'll set aside textual disputes and contradictions between the Gospels only to briefly cite Bart Ehrman from Misquoting Jesus, page 142:

. . .while Luke's source, the Gospel of Mark, portrays Jesus in anguish as he prays in the garden, Luke has completely remodeled the scene to show Jesus at peace in the face of death. The only exception is the account of Jesus's "bloody sweat," an account absent from our earliest and best witnesses. Why would Luke have gone to such lengths to eliminate Mark's portrayal of an anguished Jesus if in fact Jesus's anguish were the point of the story?

It is clear that Luke does not share Mark's understanding that Jesus was in anguish, bordering on despair....

. . .Nowhere is this more evident than in their subsequent accounts of Jesus's crucifixion... [Mark's account] stands in sharp contrast to what we find in Luke. In Luke's account, Jesus is far from silent, and when he speaks, he shows that he is still in control, trustful of God his Father, confident of his fate, concerned for the fate of others.

So the question remains. Why glorify the death and suffering of Jesus? Rev. Irene Monroe at The Witness provides awe-inspiring answers and they supply us with insights into today's false hegemony of guilt, shame, sacrifice, and a valorization of suffering and abuse:

Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ has no compassion for those of us relegated to the margins. I am not too certain that the film has any love for Christ, either.

It would be an egregious omission to gloss over the unrelenting violence that took place during Jesus' time, especially in light of the ongoing violence in today's society toward people of color, women, Jews, Muslims, and lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people. However, the deification of violence as depicted in the film as redemptive suffering has deleterious implications that are not-so-benignly played out today from the playground to the courtroom.

Also, the film desensitizes killing, giving rise not only to a cavalier attitude to kill those who pose a physical threat to our lives, but also to a self-righteous attitude to kill those who are believed to pose social and political threats to the status quo.

So much of the opposition to same-sex unions is intrinsically tied to a religious belief held by many Christian evangelical heterosexuals. They will by any means possible -- and violence is not excluded -- oppose any bill sanctioning such a union, because their fight is not only just, but it is also redemptive. And many of these Christian evangelical heterosexuals believe that if Christ can suffer as he did up the hill to Golgotha at Calvary, so too can they, as they make their way up to Beacon Hill in Boston to save the sanctity of marriage.

The notion, therefore, of equating violence to redemptive suffering is not only bad theology, but is also a bad paradigm to demonstrate how God, who so loved the world that he offered up his only begotten son to save all of humanity, sacrificed in the form of a sado-masochistic flogging.

Rev. Irene says so much in these few paragraphs that I am astounded that a vast contingency of Christian evangelicals dismiss the ultimate truth, the message--do not crucify, do not judge or condemn, do not harm another of God's children but instead love, help each other, and treat each other as "you would have them do unto you." No amount of distortion and obfuscation can justify the condemnation of any minority based on the teachings of Jesus. Ever. To correct the error, Rev. Monroe explains that we have not grasped the forces underpinning Christ's crucifixion:

However, without the contextualization and accountability of the violence enacted upon Jesus, the cycle of violence continues. As a figure that has dominated Western culture and Christianity for over 2,000 years, too little attention is paid to Jesus' death. If more focus was spent on the reasons for his death and the systems of oppression that brought about his demise, violence against marginalized people would cease to exist.

By focusing on the death of Jesus and how justice might be adjudicated from it, we are forced to remember history. In the year 33 A.D., Jesus was unquestionably a religious threat to conservative Jews because of his iconoclastic views and practice of Jewish Law, and viewed as a political threat to the Roman government simply because he was a Jew.

So, too, today, political and religious factions who wail about being persecuted themselves oppress in continuing a legacy of marginalizing minorities. I daresay some Christians have sown their seeds upon stony ground, among thorns, and on the way-side of fear, violence, ignorance, and complacency.

Artistically, I agree with Rev. Irene that we have not fully incorporated the reasons behind Jesus' crucifixion, which I attempted to articulate in my faggot crucifxion:

Look at the word FAGGOT on the cross. You could substitute the word NIGGER, JEW BOY, HONKIE, REDNECK or BITCH—it all means the same. Anytime anyone rises up in condemnation, hatred or violence against another, Christ is [once again] crucified.

I chose the word FAGGOT because today, gays are socially-acceptable and religiously-justifiable targets for hate. And, just like gays, Jesus was made a hate target in his time because he dared to be different, to tell his understanding of the truth even though his words and his position defied the religious establishment.

Who thinks the placard that bore the phrase, King of the Jews, upon the cross at Calvary was anything but a mockery? Who now dares to mock another child of God as a faggot? What justice permits the vilification and segregation of gays as less than equal citizens so deplorably perpetrated in the name of God? Is such an action an act of love or a reaction to fear? A rising chorus within the psychiatric, psychological, and sociological communities plus some religious denominations have concluded that irrational fear belies such behavior.

In 1993, I completed the crucifixion painting as the Clinton Administration capitulated to congressional homophobes in declaring "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" apartheid of gays in the military. I did not realize the artwork prophesied bloodier scenarios. Rev. Monroe describes a year of "haterati" at its ugliest in 1998. An African-American boy named Emmett Till was lynched, James Byrd Jr. was heinously murdered in East Texas, and gay Matthew Shepard was beaten and tied to a wooden fence, a "cross" of sorts where he was left to die--all hate crimes due to what I would describe as a pervasive culture of violence and bigotry aimed at the Other, the minority. Other examples abound from the 1990s to present, from here in the U.S. to the prisons of Abu Ghraib, Camp Bucca, and elsewhere in Iraq. Also...

During the summer months of 1998, the country was hit with the explosion of "ex-gay" ministry ads that appeared in major newspapers like The New York Times, The Washington Post, and USA Today. The ads were sponsored by a coalition of 15 right-wing Christian organizations calling all lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people to convert to heterosexuality.

Let me offer right now use of my faggot crucifixion to any organization who would like to reproduce it on a billboard or in an ad to challenge and protest the misuse of Jesus' teaching. Let the message reflect, they know not what they do but we will no longer tolerate bigotry masquerading as God's justice!

Not once did Christ condemn his gay brothers and sisters and perhaps he had a secret in living the down low. The Pauline text so often quoted to justify the alleged sin of man-on-man sex is hotly debated, yet are we to believe that lesbianism is OK? Ha! Few laypeople understand that scribes occasionally altered Scriptures to fit a prevalent religious bias as was done to limit women's roles in the church. Furthermore, we do not have the original manuscripts. Yes, that's right. Biblical textual scholars tell us we do not have one original manuscript of the Gospels. Instead, we have thousands of derivatives and each differ one from another. So much for the inerrant Word of God. What folly it is to take the Bible literally. And yet, Jesus' ministry and his teachings we can fully understand with a few words--love, forgiveness, compassion, and treating each other respectfully--which uplifts and redeems while a bloodshed theology, as Rev. Irene describes it, denigrates:

For those of us on the margins, a Christology mounted on the belief that "Jesus died on the cross for our sins" instead of "Jesus died on the cross because of our sins" not only deifies Jesus as the suffering servant, but it also ritualizes suffering as redemptive. While suffering points to the need for redemption, suffering in and of itself is not redemptive, and it does not always correlate to one's sinfulness. For example, the belief that undeserved suffering is endured by faith, and that it has a morally educative component to it makes the powerful insensitive to the suffering of others and it forces the less powerful to be complacent to their suffering - therefore, maintaining the status quo.

Jesus' suffering on the cross should never be seen as redemptive any more than the suffering of African-American men dangling from trees in the South during Jim Crow America. The lynchings of African-American men were never as restitution for the sins of the Ku Klux Klan, but were, instead, because of their sins that went, for decades, unaccounted for (until the 1951 Federal Anti-Lynching Act was passed). In other words, Jesus' death on the cross and the lynching of African-American are synonymous experiences.

As a deeply controversial icon in Christian liberation theologies for many feminists, womanists, African Americans, and lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people, the cross is the locus of redemption insofar as it serves as a lens to critically examine and make the connections between the abuses of power and institutions of domination that brought about the suffering Jesus endured during his time to the abuses of power and institutions of domination that brings about the suffering which women, people of color and sexual minorities are enduring in our present day.

When suffering is understood as an ongoing cycle of abuse that goes on unexamined and unaccounted for, we can then begin to see its manifestation in systems of racism, sexism, classism and heterosexism in our everyday lives. With a new understanding about suffering and how it victimizes the innocent and its aborts the Christian mission of inclusiveness, Jesus' death at Calvary invites a different hermeneutic than its classically held one.

Lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people suffer because of well-intended heterosexual Christians' unexamined and unaccounted for acts of homophobia. When these Christians say they love us as sinners, but hate our supposed sin, they are maintaining an unexamined and unaccounted for cycle of spiritual abuse.

Many Christians do not realize that with the classical view of the cross held by many conservatives in their denominations as the exaltation of Jesus as male, Jesus as white, and Jesus as heterosexual, this view not only disinvites the many faces of God that should appear on the cross with Jesus, but it also disinvites solidarity among diverse groups of people who do suffer.

Yes, a different hermeneutic is exactly the need of the hour. To mature spiritually and morally, to progress as a fruitful nation and a beacon for democracy, we must no longer excuse the Dobsons, the Falwells, and the erroneous proposition, to paraphrase Monroe, that Jesus died for our sins when he was crucified because of sin. Therein lies redemption in not only accounting for racism, sexism, homophobia, xenophobia, and any -ism or phobia that excludes one member from the family of humanity, but calling those to account for repeating the sin and promoting it as if it were the truth.

UPDATE: Matt Comer really gets what the painting of The Crucifixion of Christ is about:

Because this message is so strong, it transcends lines of faith and lines of belief. Whatever you do to “the least” of our world’s family, you do to God… and you do to Jesus. If you aren’t the religious type, the message is similar: Whatever you do to “the least” of our world’s family, you do to someone else… for each person is inextricably bound to another; we are all interconnected and interdependent upon each other. When one is hurt, all are hurt. As Wilbur depended on Charlotte and her web, we all depend on each other for life, for joy, for happiness & survival… a huge web of humanity.

Whatever you do to “the least,” you do also to Christ. This painting is such a perfect portrayal of this teaching.

Did Jesus live the down low?

Rev. Irene Monroe at The Witness blew me away with her provocative and insightful July 3, 2006, column, Church's Code Keeps Jesus on the "Down Low":

For many of us who have always cast a suspicious eye on why biblical scholars, theologians and ministers do not have a clue as to who the historical Jesus was, Dan Brown's bestseller and now blockbuster movie, The Da Vinci Code, sheds an illuminating light onto the hysteria that maintains the mystery.

And the mystery is that there has always been an open secret about Jesus' sexuality that not only attacks the pillars of Christianity, but also profoundly plays into the oppression that women as well as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer people face today in both church and society.

And that open secret about Jesus' sexuality -- along with the suggestions that he was gay, married, or both, if Jesus was on the "down low" -- point to the issues we are wrestling with today in what conservatives call the "cultural war," namely the institution of marriage, women in the church, and gay clergy. The hysteria surrounding those issues creates the perfect climate for stories about secret texts emerging from centuries-old closets and church authorities trying desperately to keep the lid over the "truth about Jesus."

However, the debate about Jesus' sexuality takes him from his mother's womb to his tomb. The Christian depiction of Jesus as that of a lifelong virgin who had no sexual desire and who never engaged in sexual intercourse raises anyone's suspicion, when Jesus' traveling with unattached (and therefore "loose") women and with at least twelve men -- the law of averages would say that at least one out of the bunch was gay -- made his scandalous band the subject of a great deal of winking and nudging around ancient Palestine. Of course, given the compulsory heterosexuality in ancient Palestine, a gay Jesus would have been forced to be on the "down low."

Yup, I couldn't agree more. The de-sexualizing of Jesus caused me to delve into textual criticism, and obviously through my art, I've speculated about a queer Jesus as have others. Rev. Monroe goes on to articulate more fully something that has bothered me for decades and moved me to undertake the subject in oil paint.

Ever notice how lesbians are kewl (a straight guy's wet dream is to get it on with lesbians, right?) but gay guys cause gnashing of the teeth particularly by straight men? I've thought gay guy bias contained an unspoken patriarchal prejudice against the feminine, and historically in usurping the Goddess with a father god, the sacred feminine. Monroe writes (with emphasis):

While homophobia in today's Christian churches is antithetical to the gospel proclaimed by the early Church, so too is the denigration of the sacred feminine.

It would have been highly unusual and very scandalous, given Jewish marital customs, for Jesus not to be married; normally he would have been betrothed and married long before he became an itinerant preacher and called both male and female disciples. And just as any good Jew in Jesus' culture (aside from a few fringe sects like the one that produced the Dead Sea Scrolls) would have obeyed the command in Genesis to "be fruitful and multiply" by having children, any "real man" in Jewish or Roman circles would have shown his masculinity by penetration. Whatever Jesus did or didn't do sexually, his reported failure to marry and have children would have made him, in the eyes of his culture, Queer, unfruitful and feminized.

But Jesus was unashamed to tap into the forbidden zone -- his feminine side. The sacred feminine is not only the life force tied to women's ability to produce new life, but is also the power of the erotic that African-American lesbian poet Audre Lorde depicted as "a source within each of us that lies in a deeply female and spiritual plane, firmly rooted in the power of our unexpressed or unrecognized feeling."

Our sexualities are the expressions of who we are with and in our bodies. They are a language and a means to communicate our spiritual need for intimate communion -- both human and divine. They are our self-understanding through which we experience the world.

However, the hysteria that surrounds Jesus' sexuality forces us all to see the walls of partition erected in our society, in our churches, and in our families that prohibit us from living freely in our bodies and force some of us on the "down low."

And these walls not only contribute to the false socialization of who we are as male and female -- they also contribute to the false spiritualization of who we are as the body of Christ.

What powerful words Monroe writes. Recently, elaborating on the idea of the sacred feminine, I dared to paint a Second Coming oil that embraces the return of a female messiah in the form of a blue pasture rose heralded by a way-showing Christ. Optimistically, I envision a future where the sacred feminine reemerges, and in tandem with the sacred masculine, gives birth to another renaissance, another Age of Enlightenment, and a restoration of balance so sorely needed on our planet. Ironically, Mother Earth and the threat of global warming may spark this necessary correction if we as species intend to flourish. Perhaps I'm foreseeing a vision that's decades or centuries away but I am encouraged to read such inspired words from Rev. Irene Monroe that identify the crux of the issue, the false socialization of who we are as male and female and ultimately a false spiritualization.

If Christians and others such as I accept the belief that we were created in the image of the divine, and that undeniably, we are sexual beings with biologically-induced minority and majority traits, inevitably we must resolve the full spectrum of sexuality and spirituality or continue a compartmentalization that robs us of our wholeness and our holiness. Let the transformative integration accelerate for I intuit that is the evolutionary force presently at work. The emergence of a politically-powerful Religious Right so hell-bent in attempting to subvert feminism, gay equality, and control what all of us do in our bedrooms and the personal decisions we make with our physicians tells me that we have embarked upon the road to recovery and an awakening. Adversity in the form of repression, oppression, and suppression has its purpose in propelling us forward, thank God! In time, these obstacles, too, shall pass.

IMAGES: From top to bottom, Judas Kiss, a cropped close-up of an acrylic study for The Last Supper, and The Raped Virgin.

UPDATE: Seems that I have joined the clan of the Fey Women in subverting necrophilia. Well, I was certainly born to be Wild. Ha!