Last week, the media was abuzz with the scandal that a University of Cambridge dean had claimed that Jesus may have been transgender. The news was first reported in Telegraph, with other outlets like New York Post, NBC Montana and Fox News quickly piling on. A piece in the Daily Mail claimed that worshippers “left in tears” about “row over Christ’s wound having a ‘vaginal appearance.’” The ruckus, which seems to have obscured many details of the sermon and turned an art history talk into grand heresy, seems to avoid one critical point: there is a long Christian tradition of reinterpreting the body of Jesus so that it speaks to a more inclusive community.
The event that precipitated the blowback was a lecture-style guest sermon, delivered by Cambridge University Junior Research Fellow Joshua Heath in the chapel at Trinity College. Heath is advised by Rowan Williams, a former Archbishop of Canterbury and leading theologian. The subject of that talk was a book on the crucifixion called christs. This 1993 work joins a series of series of engravings by the French artist Henri Maccheroni with texts from the poets Jean Claude-Renard and Raphael Monticelli.
The Daily Beast obtained a transcript of the sermon to get a better sense of what happened. Maccheroni, as those more familiar with the art scene than I will already know, is an artist with a developed interest in the vulva. It’s thus not wholly surprising that it finds its way into his artistic depictions of the crucifixion. In his analysis, Heath directed the audience to consider the yonic appearance of the wound in Christ’s side and to ruminate on the suggestive possibilities that the wound’s appearance as vulva has for thinking about Jesus’ identity.
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Maccheroni is not the first artist to probe the feminine potential of the wound in Christ’s side. The fourteenth century Prayer Book of Bonne of Luxembourg now housed in the Metropolitan Museum includes an image of the wound of Christ flipped ninety degrees. The resulting image is suggestive. Given that the prayer book was made for a bohemian princess, it’s likely that the significance wasn’t lost on the original owner either.
The reason for this is that the erotic potential of the wound in Christ’s side bubbles to the surface throughout medieval women’s mystical literature. The Life of Catherine of Siena describes a vision in which Christ has the saint “drink from [his] side” with the result that she becomes “enraptured with such delight that [her body is]…inundated with its overflowing goodness.” No, you’re not imagining it. The nineteenth century psychologist Henry Maudsley wrote in The Pathology of Mind that Catherine and St. Teresa of Ávila experience “vicarious sexual orgasm.” Maudsley is a bit reductive, to say the least, but he exemplifies a scholarly tradition that reads the scene in more complicated gendered and sexualized ways. Prominent medievalists and scholars of medieval history, religion, and gender like Amy Hollywood (Harvard) and Caroline Walker Bynum (Princeton), have explored the sexualized and feminized aspects of the wound of Jesus in medieval culture.
Medievalists on twitter have chimed in with other examples. Poet Jay Hulme pointed out that in the 1300s Julian of Norwich wrote that “Jesus Christ…is our true mother” and helpfully included a number of other vulvic images of the wound in Jesus’s side. The point is this: These are well-worn images and interpretations. If you don’t like Heath’s sermon, well then medieval artwork and mysticism might not be for you.
This isn’t just some Roman Catholic mystical tradition either (full disclosure: I am Roman Catholic myself). Eighteenth- and nineteenth- century Moravian theology exhibited a deep interest in the idea of the wound as womb that births the church. As the Rev. Dr. Craig Atwood, the Charles D. Couch Chair of Moravian Theology at Moravian Theological Seminary put it in a lecture on the Litany of the Wounds in 2011: “The wounds of Jesus … are described as a warm and soft bed in which to lie. The worshiper says, ‘I like lying calm, gentle, and quiet and warm. What shall I do? I crawl to you.’ The believer longs to return to the womb, to crawl inside the “deep wounds of Jesus” and lie there safe and protected.”
To the parishioner who told the Daily Mail that the lecture was “heresy” we have to ask, “heresy for whom?” Certainly not medieval mystic saints or nineteenth century Moravian theologians.
Heath notes both Catherine of Siena and the Prayer Book of Luxembourg in his talk, but I could not find the place where he calls Jesus of Nazareth a trans person or says that Jesus had a trans body. I couldn’t find it because it’s not there. Instead, Heath offered an exposition of an artistic tradition that, as Trinity College Dean Dr. Michael Banner accurately put it, is “legitimate.” We might even add that it is well respected and relatively mainstream.
Heath’s focus was on the incarnation and in the manner in which, to use his words, “Christ is representative of all humanity, his saving work embraces all people, insofar as his body is sexualized in both masculine and feminine terms.” Heath declined to offer comment or participate in this piece but his intention, to this reader, seems to have been to offer an image of Christ’s body that speaks to everyone. Some on social media have thought that Heath was espousing a reductionist view of gender in which feminine subjectivity is understood to be just the absence of a penis or a lack. Having read the talk, this doesn’t seem to have been the case. Heath uses the wound-vulva association to upend misogynistic understandings of gender. Following the work of other established scholars, he sees the feminine wound not as a deficiency but rather as a richly generative space.
In truth, using the body of Jesus to do inclusive theological work is a two-thousand-year-old project. The whole premise of the incarnation is one of shapeshifting (Jesus takes on the “form” of an enslaved person in Phil. 2:6-7 and he alters his “form” at the Transfiguration). In the second century apocryphal acts of the apostles his age (Acts of Peter 20–21), size (Acts of Peter 20), beauty (Acts of Peter 20), and skin texture (Acts of John 89) all change. In one story he can walk without footprints. He can even appear in different forms to different people at the same time. Thus, in the Acts of John he is, to John, a handsome and cheerful-looking young man, and to James he is a child. John later sees him as “bald-headed but with a thick flowing beard” while James beholds “a young man whose beard was just beginning.” This is a polymorphous Jesus. If people want to get upset about augmenting the body of Jesus for later political or ideological purposes, then perhaps they could start with the ubiquitous whitewashing this southwest asian man receives in European artistic tradition?
Given all of this we have to wonder: Why the outcry against a brilliant scholar who opened his sermon with a prayer? It would seem that the handwringing comes from Heath’s transparency about the relationship between the intellectual content of his talk and broader fears about “wokeness.” Heath did not claim that Jesus was trans, but he was explicit that he wants to offer a broader range of theological responses for trans people other than rejection and marginalization. This is as close as Heath comes to making a claim about Jesus: “If the body of Christ is, as these works suggest, the body of all bodies, then his body is also the trans body, and their word is his word.” Even for the most socially conservative, surely this must be correct. No matter how strongly opposed to trans-rights you might be, human beings are still human beings.
On social media ad hominem attacks called Heath a “heretic” a “depraved libertine” and implied that both he and Banner (“perverse sickos”) should be burned at the stake for something they didn’t say. I have some questions about casting the first stone and care for one’s neighbor.
The real question is how this message, from an early career (and, thus, vulnerable) scholar, was transformed into a news item in which a Dean of a Cambridge College was said to have made claims he never made? The answer seems clear. The story sells to those embroiled in the anti-woke culture wars—Cambridge! Dean! A former Archbishop of Canterbury! –as evidence that the “ultra-woke” have infiltrated the establishment. But this line of thought has been with us for centuries; the sense of panic in these responses is just fearmongering. The sensational reporting harms both those scholars targeted by the media and the trans people against whom this story was implicitly weaponized. Reasonable people can disagree, but the broader cultural project of sharing knowledge is injured by those who willfully misconstrue arguments. If something was misrepresented here, it was not the body of Jesus.
