The New Testament is very queer

Bible scholars see details that Christians might not like

When reading the New Testament of the Bible we don’t often reflect on how queer the narrative seems. Is that because it isn’t?

I’ve caught up on a pile of recent Bible scholarship, and learning a few facts I never heard in church.

1. Herod the Great was bisexual

Most men in the ancient world were assumed to be bisexual, so it’s not that surprising to find out that the Jewish officials who loom over the New Testament narratives kept slave boys for sex. It’s recalled by the Jewish historian Josephus:

“The king had some eunuchs of whom he was immoderately fond because of their beauty.”

Though Jews of this period are often thought to have been very against ‘gay’ stuff, it looks like that was a lot of talk. Christopher B. Zeichmann discusses this point and related examples in a 2020 paper, “Same-Sex Intercourse Involving Jewish Men 100BCE–100CE.”

2. The Roman centurion and his slave are a couple

In a story told in three gospels, Jesus meets a Roman military officer who is unusually polite. So the Centurion is sounding kind of gay, if you ask me. But then he comes to Jesus to try and get a healing for—his young male slave?

A variety of scholars have suggested that this is looking like a sexual relationship. In a 2018 paper, “Gender Minorities in and Under Roman Power,” Zeichmann updates the case. As he notes, Christians have managed over time to shut the conversation down. That’s looking untenable. The Centurion calls his slave something like his ‘boy’, using a Greek word, παῖς, that can suggest a sexual relationship.

Then in Luke 7:2, we learn the boy was “dear” or “precious” to him. There’s no reason to not read this as a queer narrative. Jesus heals the boy without asking a lot of dumb questions. Sounds ‘Christian’ to me.

3. Jesus is a victim of sexual violence

I’m a big fan of David Tombs’ 1999 paper “Crucifixion, State Terror, and Sexual Abuse” which documents that Jesus was likely sexually abused in the course of his crucifixion. It was commonly done, and the text does indicate Jesus is separated for the purpose of “mockery”—a regular cue in the Bible to rape narratives.

Tombs returns with a 2020 paper, “Hidden in Plain Sight: Seeing the Stripping of Jesus as Sexual Violence.” His point here is, as an educator, to walk Christians through the steps of seeing sexual violence as part of Jesus’ story.

“For most students the statement ‘Jesus was a victim of sexual abuse’ is a new idea to them and they have never thought about this possibility before.”

Turns out, Christians haven’t thought of a lot of things.

4. Paul is feminine

Was any figure in the history of words as badly misread as the apostle Paul? He’s a figure on whom Christian men have heaped their own ruthlessness and misogyny, with no regard at all for the text.

Brittany E. Wilson has been documenting how, by conventions of the time, the presentation of Paul is quite feminine. In “Destabilizing Masculinity: Paul in the Book of Acts and Beyond,” she follows up from an earlier paper and suggests a ‘Paul’ that Christianity never knew.

The road to Damascus scene, she notes, has a Paul who is overwhelmed and overpowered—and never really gets back ‘in control’. His name, ‘Saul’, suggests “queeniness” to a Greek speaker of the time. The new name he chooses, ‘Paul’, means ‘little’. His name is Little.

Paul is always talking about being loving and feeling, and analogizes himself to a woman many times (Gal 4:19; 1 Thess 2:7; 1 Cor 3:2). Kind of a weird thing for a misogynist to do?

It’s typical for the Bible, since God is “male and female”—like humans.

5. God has a strange body?

A lot of traditional Christian thinking about sex is rooted in the idea that God does not have a body. The very idea of being embodied thus begins to seem evil to many people. They can’t wait to die—to get out of these bodies!

But God is always described as embodied. In Genesis 3:8, He “walks” in Eden. Throughout the Old Testament, prophets regularly see His form: note Moses (Exo 33:19–23), Ezekiel (1:27–28), and Isaiah (6:5), etc.

In a 2019 paper, “Imaging the Divine: Idolatry and God’s Body in the Book of Acts,” Brittany E. Wilson updates the effort to break through encrusted Christian thinking. It needs to be understood: ‘God’ is an embodied deity.

The Jewish view, as she notes, was not that God didn’t have a body but that the divine body was indescribable.

God’s body then becomes something of a ‘queer’ concern. The deity has a form that is complex and unexpected—that isn’t following ‘rules’. There’s a lot of suggestion, like in the ‘Odes to Solomon’, that God’s body may be sexually configured in some rather ‘queer’ ways.

For more help for Christians on getting away from thinking of God as ‘invisible’, a 2007 paper by Andrew S. Malone: “The Invisibility of God: a Survey of a Misunderstood Phenomenon.”

6. Philemon is a ‘gay’ romance?

Near the end of the New Testament is a tiny letter by the apostle Paul, which many Christians wouldn’t even know about. It’s that odd story about—a runaway slave? Or something.

Efforts to identify the ‘plot’ tend to run the gamut. But I was gobsmacked — or God-smacked? — by a 2011 paper by Joseph A. Marchal which suggested that the basic terms have been misread. In “The Usefulness of an Onesimus: The Sexual Use of Slaves and Paul’s Letter to Philemon,” Marchal works off the slave’s name: ‘Onesimus’.

In the Bible, names are meaningful, often setting out the core of a character’s narrative. Christian commentary would say that Onesimus means ‘useful’. But Marchal says this is not quite right. The name ‘Onesimus’, he says, means ‘good for use’, ‘well-used’, or ‘easy to use’.

And to a person in the world of the New Testament, he writes, this suggests “the erotically available (or sexually vulnerable) enslaved person…”

As Marchal notes, Christianity broke its own rules in translating the slave’s name, for “use” is often seen as a cue to sex. If the phrase “natural use” in Romans 1:26–27 can be translated as “intercourse,” as often happens, then the name ‘Onesimus’ means ‘good for intercourse’.

If Onesimus is a sex slave, then we may be able to assume that he’s young, ‘pretty’, and probably castrated. There are images in Roman statuary of feminine males who seem to be this type of being.

The slave owner’s name, ‘Philemon’, is as meaningful. It suggests the Greek word phileo, or ‘love’, and also philēma, which means ‘kiss’.

Philemon seems to be a man made for love. And a lot of ‘loving’ talk surrounds him. He seems to be a very ‘loving’ person — who has a male sex slave. This provokes conflict—both in Christian anti-slavery teachings, and perhaps traditional Jewish views on same-sexual eroticism—which Paul then steps forward to help resolve.

Here is Paul replying to Philemon, in v.16 in the NIV translation:

“He is very dear to me but even dearer to you, both as a fellow man and as a brother in the Lord.”

Except this is clearly wrong. The two men aren’t “dear” to each other as “fellow men” — or else Paul, also male, would be as “dear.”

Marchal provides a literal translation of the same passage. As dear as Onesimus is to Paul, he says:

“how much (more) especially to you, both in the flesh and in the lord.”

The two men are close in flesh and spirit. Paul wants the men to just love each other. He sends Onesimus back home to Philemon, as he writes:

“that you might have him back for ever, no longer as a slave but more than a slave, as a beloved brother” (RSV)

7. Paul and cross-dressing Thecla

Christians often speak of “tradition” as being so important, but it turns out that they’re rather narrow in which “traditions” they choose to remember. A very popular text of the early Christian world called Acts of Paul and Theca extends the narrative of Acts.

It’s about a young woman who becomes Paul’s disciple — even when it means dressing as a man.

In 1906, scholars found an image of Paul and a female-presenting Thecla in a small cave near ancient Ephesus. As it survives, her eyes are scratched out, and her hand, raised in the teaching position, is erased.

It leaves her, as a scholar notes, “blinded and silenced.”

The story, even if not in the ‘canon’, highlights verses that Christian tradition doesn’t much care for. In a 2016 paper, “Paul as an Apostolic Archetype and Endorser of Female Leadership in the Acts of Paul and Thecla,” Samuel Onyedika Nwokoro notes:

“Paul seemed to have been gender neutral. In Christ, he claims that all forms of inequality dissolve (Gal. 3:28). This would imply that hierarchies of gender, class and race find their ultimate collapse in the person of Jesus Christ.”

There’s been an ongoing scholarly excavation of Thelca’s legend, which was widespread, and later all but forgotten. In two 2017 papers, we learn about her in the Latin and the Armenian traditions.

And for background, there’s a 2002 paper by Stephen J. Davis, “Crossed Texts, Crossed Sex: Intertextuality and Gender in Early Christian Legends of Holy Women Disguised as Men,” where we meet other transvestite heroines of the early Christian church. 🔶