Is God a Transexual?
When did Christianity become so obsessed with gender and sex?
Why did God choose to become a man when he decided to experience life as a human? It was, after all, a choice. It seems to me that he would say that if he can make a gender choice, so can you.
To be fair, he didn’t have a choice, because if he had chosen to become a woman he would have been killed long before he would have had a chance to teach his mantra of forgiveness. A woman claiming to be God in that part of the world during those days would have disappeared into a cruel death long before her first sermon.
She probably would never even have made it out of the house without getting killed by her brother, especially if she had tried to wear a carpenter’s tool belt. History would have never known Her.
The strict patriarchy of that era and locale and culture limited God’s choice. So his choice was not one of preference, but expedience.
Still, it was his choice. He could have made a different one. So can we.
The ultimate conclusion might be that God is most certainly non-binary.
If you don’t believe that Jesus was the Son of God or even one of God’s messenger boys, I understand. I’m not here to influence that part of your head space. That belief, however, is central to the Christian vibe. This means that they must, in turn, believe that God made a choice.
Jesus would have been alarmed by today’s controversy over bathrooms and wedding cakes. You can’t believe in Jesus as the Son of God and then say that God didn’t make a conscious decision to present himself as a man. And that, by extension, you can also be whatever you want to be. God, after all, made us in his/her/their own image. Didn’t she?
Like most things in the evangelical world, there is no logic to the bathroom and wedding cake1 nonsense.
I can hear evangelicals raging over this. “Beware false teachers!” they will say. Well, for one thing, I’m no teacher. And for another, I agree, so my reply to that is, “Shut up and mind your own business”. Or maybe work for the Mark Robinson2 campaign if you need to keep your hypocrisy satiated.
It’s true that God is always referred to as a He in the Bible. It’s also true that the Bible was written by men.
God is also referred to as a torch (or floodlight?) and a water fountain. Go figure.
I’m sure that if God presented himself to dolphins, who are just as smart as us, if not smarter, he wouldn’t present himself as a human.3
Presenting himself as a human would be a bad start to the divine relationship between dolphins and God. “What are you going to do next?” asks the frightened dolphin upon seeing the human-shaped deity. “Throw me into a pool and make me entertain your stupid human kids?”
The Bible is the way it is because men wrote it.
“It’s the Word of God!” evangelicals will blubber forth. No, it’s the word of a small group of men trying to interpret ancient magic, and later, the actions and life of Jesus.
Mary Magdalene had a gospel going4, but I’m pretty sure men torched it, broke it into pieces, or whatever, and now it’s an incomplete manuscript. The first three chapters are gone.
As I understand it, she didn’t write it. It was written from her perspective by someone else.
Either way, her gospel never made it into the Bible. Even if it had somehow remained intact without a man destroying parts of it, the men who presided over Biblical canon would never have let it into their sacred pages.
Was Jesus Married?
As if my heresy is not yet sufficient, it’s also noteworthy that we really don’t know whether or not Jesus was married. The vast majority of men his age were. There were very few exceptions. There were probably incels in those days, but society made them get married anyway so that they wouldn’t mow people down with the ancient equivalent of AR-15s.
The fact that the Bible doesn’t mention a wife doesn’t mean much. As Sarah Ruden points out in her excellent translation of the Gospels, called, surprisingly enough, The Gospels: A New Translation, the fact of Jesus’s marriage…
“…would not have been mentioned absent a special circumstance. Simon Peter’s marriage is alluded to only because of his mother-in-law’s healing. Custom prescribed that a young wife would stay home to the extent possible, unnamed and unmentioned in public, at least until she had borne a child.”5
One could argue that the special circumstance of Jesus’s not being married is what would have been called out during those times.
You would expect at least one of the Gospel writers (my money would be on Luke) to have written, “The Lord never married.”
Why Luke? Because he had a lawyer’s eye for things and would have always been ready to offer his services for a pretty denarius in case Jesus needed to consider a divorce. He being lawyerly and all.
That said, my gut says Jesus was never married. Much of what we believe comes from what’s inside us — that still, small voice, and everything in that voice suggests to me that Jesus was alone in his mission and his trials.
Besides, isn’t Jesus’s relationship with Mary Magdalene a beautiful template for how men should act towards women? Married or not? Lover or not?
Isn’t that the lesson that has been trampled by 2,000 years of patriarchal biblical misinterpretations? Many people still believe Mary Magdalene was a prostitute because that’s how men portrayed her for centuries.
Ruden’s argument, though, shows some weakness when we consider this: There was significant reporting in the Gospels on Jesus’s perp walk, and you’d expect one of the Gospel writers to have reported on his wife’s anguish, especially at the end.
In other words, there was a special circumstance: his long public suffering and death.
Jesus did have a special woman in his life: Mary Magdalene
Was she his wife? It’s possible, but again, that seems like a special circumstance that would have been reported, since she appears in the Gospels under different contexts.
She was no doubt extremely important to Jesus. She was the first person he met after his resurrection. He had a dozen other apostles he could have hung out with first after he pushed over the rock of his tomb, but he chose Mary.
Ruden might fairly argue that the writers of that era considered their marriage such an obvious fact that no specific reference was necessary.
So what was she to him? Truth is, the Bible doesn’t care. Despite all the efforts of men to establish patriarchy over Jesus’s words and actions, at the end of the day, none of the stuff about gender, marriage, and sex matters.
The point here is that Jesus’s marital status was of such little concern to the original writers of the Gospel that it wasn’t mentioned at all either way. It is our patriarchal society that has emphasized the nuclear family.
Fundamentalism, with its false, hypocritical teachings, has jumped on a few phrases from the Bible to make it sound like the nuclear family is a central tenet of Christianity.
But it isn’t. King David, who was supposed to be one of God’s favorites (God doesn’t play favorites, by the way, in case you’re wondering about that), had about a billion girlfriends. He bedded half of Israel. A close reading of the Bible suggests a bit of gay, too (Jonathan has entered the chat).
Jesus made a famous reference to how looking at a woman lustfully is a form of adultery, but Jesus was especially disdainful of hypocrisy. He spoke in parables and riddles and enjoyed a bit of sarcasm. He was probably poking fun at those making judgments in those days.
He knew that marriage was a gateway drug to hypocrisy. This is probably why he ridiculed a woman for her five husbands. It’s most likely why he chided someone for judging an adulterer when he said, “I saw how you looked at that woman walking down the street, you hypocrite.”
Overall, his few vague references to marriage were focused on the various hypocrisies that surround our behavior when we pledge ourselves to one person.
This may sound like an argument for open marriages and philandering. It’s not. I’m a hopelessly serial monogamist. It’s when we decide to evangelize our sexual proclivities to others that we get into trouble. I’m a monogamist, but that doesn’t mean you must be. It’s just how I’m wired. The fact of our different wiring is something to celebrate, not control.
It also doesn’t mean it’s not okay to try out marriage. What’s not ok is for others to point fingers when it doesn’t work out or, especially, when others prefer an alternative lifestyle, few of which are mentioned in the New Testament, either in a good way or a bad way.
The tale of Jesus is all about being contrary to sexual norms
Jewish tradition greatly discouraged premarital sex among young, unmarried women because they were considered their father’s property, and a non-virgin wife was not considered as valuable as a virgin wife when funds were exchanged between families during the marriage process.
So what does God do? He assigns the birth of Jesus to an unwed young virgin.
Joseph, the man betrothed to Mary, had to scramble to keep her safe, and an angel had to assure Joseph that Mary hadn’t snuck into the tent of some other dude when he wasn’t looking.
We are faced today with an evangelical movement where pastors are extolling the virtues of a politician who the writers of Revelation would probably expect to see “666” tattooed on his forehead. They are using their Sunday pulpits to encourage their flock to vote for an adjudicated rapist who brags about sexually assaulting women and whose career has been nothing but a marathon of grift.
It’s no wonder so many people hate Christians and Christianity. It’s chock full of hypocrisy. Christians have turned hypocrisy and stupidity into an art form. It’s a dying religion in the West because it has veered completely off its only important message: That love and forgiveness should be our only master.
Notes
I say all this as a Christian man who found Christianity late in life. Mine, though, is a different kind of Christianity than what most Americans are taught. If that makes me an apostate in the eyes of traditionalists, so be it.
Thanks, as always, for reading!
The wedding cake nonsense refers to the refusal of a business to bake a cake for a gay couple’s marriage, and the Supreme Court ruling that ensued.
Mark Robinson is a preacher turned politician who is steeped in so much hypocrisy over porn that someday he’ll become a case study in universities after his attempt to become North Carolina’s governor fails.
Stay tuned for my upcoming short story, Born a Savage, about a messianic dolphin. You’ll need to be sure you’ve enabled “Fiction” newsletters in this Ruminato Substack if you want to receive it in your email inbox. Other authors have also played around with the concept of alien messiahs, perhaps most famously C.S. Lewis in his Perelandra trilogy (along with the first book in the series, Out of the Silent Planet, and the third book, That Hideous Strength).
The Gospel of Mary is a non-canonical Gnostic scripture with many missing pieces that many scholars consider representative of Mary Magdalene’s thought process, although it is not widely claimed to have been written by her.
Sarah Ruden, The Gospels: A New Translation (New York: Modern Library, 2021)
One of the big benefits of not being particularly religious is that I never have to worry about stuff like this. I figure that whatever god there is will eventually sort out all of these questions that arguably don’t (or shouldn’t) matter in the least.
Thanks ... I always love it when someone makes me think anew.