The Crucifixion And Paraphilia

My motivation for writing this post is that my previous post on a similar subject, ‘Was Jesus Raped‘, has gotten popular in the wrong way. It’s attracted a lot of spam due to the fact that the title contains two keywords and this has made it difficult to discuss anything in the comments. Therefore I’m going to attempt to close that post for comments and start one here in the hope that it doesn’t get similarly inundated. However, I can’t just replicate the passage, so I’m going to talk about something rather different, though still related to that one.

There are probably three areas which we need to look at here: concrete evidence regarding the sexual assault of Jesus, the motives of people who represent that possibility and the good faith or otherwise of their assertion. I also want to look at atonement and the concept of perversion.

I’ll start with perversion. To many, this is an old-fashioned word which doesn’t have much meaning today. It’s probably similar to the word “fornication”. When I shared a house with a fundamentalist Christian, that is, a Biblical literalist who was a Young Earth creationist and also pursuing a doctorate in genetics, an interesting combination, she used to object to us watching the Channel 4 lesbian and gay magazine programme ‘Out On Tuesday’ in a number of ways, including watching ‘Minder’ of all things, and once said that to her the whole thing was “nothing more than fornication”. Now I will cut her some slack here because she was from Kerala and her English was therefore Indian English rather than British English, which uses words rather differently than we do, but even so, the word “fornication” sounded very old-fashioned to me even back then in 1992. I feel the same way about “faggot” used homophobically. The word has an antiquated feel to me, like using the word “gay” to mean “happy”.

Thomas Nagel wrote a famous paper in 1969 for the ‘Journal of Philosophy’ which was later collected in his ‘Mortal Questions’ (Nagel, T. (2012). Sexual Perversion. In Mortal Questions (Canto Classics, pp. 39-52). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/CBO9781107341050.006). Citation date notwithstanding, Nagel’s essay is a creature of its time, and therefore uses the word “perversion” quite baldly. He begins by raising the question of how we have a concept of sexual perversion. For perversion to exist, there must be sexual desires or preferences which can be plausibly described as unnatural. This raises an immediate problem which I will however breeze past for now. Nagel then states that the main problem is how to make that distinction. Unless one throws out the concept of perversion entirely, and most people wouldn’t although they might call it something else, there’s a core of practices which just are perversions. Nagel lists shoe fetishism, bestiality and sadism. I would take issue with the last one because I think it varies with consent. We might not agree with this list. I personally would consider bestiality, morally speaking, to be morally wrong, and today it seems sometimes that many people almost use the word “perversion” as a synonym for pædophilia while possibly failing to realise that many acts of child sexual abuse are perpetrated by non-pædophiles. If perversions exist, says Nagel, they’re inclinations rather than adopted for other reasons, and this is of course counter to the Roman Catholic understanding of what they were at the time, and possibly still. As a counter-example, using Nagel’s shoe fetishism, someone’s spouse might wear a particular style of footwear in order to turn their partner on or indicate subtly that they were interested in going to bed with them today, but have no direct sexual interest themselves in that item. I mentioned Roman Catholics, and this is harsher in hindsight considering recent scandals in the Church which had yet to come to light in the 1960s. According to Nagel, Roman Catholics consider contraception as a perversion, I presume because they see it as frustrating the divinely ordained function of sex as for procreation, but contraception is not a sexual preference. Many people would, all things considered, prefer not to use barrier methods of contraception for example if they knew conception was impossible anyway. There could be a sexual fetish based on diaphragm use, but that’s not the usual reason people employ them.

Next, other “frustrations” of reproduction are considered. One example of this would be the banana, which has been bred not to have seeds in the fruit and consequently cannot reproduce through fertilisation but has to be grafted. Among humans, there is infertility and miscarriage, neither of which have anything to do with perversion. Mammals and possibly other animals, though, could be considered perverted, such as the famous example of the monkey who was aroused by a zookeeper’s boots. This can happen and does count as perversion. A “radical” argument for the non-existence of perversion is proposed, thus:

Sexual appetite is similar to other appetites, such as that for food. It can have various objects but none are “unnatural”. Sexual desire is defined by the organs and areas of the body where it is felt and the types of sensation which cause it. Some such desires are ethically problematic (i.e. wrong) and others are hard for many to identify with, but as such they’re simply sexual desires and cannot be considered inherently perverted.

Nagel disagrees with this argument, but it isn’t a strawman. He objects to it by using the analogy of hunger. If someone had pica, which I have had of course because I used to eat pencils and wood, or could satisfy their hunger by looking at lavish photographs of food in a cook book, those would both seem to be examples of perversions of appetite. Hence the analogy in the argument breaks down. Sadly, nowadays eating disorders are more recognised and there’s a sense in which these are such perversions, although having called them “eating disorders” I feel that I am reducing the people concerned to their disorder and probably should speak of “disordered eating” instead.

The idea that sexual desire always attempts to achieve the unattainable is then introduced, and this I think is particularly relevant to Christian world views. Perfect love is only possible unaided by the divine. Human love would always fall short in some way unless perhaps, according to Christianity, one was a channel for divine love. Hence the sexual expression of that love could always be perceived as a form of perversion. However, that sets the bar much higher than most people in today’s world are willing to place it, and the majority of Christians probably do see marriage as a good and blessèd thing. There is an issue here with being called to celibacy and there’s also a problem in some churches with there being undue emphasis on the married state, and perhaps even married with children, which tends to exclude singles, willing or otherwise, simply through the assumptions made by such a large proportion of married people. This is a separate issue from extramarital sex, incidentally.

Sartre is then considered. Sartre regards sexual desire as a doomed attempt for embodied consciousness to come to terms with the existence of others. It’s doomed because one will either objectify the other or become an object for them, and one cannot win through by capturing the other’s freedom as freedom. Hence for Sartre there can be no ultimately successful sexual relationship because the deep aim of sexual desire is unachievable. Although Nagel rejects this rather pessimistic idea, he’s still interested in the way Sartre presents it, and proceeds to paint a picture of a scene where a woman and a man notice each other sexually, go on to notice that they are attracted to each other and are aroused by that attraction. Hence there is a mutual objectification here which he understands to be what might be called “vanilla” sex. This he also sees as typical of human relations, in that, for example, anger between people breeds more anger between them and so forth. In the identification of both parties with their bodies, the actions of the body take over and threaten the will, and unlike hunger there is a saturation of the body with sexual desire. This, Nagel claims, is the non-perverted condition of sex.

He then uses a variety of examples of more deviant sexual activities to illustrate where it becomes perversion, noting that it isn’t always black and white. For instance, it probably isn’t ideal for a couple to be privately fantasising during lovemaking but it isn’t perverted either. This lack of interpersonal relationship is, he contends, found in pædophilia, bestiality, fetishism, voyeurism and exhibitionism. I would add necrophilia to that. More controversial cases are found in homosexuality and sado-masochism. Incidentally, it feels a little shocking reading this because it’s pretty cold, as it must be, when pædophilia and bestiality are mentioned and analysed, so in a weird way it is quite a hard read. Sadism seems to fall short of reciprocity, but this assumes there is no consent, but then in some cases a sadist, or even a masochist, would require lack of consent in order to become aroused. This conjures up a couple of odd scenarios. In one of them, the sadist imagines they’re causing suffering when they aren’t, and not through any artifice of rôle-playing. This illustrates a clash between consensus understandings of what constitutes sexual attraction, because if someone’s proclivities are sufficiently obscure or perverse, they undercut any attempt to avoid lust. For instance, it’s entirely possible that some heterosexual men find the burqa more arousing than a naked woman’s body. In fact Rule 34 guarantees that this is so, and from their perspective it means that whether or not it’s forced, women are encouraged to dress in a way those men find more sexually arousing than if they were dressed in a conventional, supposèdly titillating Western manner. Nagel proposes that sadism falls short, and is therefore a perversion, because it lacks interpersonal reciprocity, but the trouble with that is that he seems to assume only a subset of sadists who are perhaps impaired in terms of empathy, or who empathise and despise.

Homosexual activity, on the other hand, is singled out as being completely non-perverted because the kind of multilayered embodiment and reciprocity involved does not depend on gender or sex. It would only become an issue if the proclivity was absent and at least one of the people involved was a “closet heterosexual”. If the kind of sex involved is a matter of activity and passivity and either is seen as “natural” to one sex or another, that would mean that one party at least would be going against their nature, but in fact this kind of active-passive division is not automatically male and female respectively and therefore there would be many heterosexual acts which don’t conform to this but are unlikely to be perceived as perverted because of that.

In the closing remarks of his paper, Nagel turns to the question of evaluation. The concept of perversion is evaluative and implies that better sex is possible than the kind of sex pursued by the pervert. Subjectively this may be impossible because in physical terms a pervert may be unable to achieve sexual pleasure any other way, but this could be seen as a shortcoming on their part, or perhaps a disability. Certainly there might be a problem with loneliness if the possible pool of people with whom one can engage consensually with is smaller than usual, perhaps even non-existent. However, this idea of better and worse sex may be more æsthetic than ethical, because once one enters the realm of ethics things become more complicated. One is evaluating human beings. Even within the realm of perversion there could be cases of sex which is better than the worst vanilla sex, given that one considers there to be such a thing, and I do think almost everyone would. For instance, there’s consensual homosexual sex and there’s heterosexual rape, and although I’m not in the homophobic camp I would still fervently hope that nobody would consider heterosexual rape of any kind better than loving homosexual sex.

Nagel’s view is not the only one of course, and I also feel it’s quite outdated, not least in his use of the word “perversion”. It might also fail to capture a conservative religious viewpoint on the issue. For instance, he does note that the Roman Catholic Church regards sex with contraception as perverted. I’m not sure what to do with this observation because I find it hard to imagine that the Church would want married heterosexual couples to separate if one of them turned out to be infertile or that they should stop having sex after the menopause. Maybe, but I haven’t come across this and it really doesn’t seem to be what they believe.

Clearly I do believe there’s such a thing as morally bad sex. Zoöphilia and pædophilia are pretty much obviously wrong in the sense that if they were to be indulged in reality they would have devastating consequences for the victims. I feel an æsthetic sense of disgust here but this should not be allowed to interfere with one’s moral judgement. On the other hand, the conscience could be akin to a moral sense. In the case of pædophilia I do think that poorly-drafted legislation could lead to the criminalisation of sex between two people a single day apart in age, which would just be silly, but at least historically in this country age difference has been a significant factor. But that’s an extreme case, and extreme cases make for bad law.

Thank you for being patient with me so far. I shall now discuss the issue of Jesus being sexually assaulted again, though from a different angle than the spam magnet post I wrote some time ago. There could be said to be several camps here, one of which oddly misunderstands the issue. There would be those who say Jesus cannot have been sexually assaulted, and they would make several assertions on this matter. For instance, no gospels, canonical or otherwise, mention a frank sexual assault. Others, and this includes me, maintain that it’s possible that he was sexually assaulted for various reasons, some of which have a Biblical source, and might further claim that thinking of him in this way helps the survivors of sexual assault to bond with him and be aware that he is with them in all circumstances. A further category amounts to trolls, and this is the puzzling category because they seem to have misunderstood the attitude Christians are supposed to take towards the Incarnation. Finally, and this is the reason for the preamble on Thomas Nagel, there’s the category which could be described as “perverts”, which is of course quite a strongly pejorative term. Some might say that these categories are not isolated from each other. For instance, one could take the view that once one has abandoned a particular orthodox view, one would gradually become corrupted in various ways and drift into the “perversion” category. There’s a New Testament justification for this in Paul’s Letter to the Romans 1:18f:

¹⁸ αποκαλυπτεται γαρ οργη θεου απ ουρανου επι πασαν ασεβειαν και αδικιαν ανθρωπων των την αληθειαν εν αδικια κατεχοντων

¹⁹ διοτι το γνωστον του θεου φανερον εστιν εν αυτοις ο γαρ θεος αυτοις εφανερωσεν

²⁰ τα γαρ αορατα αυτου απο κτισεως κοσμου τοις ποιημασιν νοουμενα καθοραται η τε αιδιος αυτου δυναμις και θειοτης εις το ειναι αυτους αναπολογητους

²¹ διοτι γνοντες τον θεον ουχ ως θεον εδοξασαν η ευχαριστησαν αλλ εματαιωθησαν εν τοις διαλογισμοις αυτων και εσκοτισθη η ασυνετος αυτων καρδια

²² φασκοντες ειναι σοφοι εμωρανθησαν

²³ και ηλλαξαν την δοξαν του αφθαρτου θεου εν ομοιωματι εικονος φθαρτου ανθρωπου και πετεινων και τετραποδων και ερπετων

²⁴ διο και παρεδωκεν αυτους ο θεος εν ταις επιθυμιαις των καρδιων αυτων εις ακαθαρσιαν του ατιμαζεσθαι τα σωματα αυτων εν εαυτοις

²⁵ οιτινες μετηλλαξαν την αληθειαν του θεου εν τω ψευδει και εσεβασθησαν και ελατρευσαν τη κτισει παρα τον κτισαντα ος εστιν ευλογητος εις τους αιωνας αμην

²⁶ δια τουτο παρεδωκεν αυτους ο θεος εις παθη ατιμιας αι τε γαρ θηλειαι αυτων μετηλλαξαν την φυσικην χρησιν εις την παρα φυσιν

²⁷ ομοιως τε και οι αρσενες αφεντες την φυσικην χρησιν της θηλειας εξεκαυθησαν εν τη ορεξει αυτων εις αλληλους αρσενες εν αρσεσιν την ασχημοσυνην κατεργαζομενοι και την αντιμισθιαν ην εδει της πλανης αυτων εν εαυτοις απολαμβανοντες

²⁸ και καθως ουκ εδοκιμασαν τον θεον εχειν εν επιγνωσει παρεδωκεν αυτους ο θεος εις αδοκιμον νουν ποιειν τα μη καθηκοντα

²⁹ πεπληρωμενους παση αδικια πορνεια πονηρια πλεονεξια κακια μεστους φθονου φονου εριδος δολου κακοηθειας ψιθυριστας

³⁰ καταλαλους θεοστυγεις υβριστας υπερηφανους αλαζονας εφευρετας κακων γονευσιν απειθεις

³¹ ασυνετους ασυνθετους αστοργους ασπονδους ανελεημονας

³² οιτινες το δικαιωμα του θεου επιγνοντες οτι οι τα τοιαυτα πρασσοντες αξιοι θανατου εισιν ου μονον αυτα ποιουσιν αλλα και συνευδοκουσιν τοις πρασσουσιν

In the KJV:

¹⁸ For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who hold the truth in unrighteousness;

¹⁹ Because that which may be known of God is manifest in them; for God hath shewed it unto them.

²⁰ For the invisible things of him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even his eternal power and Godhead; so that they are without excuse:

²¹ Because that, when they knew God, they glorified him not as God, neither were thankful; but became vain in their imaginations, and their foolish heart was darkened.

²² Professing themselves to be wise, they became fools,

²³ And changed the glory of the uncorruptible God into an image made like to corruptible man, and to birds, and fourfooted beasts, and creeping things.

²⁴ Wherefore God also gave them up to uncleanness through the lusts of their own hearts, to dishonour their own bodies between themselves:

²⁵ Who changed the truth of God into a lie, and worshipped and served the creature more than the Creator, who is blessed for ever. Amen.

²⁶ For this cause God gave them up unto vile affections: for even their women did change the natural use into that which is against nature:

²⁷ And likewise also the men, leaving the natural use of the woman, burned in their lust one toward another; men with men working that which is unseemly, and receiving in themselves that recompence of their error which was meet.

²⁸ And even as they did not like to retain God in their knowledge, God gave them over to a reprobate mind, to do those things which are not convenient;

²⁹ Being filled with all unrighteousness, fornication, wickedness, covetousness, maliciousness; full of envy, murder, debate, deceit, malignity; whisperers,

³⁰ Backbiters, haters of God, despiteful, proud, boasters, inventors of evil things, disobedient to parents,

³¹ Without understanding, covenantbreakers, without natural affection, implacable, unmerciful:

³² Who knowing the judgment of God, that they which commit such things are worthy of death, not only do the same, but have pleasure in them that do them.

The process described here is similar to Pharaoh’s heart being hardened before the Exodus, and raises a couple of questions. One is that of the perseverance of the the saints: one cannot lose one’s salvation if one has ever honestly committed oneself to Christ. This also contains the most important “clobber” verse used by homophobes. I personally happen to believe that a literal interpretation of the Bible, and the New Testament, requires one to be homophobic. I’m not in the camp that tries to make excuses or explain away these passages with cultural relativism. However, I also believe that to believe homosexually expressed mutually consensual love is sinful is similar to believing 2+2=5. If you went through a process in maths which led to a result which implied that 2+2=5, you would check your working until you either gave up or found your error. Similarly, if your understanding of Scripture leads you to conclude that homosexual activity is immoral in different circumstances to heterosexual activity, ethical intuition, that is, your conscience, will make you aware that you’ve made a mistake somewhere. However, the problem with the idea of ethical intuition is that one can simply baldly assert that one’s conscience is telling one something without having to justify it, meaning that sensible discussion is impossible, so this doesn’t get anyone very far as far as dialogue is concerned. Anyway, the idea is that if someone strays from the path laid out by Christ and the Word, one will become corrupted even if one has repented and committed oneself, and the belief that Jesus was raped is placed firmly in this category by many people. And it is a very tough thing to come to terms with, or at least it ought to be. It may not be for some people, particularly if they aren’t Christian.

I’ve been asked for evidence, and such evidence is forthcoming. Firstly, I’d like to quote the last verse of the Fourth Gospel:

εστιν δε και αλλα πολλα οσα εποιησεν ο ιησους ατινα εαν γραφηται καθ εν ουδε αυτον οιμαι τον κοσμον χωρησαι τα γραφομενα βιβλια αμην

In the KJV:

And there are also many other things which Jesus did, the which, if they should be written every one, I suppose that even the world itself could not contain the books that should be written. Amen.

In other words, bearing in mind also that the gospel of John is the most recent canonical gospel, even all of the gospels taken together do not constitute a complete account of Jesus’s life. A notable omission found in all is a complete absence of any account of his life between twelve and thirty. The infancy gospels, generally considered unreliable, do at least indicate the strong desire to know more about his life. The gospels are not a complete biography of Jesus, and perhaps they don’t need to be, if one assumes that all that needs to be known about him is in there. For instance, it isn’t important what he looks like and he isn’t described at any point. Except that in a sense it is. If Jesus is to be the stand-in for any human, maybe his appearance was significant, or would be to us today. For instance, the fact that he was Jewish would mean that anti-semitism in full knowledge of Jesus’s physical appearance could often mean that a Christian is persecuting someone who looks very like him. Although Jesus was not Ashkenazic, Sephardic or Mizrahic, or for that matter Beta Israel, because the different communities had yet to diverge at that point, his appearance is likely to be closest to that of the Mizrahim, and since even Sephardim are perceived by WASPs as non-White, odd though that seems, the chances are that Jesus would be too. Matthew 25:40 of course reads:

καὶ ἀποκριθεὶς ὁ βασιλεὺς ἐρεῖ αὐτοῖς· ἀμὴν λέγω ὑμῖν, ἐφ’ ὅσον ἐποιήσατε ἑνὶ τούτων τῶν ἀδελφῶν μου τῶν ἐλαχίστων, ἐμοὶ ἐποιήσατε.

And the King shall answer and say unto them, Verily I say unto you, Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me.

In other words, Jesus acts as a stand in for people and Christians are supposed to see him in everyone. This is where the issue of rape arises too. If it’s a real prospect for Jesus to have been a victim of sexual assault, it means that those who sexually assault others, and rape does occur within marriage of course, might see themselves as sinning directly against Jesus.

I’m not going to deny that it’s shocking and difficult to accept. Jesus is supposed to have a radical influence on one’s life. The evidence is there that this could have happened, and it also makes sense that the gospel writers may have been silent on the matter. However, there are several passages which do appear to allude to it in the gospels. In the KJV, Matthew 26:47-50 reads:

And while he yet spake, lo, Judas, one of the twelve, came, and with him a great multitude with swords and staves, from the chief priests and elders of the people.

⁴⁸ Now he that betrayed him gave them a sign, saying, Whomsoever I shall kiss, that same is he: hold him fast.

⁴⁹ And forthwith he came to Jesus, and said, Hail, master; and kissed him.

⁵⁰ And Jesus said unto him, Friend, wherefore art thou come? Then came they, and laid hands on Jesus and took him.

In Greek, this is:

⁴⁷ και ετι αυτου λαλουντος ιδου ιουδας εις των δωδεκα ηλθεν και μετ αυτου οχλος πολυς μετα μαχαιρων και ξυλων απο των αρχιερεων και πρεσβυτερων του λαου

⁴⁸ ο δε παραδιδους αυτον εδωκεν αυτοις σημειον λεγων ον αν φιλησω αυτος εστιν κρατησατε αυτον

⁴⁹ και ευθεως προσελθων τω ιησου ειπεν χαιρε ραββι και κατεφιλησεν αυτον

⁵⁰ ο δε ιησους ειπεν αυτω εταιρε εφ ω παρει τοτε προσελθοντες επεβαλον τας χειρας επι τον ιησουν και εκρατησαν αυτον

Mark 14:43-45 similarly read:

⁴³ και ευθεως ετι αυτου λαλουντος παραγινεται ιουδας εις ων των δωδεκα και μετ αυτου οχλος πολυς μετα μαχαιρων και ξυλων παρα των αρχιερεων και των γραμματεων και των πρεσβυτερων

⁴⁴ δεδωκει δε ο παραδιδους αυτον συσσημον αυτοις λεγων ον αν φιλησω αυτος εστιν κρατησατε αυτον και απαγαγετε ασφαλως

⁴⁵ και ελθων ευθεως προσελθων αυτω λεγει ραββι ραββι και κατεφιλησεν αυτον

⁴³ And immediately, while he yet spake, cometh Judas, one of the twelve, and with him a great multitude with swords and staves, from the chief priests and the scribes and the elders.

⁴⁴ And he that betrayed him had given them a token, saying, Whomsoever I shall kiss, that same is he; take him, and lead him away safely.

⁴⁵ And as soon as he was come, he goeth straightway to him, and saith, Master, master; and kissed him.

The verb καταφιλέω translates as “I kiss”, “I caress with affection” and “I kiss tenderly”. It doesn’t seem to me to be a stretch that this is the beginning of a sexual assault, although of course it may only appear to be given contemporary Anglo-Saxon mores. After all, in the Arab world, for example, it’s normal for men to hold hands affectionately when walking down the street.

Another important passage is the mocking of Jesus, covered in Matthew 27:27-31 (KJV):

²⁷ Then the soldiers of the governor took Jesus into the common hall, and gathered unto him the whole band of soldiers.

²⁸ And they stripped him, and put on him a scarlet robe.

²⁹ And when they had platted a crown of thorns, they put it upon his head, and a reed in his right hand: and they bowed the knee before him, and mocked him, saying, Hail, King of the Jews!

³⁰ And they spit upon him, and took the reed, and smote him on the head.

³¹ And after that they had mocked him, they took the robe off from him, and put his own raiment on him, and led him away to crucify him.

²⁷ τοτε οι στρατιωται του ηγεμονος παραλαβοντες τον ιησουν εις το πραιτωριον συνηγαγον επ αυτον ολην την σπειραν

²⁸ και εκδυσαντες αυτον περιεθηκαν αυτω χλαμυδα κοκκινην

²⁹ και πλεξαντες στεφανον εξ ακανθων επεθηκαν επι την κεφαλην αυτου και καλαμον επι την δεξιαν αυτου και γονυπετησαντες εμπροσθεν αυτου ενεπαιζον αυτω λεγοντες χαιρε ο βασιλευς των ιουδαιων

³⁰ και εμπτυσαντες εις αυτον ελαβον τον καλαμον και ετυπτον εις την κεφαλην αυτου.

This, of course, is the point where, if it happened at all, the sexual assault is most likely to have occurred. It’s brutal of course, even as written, but Jesus is stripped naked before being dressed in a robe and mocked. This has overtones of the abuse of power, and it should be remembered that rape is primarily about power, more specifically the abuse thereof, not sex. The New Testament also paraphrases and euphemises sexual acts. I’ve already quoted Romans 1:27 –

. . . αρσενες εν αρσεσιν την ασχημοσυνην κατεργαζομενοι . . .

. . . men with men working that which is unseemly . . .

Other translation of ασχημοσυνη are “shamefulness”, “indecency”, “deformity”, “pudendum” and “nakedness”, the point being that this is euphemised. Elsewhere, in Genesis 4:1 for example, this appears:

וְהָאָדָם, יָדַע אֶת-חַוָּה אִשְׁתּוֹ; וַתַּהַר, וַתֵּלֶד אֶת-קַיִן, וַתֹּאמֶר, קָנִיתִי אִישׁ אֶת-יְהוָה.

The verb יָדַ֖ע here occurs more than five dozen times in the Tanakh, meaning “he knew”, usually with literal connotations, but occasionally referring to sexual relations. Both the Tanakh and the New Testament tend to refer to sex obliquely, not of course not always. However, we are correct in reading both of these passages as referring to sexual acts even though they are not explicitly mentioned. The difference in the gospels, of course, is that any euphemism would range over the entire passage. It would be a hint rather than a euphemism as such.

Paintings of the Crucifixion make concessions to the modesty of the times, just as other religious paintings do. For instance, although I won’t reproduce it here because I’ve posted it before and it will damage SEO, paintings of the resurrection on the Day of Judgement depict the naked bodies of the resurrected with swathes of cloth around their genitals, although this is not how the New Testament describes it. Likewise, the Crucifixion is usually shown with a loin cloth. This is inaccurate, and in a culture when modesty was key, nakedness would be shameful and have sexual overtones. The presence of the loincloth is not mentioned in any gospel account. It isn’t Biblical.

Seneca the Younger, in his ‘Of Consolation: To Marcia’, rails against crucifixion as cruel and unusual, as we might put it today, and talks about victims’ genitals being impaled in some cases. An important element of crucifixion is to shame the victim, and here again the abuse of power is involved. Within the concept of the gospels a man is stripped naked and flogged. This is sadism, and referring to Nagel’s account, is perverted. The perversion is there in the New Testament. It doesn’t need to be stretched or creatively interpreted to be seen as sexualised, and more specifically to do with the abuse of power over someone expressed sexually. Josephus refers to the torture of Jewish rebels by Roman soldiers, including sodomising them with sticks and sticking vetch stalks into their urethræ (from ‘On The Jewish War’). In Gorgias 473C, Plato refers to castration preceding crucifixion. So there’s some chapter and verse for you from external, non-Biblical sources that crucifixions had a sexual element.

Then there’s the circumstantial evidence. We all know that prisoners are raped. Sexual atrocities have been regularly committed by the military throughout history. Anal rape of men by Roman soldiers is an established fact of ancient history. Now put these all together:

• The Tanakh and the New Testament euphemise sexual acts.
• Anal rape of men as a humiliating punishment was common in the Ancient World and was perpetrated by soldiers.
• Roman soldiers sexually assaulted Jewish men around the year 70 CE, i.e. forty years after the Crucifixion.
• The depiction of the stripping and flogging of Jesus is unequivocal sadism.
• Rape is more about the abuse of power than sex, but there was no Roman taboo about homosexual acts.
• Contemporary accounts of crucifixion include sexual atrocities.
• Jesus was naked on the Cross.

I don’t deny that there are people out there who get off on the idea that Jesus was raped but simply because there are doesn’t mean it didn’t happen. It’s also true that Jesus needn’t literally go through the exact same sufferings as everyone who ever believes in him, but being the victim of sexual assault is an important category of suffering which people experience, sometimes in religious contexts. Also, the fact that people still use it today to mock Jesus doesn’t mean it’s sullied. In the Middle Ages, some nuns used to have visions that they were marrying Christ with his foreskin used as a wedding ring. This strikes us as peculiar and sexualised today, but it doesn’t irrevocably sully the relationship Christians have with him.

I want to move on now to the way people in today’s world react to this idea.

Before the late, largely unlamented Yahoo Answers succumbed to the malign neglect inflicted upon it by Verizon, there was a flurry of questions regarding the possibility that Jesus was raped. The motivations for many of the posts on that forum, if that’s the word, were often obscure. It was rife with people, myself included, who could probably be seen as mentally ill. For instance, there was a period during which Philosophy was afflicted by incessant questions about the details of the Australian Collins Submarine Project, which seemed to be an attempt by someone to come to terms with the office politics of the organisations involved but came to dominate the section, which one might expect to be about such questions as “if a tree falls in a forest with nothing to hear it, does it make a sound?”. Although there was a time when sensible questions could receive sensible answers there, by the end it was full of trolls and manifestations of mental illness. Hence the questions about Jesus being raped may well have had an erotic component for some of the people asking, but also were, I think, often attempts to upset Christians. The problem is that this approach is ill-conceived. Christians already worship a figure whose humiliation and low social status is for many of them a central part of his identity. He’s supposed to be a King who ruled from below while he was among us, and:

⁷ But made himself of no reputation, and took upon him the form of a servant, and was made in the likeness of men:

⁸ And being found in fashion as a man, he humbled himself, and became obedient unto death, even the death of the cross.

⁹ Wherefore God also hath highly exalted him, and given him a name which is above every name:

¹⁰ That at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, of things in heaven, and things in earth, and things under the earth;

⁷ αλλ εαυτον εκενωσεν μορφην δουλου λαβων εν ομοιωματι ανθρωπων γενομενος

⁸ και σχηματι ευρεθεις ως ανθρωπος εταπεινωσεν εαυτον γενομενος υπηκοος μεχρι θανατου θανατου δε σταυρου

⁹ διο και ο θεος αυτον υπερυψωσεν και εχαρισατο αυτω ονομα το υπερ παν ονομα

¹⁰ ινα εν τω ονοματι ιησου παν γονυ καμψη επουρανιων και επιγειων και καταχθονιων

Philippians 2:7-10.

We basically already know this about him. We may disagree on the details, but there are undoubtedly many examples of the consequences of his humble status which are not mentioned in the New Testament. Constantly bringing this particular aspect to light seems to be a calculated attempt to cause distress, but for many people it probably just makes the person doing this look silly and reveals their ignorance about the nature of the Christian faith. The appropriate response might be to work out a way to evangelise to such people, because their ignorance is a barrier to their salvation, as a Christian might see it.

All that said, I do agree that it’s possible that some of these statements are erotically motivated. I think they probably work because they cross taboos in people’s minds which were instilled early in their life, so the situation may be similar to something like a fetishist taking dirty underwear and masturbating to it. I don’t want to judge people for doing that, although for me it doesn’t sound like it’s just a fetish. It sounds, rather, that they are thoughtlessly or maliciously indulging their paraphilia when they could confine it to something which impinges less on the personal integrity of others. That said, a compassionate approach to someone’s psyche cannot allow one to give in even to moral disgust. I suspect that part of people’s motivation here is that they have been wronged by organised religion in one way or another, although I’m also sure there are many edgelords who are just doing it to get a reaction. And of course we do reward them for doing this when we do react.

That, then, is what I have to say for now, and the purpose, as I’ve said, of this post is to initiate a discussion which doesn’t descend into spam and the kind of silliness which happens on many online fora nowadays. Nonetheless, that’s my position on this. Any thoughts?

Gnosticism

Trigger warning: Rape.

Here’s some common ground for mainstream theistic Christians and metaphysically naturalistic atheists: something neither of us believe in. Gnosticism is a variety of religion, possibly a form of early Christianity but arguably not, which existed from about the first Christian century until going into decline around the time of the Council of Nicaea in 325 CE. It might have been the other way round, in which case mainstream Christians would’ve been the heretics and they’d be orthodox, but this is how it really turned out.

The word “Gnosticism” is derived from the Greek γνωσις, which both means and is cognate with the English word “knowledge” and the Sanskrit word ज्ञान, jñāna. The general idea is that Jesus provided special esoteric knowledge to a few people, such as his disciples, which can be discovered by analysing what he said. Because history went the way it did, Gnosticism comes across as odd to today’s Christians, and also has a flavour more akin to Eastern religions such as Buddhism than Judaism or the other Abrahamic religions. A possibly over-simplified version of Gnosticism goes as follows: There is an ultimate true God known as the Λογος, Logos, or Word, who rules over all and is ultimately good. This God is hermaphrodite and defined only negatively, for instance as the Unmoved. Several steps down from this God is the Δημιουργός, Demiurge or artisan, carpenter perhaps, who fashioned the physical Cosmos and has trapped souls in matter. This Universe as we know it is therefore effectively the Matrix. This is the origin of the idea that we might be living in a simulation, and the secret knowledge we gain enables us to escape. I often think this makes the film series ‘The Matrix’ and Elon Musk’s and others’ idea that we are in a simulation distinctly unoriginal. Some Gnostic Christians saw Christ as the manifestation of the Logos and contrasted the New Testament God with God as portrayed in the Hebrew Bible as being the Logos and the Demiurge respectively.

Now for a bit more detail.

This is a diagram of the πληρωμα (pleroma). This is literally “fullness” and is a concept used in both orthodox and Gnostic Christianity. It means the totality of divine power. There is, incidentally, a lot of overlap between the concepts of orthodox and Gnostic Christianity and the word is used many times in the New Testament. It contrasts with κένωμα, kenoma, emptiness, and there may be a third contrast with κοςμος, kosmos (more usually spelt with a C in English). I should point out, incidentally, that when I say “orthodox Christianity” I’m actually referring to the version of Christianity which is directly ancestral to the Roman Catholic, Protestant and of course Orthodox denominations of the Church, and not just the Orthodox churches, although at the time what was to become mainstream Christianity was also to become the Orthodox Church. Terminology just is confusing here. A general trend of sophistication can be traced in the New Testament between the earlier synoptic gospels and the later Fourth Gospel and Johannine writings, and this trend continued with Gnosticism becoming more esoteric. Therefore the Pleroma as shown above works like this. The point at the top is the Monad, which seems to be another word for the Logos but I’m not sure (I’ll come back to that). This emanates into νους & αληθεια (I’m having to shift between Greek and English keyboards here all the time, hence the ampersand in the middle of that – it’s quite tiresome!), which are Mind and Truth. The word for “truth” is negative in Greek, meaning something like “non-forgetfulness” or “the state of not being hidden”, hence the “a-“, as in “atypical”, “asymmetrical” and “atheism”, also found in the related Sanskrit. This reflects the tendency in Gnosticism to pursue the via negativa, i.e. describing things as what they are not because the divine passes all understanding and therefore cannot be described positively – we don’t have appropriate concepts for God. This could lead into something interesting, and it will in a bit. Every point in that diagram within or on the larger circle represents one of the emanations of the divine, and the circle itself is referred to as the Boundary, Cross (Stake as in σταυρος), i.e. the same word used for the instrument of Jesus’s execution. The pleroma is where the ‘αιωνης (I’m not sure of that plural) dwell. These Æones (singular “Æon”) are the enamations of the Monad. Emanations are things which are “thrown off” the Monad without it being diminished. I tend to think of them as separate beings but I’m not sure this is correct. A similar idea is found in Zoroastrianism with the 𐬀𐬨𐬆𐬱𐬀 𐬯𐬞𐬆𐬧𐬙𐬀, Amesha Spenta, seven divine and personified emanations of Ahura Mazda representing various virtuous attributes of God. Since these are personified, I assume they are also in Gnosticism, which has thirty of them.

The kenoma could be linked to kenosis, an important concept in orthodox Christian theology. Kenosis is the idea that in becoming human Jesus emptied himself out and “became nothing for us”, and is a useful concept, for example, in the idea that Jesus was gang-raped before the crucifixion by Roman soldiers. One of the most popular posts on this blog is ‘Was Jesus Raped?‘ which goes into this in more detail, but it should be noted that there are many people who describe themselves as Christian now who object to such things as this statue:

A photo of the Jesus the Homeless Statue by Timothy Schmalz outside
Date
22 April 2014, 14:15:07
Source
Own work
Author
Pjposullivan

This statue is sometimes objected to on the grounds that it attempts to debase Christ, and similarly there are attempts on Yahoo! Answers to insult Christians by bringing up the question of him being gang raped. Kenosis focusses on the idea of Jesus becoming the lowest of the low: a homeless man, born in a stable, who happened to be God. The Gnostic concept of the Kenoma is of the emptiness or void outside of the Boundary of the Monad, and is the world as we perceive it by our senses. Each Æon in the pleroma has a corresponding entity in the kenoma.

The reason all this stuff is speculated about is that it’s supposed to be secret knowledge which carries the key to the Universe, and it’s also an attempt to reconcile Christian philosophy with Neoplatonism. My first impulse is to throw all of this into some kind of conceptual dustbin as completely idle and pointless esotericism, but one thing that stops me is the fact that, and this opens me to potential ridicule, I actually believe Nostradamus made successful, unambiguous and accurate predictions, and he based his technique on Neoplatonism. Also, the esoteric has a draw to me: it can be seen in alchemy, the Qabbalah, choirs of angels and the likes of the chakra system in Yoga.

I am, of course, coming out of the dominant strand of Christianity, some of which was to evolve into evangelical Protestantism, and consequently I’ve inherited the dismissive attitude of the early Church from about the fifth Christian century onwards, which regards Gnosticism as heretical. This history of early Christianity may, however, help to explain a couple of notable features of today’s mainstream Christian faith. Christianity as I understand it has an oddly sparse and austere cosmology. Any other world faith seems to have accumulated complex models of the spiritual universe such as many deities, the various worlds of Buddhism, the emanations of Zoroastrianism, the complexity of the Talmud in Rabbinical Judaism and the names of God in Islam. Some denominations of the Christian faith share that kind of concretion, but not the likes of the Society of Friends or Evangelical Protestantism, the two aspects wherewith I have most to do. I also place ethical considerations right at the centre of my life, something which occurred to me when I first looked at the Qabbalah, because the idea there seemed to be that “doing the Right Thing”, which in that case probably meant following the Talmud perfectly, was simply the first stage of the Tree Of Life, whereas to me that makes the entire thing redundant because it constitutes a distraction from that duty and a waste of time and energy. This plainness and austerity, in the context of what became orthodox Christianity, seems like a continuation of the trend which began with the rejection of Gnosticism.

There is, though, an opposite trend which is equally apparent in Evangelical Protestantism, and the fact that these two seem to coëxist in it really puzzles me. If you look at, for example, Judaism, that has a list of thirteen precepts arrived at by Moses Maimonides which sums up its basis, although of course you then have the sophistication of Torah, Talmud and perhaps even the Zohar. Islam has its Five Pillars and Buddhism its Four Noble Truths and Noble Eightfold Path. All of these amount to just one principle: do good deeds in the world and you will achieve a higher state of being. Evangelical Protestantism is markèdly unlike this. It has no “elevator pitch”. In order to do the right thing according to that, you have to repent and commit to Christ, the uniquely fully human and fully divine sinless person who died on the Cross for you in order to atone for the inherited sins of the human race due to the first people’s disobedience from God, and it isn’t good deeds which help here but just the one deed of letting Christ in. Maybe it’s just because I’m closer to it, but all that seems a lot more complicated than other religions. And somehow, this austerity and complexity comfortably occur together as features of Evangelical Protestantism. Which is weird. However, I think this complexity is probably inherited from Gnosticism, because a clear trend can be seen towards it in the chronological order of the New Testament texts.

Modern mainstream Christianity, including in fact heterodox sects such as Jehovah’s Witnesses, emerges from a tradition which defined itself as “Not Gnosticism”, although there are other heresies such as Arianism and Monophysitism, while also inheriting Gnostic features. One legacy is the via negativa, that is, describing the Divine by what it’s not. There is a view that metaphysically naturalistic, scientifically realist atheism is the result of a Christian world view because of its separation between the Divine and the created realms, the latter of which is taken to be amenable to logic and governed by physical laws, and ultimately leading to the redundancy of the concept of God. Some other forms of atheism are remarkably different. For instance, some Indian atheists simply saw karma as a sufficient explanation for everything an therefore rejected the concept of God. But to me the most appealing other option to theism, and probably the one closest to my own theism, is theological non-cognitivism, also known as “ignosticism”, which is the view that religious language, including talk of God, is not about semantic meaning, and therefore that “there is no God” is just as invalid as “God exists”. It’s similar to ethical non-cognitivism – the idea that a sentence like “this is the right thing to do” in fact means “I approve of this, do so as well”. It is also true that the via negativa edges into that, and if I were to reach another set of beliefs from where I currently am, I would probably just decide that atheism and theism are equally crass and ill-conceived. This idea can be traced back to Gnosticism, although it crops up in other belief systems, such as logical positivism. There is no point at which I would ever claim to be atheist, for that reason, unless I change my mind about the idea that there is always a strong emotive element in meaning. My narrative tends to be psychological even though I’m externalist, but ignosticism also works as a way of highlighting the possibility that our notion of God, among other religious ideas, may simply be incoherent.

I don’t consider Gnosticism to be a good thing. To my mind, it removes the distinctiveness of Christianity and makes it more like Buddhism and Hinduism in that it leads one to view matter as evil. This has negative consequences in the real world. For instance, Ayurvedic medicine is influenced by the idea that reincarnation is an undesirable consequence in that it sees in utero development as painful for the fetus and pregnancy as an unhealthy state, so it brings misogyny with it. Women are, for Ayurvedic medicine, undesirable vessels which trap us all in life as opposed to Nirvana. The same kind of thing happens with Gnosticism, since it views matter as evil and something to be escaped. Adopting such an attitude undercuts the urge to make a positive difference to the world, since life is effectively an illusion anyway. The modern Church has also accused transgender people of Gnosticism, which I won’t cover since this is the wrong blog for it: here is a pamphlet from the Christian Institute on the matter, so to speak.

There are opposing views regarding whether the New Testament itself contains Gnostic elements. It had a tendency to use words also used in the New Testament, and the Septuagint, but elaborated way beyond their usual meaning, which accords with its esotericism. The Fourth Gospel (“John”) of course mentions the Logos in a prominent position and there seems to be something odd going on with its prose style which I’ve never been able to put my finger on, possibly chiasmus, which might be used to extract some kind of hidden meaning. Analysing the texts of the gospels themselves, some claim that earlier and later versions can be distinguished in such as way that Jesus was viewed differently as time went by. Specifically, the Gospel of Thomas, a non-canonical gospel which, however, appears to be Q, an early long-undiscovered apparent source for other canonical gospels, seems to focus on the idea that the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand and doesn’t refer to the idea of the End Times. This could reflect on a change in attitude when the apparently promised imminent end of the world didn’t happen. To my mind, it seems that paradoxically the idea that the world was about to end is a later idea, although this may not be sustainable considering the apparently apocalyptic focus of much contemporary Judaism. It’s also possible that Paul was influenced by Gnosticism, because his focus was on the Gentiles, who would at the time have been more comfortable with Greek ideas, although the Jews were themselves quite Hellenised at this time. He may even have been Gnostic himself, referring to “knowledge” in such texts as 1 Corinthians 8:10 –

Εαω γαρ τις ιδη σε τον εχοντα γνωσιν εν ειδωλειω κατακειμενον ουχι η συνειδησις αυτου ασθενους οντος οικοδομηθησεται εις το τα ειδωλοθυτα εσθειν;

For if someone with a weak conscience sees you, with all your knowledge, eating in an idol’s temple, won’t that person be emboldened to eat what is sacrificed to idols? 

I don’t know about you, but to me this looks a bit contrived, since the “knowledge” might simply be the usual Pauline theology of salvation.

To conclude, if Gnosticism had become the dominant form of Christianity I don’t think it would’ve been a good thing. Even as it stands, Christianity may have been instrumental in the fall of the Roman Empire because people simply didn’t care about the world any more, and with Gnosticism it would’ve been even more so. It’s popular in certain circles and has influenced Christianity as we know it, pun intended, but it isn’t a good thing. It’s still quite interesting though.

Was Jesus Raped?

Very obvious trigger warnings.

I’m going to start with trolls. I’m quite keen on frequenting Yahoo! Answers Religion & Spirituality section, and have been a level 7 user on there although it’s subject to the same entropy as I’ve just written about . There’s also the usual polarisation of opinion there, with the main categories being metaphysically naturalistic atheists and fundamentalist evangelical Protestants, who unwittingly agree on a historical-grammatical approach to Scripture, apparently because they’re ignorant of other options. There are also, unsurprisingly, many trolls, some of which are hard to comprehend, but a recent apparent attempt at trolling is to ask variations of the question at the top of this post: Was Jesus raped? I don’t fully understand why this is trolling, because the chances are that the historical Jesus was indeed sexually assaulted, quite possibly even gang-raped, and it actually has quite helpful considerations.

Before I go any further, I should point out that a lot of what I’m going to say is a paraphrase of the Otago theologian David Tombs’ research, although it’s also a personal response and I’ve added more.

First, to address the idea of an historical Jesus for non-believers: most scholars agree that Jesus, that is Yeshua ben Yosef of Nazareth, did exist. The popular New Atheist idea that he didn’t is poorly informed and an example of an extreme position adopted in ignorance. These scholars, incidentally, are not religious. Many of them are themselves agnostic or atheist and don’t have an axe to grind. I don’t want to go on too much about this because that’s not what this is about, but consensus opinion is that there was such a person, that he was baptised by John The Baptist, crucified under Pontius Pilate and lived at a time of unrest when the Jews were expecting the apocalypse and the appearance of the Messiah. However, what I’m going to say doesn’t entirely depend on the existence of a real Jesus.

Beyond this, things are more controversial, but suppose someone of that description had lived at that time and that the above claims are true of him. What would have happened to him at the end of his life? I also want to emphasise that in concentrating on the question of his sexual assault, I don’t wish to minimise any other suffering he or anyone else went through under the Romans or any other oppressive regime, but rather to concentrate on an aspect of it which people tend not to think about and seem to shy away from. And I’m not setting myself up as an expert either, although of course I’m Christian, and furthermore a bog-standard Christian which most staunch evangelicals would accept as such, even though my values are highly divergent from what might be expected given that.

Having got that out of the way, there are at least three main sources of evidence that Jesus was sexually assaulted, and I also think it’s fair to describe his assault as anal rape, possibly repeatedly. These are: historical evidence outside the Bible, the gospels themselves and circumstantial evidence from what’s known to happen in similar situations at other times and places.

Firstly, historical evidence suggests that crucifixion involved other elements than what we’re told in the gospels. Here’s a fairly standard depiction of the crucifixion of Jesus:

I can’t just post that and move on. It’s an upsetting image of a real event. Forget for a moment that that’s Jesus and remember that this is something which happened routinely in the Roman Empire. Although the picture is inaccurate in various ways, and the black background presumably refers to Matthew 27:45 – “Now from the sixth hour there was darkness over all the land unto the ninth hour,” – the fact was that people did hang and suffer like this, and died from a combination of heatstroke, dehydration, suffocation and suspension syndrome – look them up if you like but this is not a medical post. But there is one probable inaccuracy which is particularly important in this context. Would there really have been a loincloth? Would the Roman authorities, having flogged him, stripped him naked and forced him to carry his cross through the streets of Jerusalem, really have provided him with a cover to preserve his modesty? Why would they have done that? Would it not, in fact, have had the opposite effect from what they intended, of humiliating and destroying his dignity in death? I don’t think so. I think that loincloth is there for the viewer and because Velázquez couldn’t have got away with depicting the Son of God, as he was seen by the majority of the populace at the time, in a seventeenth century predominantly Roman Catholic country. And just as Matthew says the veil of the temple was torn in two at the moment of his death, we need to tear away this garment, because in doing so it emphasises the sheer nothingness to which Jesus was being reduced by the Romans. This is also a society in which there was a great deal more modesty than we’re used to in the West. The hijab in Islam for men, as far as I know, involves covering the waist from the navel to the knees as a minimum, and since religious Jews, Christians and Muslims are all people of the book, it seems very likely that something like that would’ve been enforced by the Pharisees. They certainly would not have considered it okay to expose the entire body, and the nakedness of crucifixion is a significant, and deliberately sexually humiliating, part of the punishment. It very probably violates Jewish religious codes. Although it’s a mistake to assume what was the general practice in Roman-occupied Palestine two thousand years ago to be similar to modern Orthodox Jewish practice, modesty of dress is clearly important to Hassidic men today. That insult, and perhaps blasphemy, was an element of the motivation behind the crucifixion of Jews. It says, “we don’t care about your culture or your God and we’re showing it by ridiculing it as we kill you”. It’s also significant that artistic depictions of the crucifixion always, as far as I know, commit this inaccuracy, because it’s hard for them to face the probable fact of his nakedness and vulnerability in this respect.

Josephus the first century Jewish historian who may or may not have referred to Jesus in his work – many see it as an insert by later writers and a forgery – also refers to the practice among Jewish radicals of driving stakes into the recta of victims and stuffing vetch down their urethras in order to torture them into revealing the location of food. Josephus was writing for a Roman audience and is unlikely to have portrayed the Jews sympathetically, but these kinds of torture are rife in the ancient world and can be expected to have happened in other contexts even if they didn’t in the one he mentioned. Plato also describes crucifixion as being preceded by castration, so it did happen. Also, the Romans used to arrange the bodies of their victims in “amusing” poses on the crosses, and if Jesus hadn’t been castrated by that point, it doesn’t stretch credulity at all to suppose that considering that his limbs had been nailed to the cross, so might his genitals.

This is all “mights” and “could’ves” of course, but to me it doesn’t stretch credulity at all to believe that once Jesus had been handed over to the soldiers that he would’ve been raped, possibly repeatedly, as well as all the rest of what happened, and regardless of anything else. You can completely leave aside the element of sexual humiliation as a weapon of power during the crucifixion itself and still believe the soldiers gang-raped him anally. Unlike the Jews, the Romans had no sodomy taboo.

This brings me to the gospels themselves. Clearly they don’t mention anything explicit about this, and people haven’t generally “gone there” since, but considering that the New Testament is generally quite circumspect about these things and only refers to them elliptically if at all, this is not surprising. Paul’s statement in Romans 1:27 refers to homosexual male activity in these terms: “And likewise also the men, leaving the natural use of the woman, burned in their lust one toward another; men with men working that which is unseemly, and receiving in themselves that recompence of their error which was meet.”. It may also be that the writers themselves couldn’t face talking about it, or that their sources couldn’t since the accounts are not contemporary. Incidentally, if you’re worried about inaccuracy and mythologising at this point, bear in mind that the myth you might think this is is still significant and useful to many.

The gospels do refer to Herod and the soldiers dressing Jesus in a “kingly”, “purple” or “red” robe after taking off his clothes and mocking him by pretending to worship him, and to him being flogged. All of this could plausibly have a sexual element to it.

Then there’s the evidence of what happens in other comparable situations. The purpose of crucifixions was «pour encourager les autres» as Voltaire once put it, that is, if the punishment is severe enough, it’s easier to subject a population. That subjection bears a close parallel to the meaning of rape, in the sense that it’s about power. It’s entirely credible that a regime like Rome would exercise its power over its conquered peoples by subjecting them sexually, something which happened at the time routinely in war, and still happens today in that context. Taking a couple of examples, the recent Congolese war was characterised by male rape, it was used as an instrument of war in Libya, Gaddafi was sexually assaulted with a metal pipe before being dragged off and killed, and there are numerous other examples. The sexual assault and other anal rape of men is routine in this situations in modern times and is also referred to throughout recorded history.

This gives Judas’s kiss a whole new meaning, doesn’t it?

Okay, so whereas I feel pretty confident that this did happen, the question arises of why it’s important to emphasise it. One reason is that it stresses the fact that Jesus was socially speaking a pretty lowly person, subject to all the suffering that we experience in our lives in this imperfect world. Jesus is the person to me as a Christian who provides me with a good example, and was able to avoid wrongdoing and selfishness in every situation he was confronted with. There’s nothing in his experience which can’t in some way be meaningfully equated with anything which happens in someone else’s, regardless of sex or gender. He is also not a person apart from the rest of us. Whereas I have a lot of respect for Islam, one of the problems I find with it is that many Muslims, and the Qu’ran itself, deny that Jesus was crucified because they don’t believe that God would allow that to happen to a prophet – such a person would be under special protection perhaps. This is not the kind of king Jesus is. Jesus is absolutely one of us, and he’s able to stand with a rape survivor and genuinely say he’s been through that too if this happened. The whole point of the incarnation is that he’s walked a lifetime in our shoes, and that’s everyone.

Another reason is that it helps to work against the denial of sexual abuse of children and others which has taken place in various churches, because there is no shame for the survivors of these assaults if they are suffering as Christ suffered, and it stresses also that the perpetrators are doing “unto the least of my brethren” what was done to Christ. The current unease about revealing this stuff, while understandable, is in accordance with the way these sexual sins have been hidden in the past when they were committed against Jesus.

A further aspect of this is that it provides a model of solidarity for the “meek”. Those who are suffering in war and totalitarian states are going through what Jesus went through, in this and in other ways. This is the kind of king Jesus is. Jesus can be seen as a freedom fighter or guerilla, and this and other aspects of his life underline this.

Yes, it’s uncomfortable to assert that as well as all the other suffering he went through, Jesus was probably raped, but it helps, because it means Christ is with us in that and there’s nowhere he won’t go to walk beside us. It’s a difficult and unnerving prospect to look at, but if spirituality is merely about comfort, is it really worth having at all?