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?