Jesus might be a woman dressed as a man - Religion scholar
A scholar at a Jesuit-run college in Massachusetts, Professor Tat-Siong Benny Liew, has reportedly claimed in his ‘radical’ reading of the New Testament that Jesus might have been a male or female and could have been a drag king.
Drag kings are mostly female performance artists who dress in masculine drag and personify male gender stereotypes as part of an individual or group routine.
Elinor Reilly, a former student at the College of the Holy Cross, wrote an article about Professor Liew where she reportedly outlined in great detail the professor’s “unconventional approach to gender, sexuality, and race in the biblical texts”.
Independent UK reports that Reilly cited a 2009 paper Liew co-authored entitled They Were All Together In One Place: Towards Minority Biblical Criticism
READ ALSO: You cannot install APGA governor - Okorocha dares Imo Archbishop
In the volume, Liew discussed the New Testament Gospel of John: “If one follows the trajectory of the Wisdom/Word or Sophia/Jesus (con) figuration, what we have in John’s Jesus is not only a “king of Israel” or “king of the Ioudaioi”, but also a drag king.
[Christ] ends up appearing as a drag-kingly bride in his passion.”
The professor added: “In addition, we find Jesus disrobing and rerobing in the episode that marks Jesus’ focus on the disciples with the coming of his ‘hour’ (13:3– 5, 12).
“This disrobing, as [Colleen] Conway points out, does not disclose anything about Jesus’ anatomy. Instead, it describes Jesus washing his disciples’ feet.
“As more than one commentator has pointed out, foot-washing was generally only done by Jewish women or non-Jewish slaves.
“12 John is clear that Jesus is an Ioudaios (4:9, 22; 18:33– 35; 19:40); what John is less clear about is whether Jesus is a biological male. Like a literary striptease, this episode is suggestive, even seductive; it shows and withholds at the same time.”
Professor Liew also allegedly argued that John’s constant references to Jesus and water “speak to Jesus’ gender indeterminacy and hence his cross-dressing and other queer desires”.
PAY ATTENTION: Get the Latest Nigerian News Anywhere 24/7. Spend less on the Internet!
He also suggests that the crucifixion scene as described by John implies that “when Jesus’ body is being penetrated, his thoughts are on his Father imagining his passion experience as a… sexual relation with his own Father".
Meanwhile, Legit.ng previously reported that German Chancellor Angela Merkel struck a conciliatory tone in her first speech to parliament on Wednesday, March 21 saying Islam had become part of the country because about 4.5 million Muslims are living in the nation.
The chancellor was alleged to have directly contradicted her new interior minister, an old foe when it comes to the topic of refugees, Horst Seehofer, leader of the Christian Social Union.
Seehofer sparked a furore recently when he told the Bild newspaper that “Islam does not belong in Germany.”
Image of Jesus Christ appears in Ikorodu Church - on Legit.ng TV
Source: Legit.ng
