The gospels of Judith Christ

A friend of mine recently tipped me onto a new book making a stir with its assertion that Jesus Christ was a woman and not a man.

"Judith Christ of Nazareth: The Gospels of the Bible, Corrected to Reflect that Christ was a Woman" is a collection of the four canonical gospels with all references to Jesus changed to reflect this conceit. That's it. It's not a serious attempt at scholarship; it's a clever trick meant to make us examine our attitudes toward women, and that's about it.

I'd like to think most people think it's an interesting idea, contemplate it a bit and then move.

Unfortunately there are other people for whom moving on is impossible. To them it's not a tempest in a teapot, it's a shitshow in sackcloth.

Over at CHRefugee, which I visited recently to see if it really was getting as ridiculous as a friend said it was, people were gleefully pointing out that Judith is the feminine form of Judas, as though that proved something, and talking about the "translation" as though it were a heresy straight from hell.

The only fair criticism that I saw was that the Bible, when it uses a pronoun to refer to God, invariably settles on the masculine set, and there is no evidence that Jesus was actually a woman.

To the point of the book: What diffrence would it have made had if Jesus had come as a woman? Offhand I can't think of anything. God chose to work through a patriarchal society to reveal himself, but he uses some pretty blatant feminine imagery to describe himself at times. There's the prophetic utterance "Can a mother forget the child that nurses at her breast?" or Jesus' own statement, "Long have I longed to gather you as a hen gathers her chicks beneath her wings."

The Holy Spirit, one of the three persons of the Godhead, routinely is described with feminine imagery, describing God as a comforter and a nurturer. The Holy Spirit's name in Hebrew, Ruakh Khadesh, is even feminine. My personal favorite is one of the names the Tanakh uses to refer to God: "many-breasted One." (I think that's El Shaddai.)

So why Jesus and not Judith? I would hazard a guess it's because of the culture he was in, and no other reason.

When I directed the church's Passion play one year, I wanted to cast my close, personal friend Anne in the role of Christ because she was the best actor available. Anne loved the idea, but didn't see how we could pull it off with a one-time performance, since by the time people got used to a female Jesus, the play would be over, with no other performances coming up.

As the father of two girls, I wish the Bible had more fully developed female role models than just Esther and Ruth. That no doubt is because of the culture the Bible was written in, but it's a shame that we don't know more about women like Priscilla, Lydia or Dorcas, Deborah or even Jael. All I can say about Priscilla is that Paul thought highly of her, she was a woman apostle and a contender for author of Hebrews, and a few other little tidbits like that. That's a loss for all of us.

If this is going to drive people batty so much, I'm tempted to scour the Bible for other men who were really women in disguise.

The best example would have to be Jacob, the father of the Israelites. Remember how he was smooth-skinned, Rebekah loved him more than Esau, he was good in the kitchen and had a voice that was noticeably different from his brother's? As a woman, Jacob even needed someone else to help him get his wives pregnant.

It would be much easier today, with fertility technology, but at the time he had help from two of the household servants, whom the Bible calls "maidservants" in an attempt to perpetuate the fiction that Jacob was a man.

In the end, these over-the-top reactions underscore the message of the LBI Institute responsible for publishing these tales of Judith Christ. There's a lot of sexism and misogyny in the church aimed at women. It's inconsistent with the liberating message of the gospel and ultimately counter to the prevailing message of Scripture.

God sees it, and man is she pissed.