There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female; for you are all one…
Galatians 3:28
This is one of the few sentiments that’s both in the earliest primary source documents of Jesus and the apocrypha:
“…when you make male and female into a single one, so that the male will not be male nor the female be female…”
Gospel of Thomas 22
When Salome inquired when the things concerning which she asked should be known, the Lord said: When ye have trampled on the garment of shame, and when the two become one and the male with the female is neither male nor female.
Lost Gospel of the Egyptians via Clement
At the time Jesus was actually alive, the interpretation of Genesis 1:27’s “So God created humans in his image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them” was widely thought to mean that there was a hermaphroditic original ‘Adam.’ This was widely discussed just a few decades after the time of Jesus among the Egyptian Jews in Alexandria, particularly Philio, contemporary to Paul.
As well, at the time he was alive there was a very brutal form of forced hormone alteration by castrating prepubescent boys to leave them more feminine. Only a few decades after Jesus’s crucifixion the emperor of Rome even married someone this was done to (just a few years before the extant gospel of Mark is finalized, talking about marriage only being between a man and a woman).
The ways in which a historical Jesus would have been thinking about the notions of gender or sexuality may be different than you might think back then.
In my mind, the historical people at the center of the tradition has always been more important than the echo of them leftover in books confirmably marred by edits, revisions, and omissions. For both the old book and the new.
And I think the historical Jesus might have agreed.
His disciples said to him, “Twenty-four prophets have spoken in Israel, and they all spoke of you.”
He said to them, “You have disregarded the living one who is in your presence, and have spoken of the dead.” […]
Jesus said, “Whoever drinks from my mouth will become like me; I myself shall become that person, and the hidden things will be revealed to him.”
The people who had a version of Jesus saying this also thought he was talking about matter being made up of indivisible parts, something only proven to be true beyond any doubt around a century ago.
It’s easy for false prophets to cast weeds among the wheat, but it’s very hard to plant seeds that mature well with the times. To do that takes true foresight. Eventually as the years drag on, what was wheat and what was weeds inevitably becomes clearer as each grows - it’s an inescapable separator between truth and fiction.
The Old Testament is flat out wrong when Elihu claims in Job that “why it rains and where snow comes from is beyond human understanding.” This knowledge had even become known in Jesus’s time, in the same Roman book published just 50 years before he was born in the Roman empire which also talked about Greek atomism and survival of the fittest.
The church, in an age where people were still peeing on their hands to clean them, appointed itself an arbiter of what was wheat and what was weeds and proceeded to uproot anything it declared a weed.
TL;DR: Having blind faith in those who have even more blind faith sounds a bit like the blind leading the blind to me. Maybe one would be less in danger of blaspheming the holy spirit and the notion of divine revelation if avoiding declaring anything absolutely true or false for sure until having sufficient confirmable information to evaluate it.
That “wait and watch” approach is even the methodology of how the aforementioned book 50 years before Jesus got all that other stuff right about evolution and atoms. A book sharing word for word similarities with one of Jesus’s most famous parables, about how only what survived to reproduce multiplied. Also the only parable in the earliest written canonized gospel which has a “secret explanation” for what was a clearly public telling of the parable itself to thousands.
This is one of the few sentiments that’s both in the earliest primary source documents of Jesus and the apocrypha:
At the time Jesus was actually alive, the interpretation of Genesis 1:27’s “So God created humans in his image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them” was widely thought to mean that there was a hermaphroditic original ‘Adam.’ This was widely discussed just a few decades after the time of Jesus among the Egyptian Jews in Alexandria, particularly Philio, contemporary to Paul.
As well, at the time he was alive there was a very brutal form of forced hormone alteration by castrating prepubescent boys to leave them more feminine. Only a few decades after Jesus’s crucifixion the emperor of Rome even married someone this was done to (just a few years before the extant gospel of Mark is finalized, talking about marriage only being between a man and a woman).
The ways in which a historical Jesus would have been thinking about the notions of gender or sexuality may be different than you might think back then.
In my mind, the historical people at the center of the tradition has always been more important than the echo of them leftover in books confirmably marred by edits, revisions, and omissions. For both the old book and the new.
And I think the historical Jesus might have agreed.
The people who had a version of Jesus saying this also thought he was talking about matter being made up of indivisible parts, something only proven to be true beyond any doubt around a century ago.
It’s easy for false prophets to cast weeds among the wheat, but it’s very hard to plant seeds that mature well with the times. To do that takes true foresight. Eventually as the years drag on, what was wheat and what was weeds inevitably becomes clearer as each grows - it’s an inescapable separator between truth and fiction.
The Old Testament is flat out wrong when Elihu claims in Job that “why it rains and where snow comes from is beyond human understanding.” This knowledge had even become known in Jesus’s time, in the same Roman book published just 50 years before he was born in the Roman empire which also talked about Greek atomism and survival of the fittest.
The church, in an age where people were still peeing on their hands to clean them, appointed itself an arbiter of what was wheat and what was weeds and proceeded to uproot anything it declared a weed.
TL;DR: Having blind faith in those who have even more blind faith sounds a bit like the blind leading the blind to me. Maybe one would be less in danger of blaspheming the holy spirit and the notion of divine revelation if avoiding declaring anything absolutely true or false for sure until having sufficient confirmable information to evaluate it.
That “wait and watch” approach is even the methodology of how the aforementioned book 50 years before Jesus got all that other stuff right about evolution and atoms. A book sharing word for word similarities with one of Jesus’s most famous parables, about how only what survived to reproduce multiplied. Also the only parable in the earliest written canonized gospel which has a “secret explanation” for what was a clearly public telling of the parable itself to thousands.