🏳️⚧️🏺🛐 Jesus and the Eunuch Bible 14
🏳️🌈🏺2-Gay in History🛐🏳️⚧️
Jesus never said anything about gay people. We’ve heard that — and it’s technically true. But he did welcome people who fall outside the male/female binary.
Matthew 19 opens with the Pharisees testing Jesus on divorce. He gives a stricter answer than they expected, one most modern Christians seem to gloss over. His disciples respond: if that’s the standard, it’s better not to marry at all and Jesus doesn’t correct them.
“Not everyone can accept this teaching, but only those to whom it is given. For there are eunuchs who have been so from birth, and there are eunuchs who have been made eunuchs by others, and there are eunuchs who have made themselves eunuchs for the sake of the kingdom of heaven. Let anyone accept this who can.”
Three categories of people: the third — voluntary celibacy for the kingdom — is the one churches focus on exclusively ignoring the first two.
Jewish tradition has long recognized multiple gender categories. The Talmud distinguishes between the ‘saris hamah’ — a person born with male-identified characteristics who naturally develops otherwise — and the ‘saris adam,’ eunuchs made so by human intervention. Those categories map exactly onto Jesus’s list, we may not practice castration any more, but Jesus is describing intersex people and people who have had their gender changed, without excluding either.
It gets more complicated though. In the ancient world “born eunuch” often described men who lacked attraction to women not just genitalia— a category that included what we would now call some gay men. Even Robert Gagnon — the most prominent conservative anti-gay biblical scholar — concedes that born eunuchs in the ancient world probably included homosexually inclined people, which he acknowledges contradicts the claim that the ancient world couldn’t conceive of people born with same-sex attraction.
Jesus casually includes them without calling them to repentance or qualifying or conditioning their place in the kingdom. He simply acknowledges they exist and moves right along.
Jesus seems to be aware that not everyone could accept these people and yet he seems to include all non-binary and trans people, and even by extension gay people using the only language he had for it before holding up celibacy, but the only thing the church heard was celibacy.
We covered earlier in this series how Isaiah 56 promised eunuchs — those barred from the assembly in Deuteronomy — an everlasting name better than sons and daughters. And how in Acts, Philip finds the Ethiopian eunuch reading that very prophet and baptizes him on the spot. Jesus’s words in Matthew are just part of that same thread.
“Let anyone accept this who can.”
Jesus doesn’t ask you to be comfortable. He asks for acceptance. The people who can’t seem to manage that aren’t following a harder teaching than Jesus gave — they’re refusing the one he did.
I will share some closing thoughts on the series next week.
