Transgender Jesus? by Neil English

Trinity College Cambridge Revives Ancient Gnostic Heresy

On Sunday, November 20, 2022, a group of Church of England worshippers faithfully attended a church service at Trinity College Cambridge expecting the godly pastoral care they had come to expect on a day of worship. But the celebrant, a newly-minted Ph.D. in Divinity, Joshua Heath, delivered a sermon quite unlike any other.

An expert in Medieval art, Heath showed the congregation a number of paintings, including one showing Jesus’ prominent spear wound with blood gushing down his dead body as it’s taken down from the cross. To the utter shock of the congregation, Heath then argued that the wound represented a woman’s vagina and that Jesus had a trans body. Heath also cited a 14th century work, where the blood flowed down the Lord’s side to his groin area. That too, in Heath’s mind, screamed “transgender.”

The side wound “takes on a decidedly vaginal appearance,” said Heath. He further proclaimed:

In Christ’s simultaneously masculine and feminine body in these works, if the body of Christ as these works suggest the body of all bodies, then his body is also the trans body.

The congregation was outraged. Some shouted, “Heresy!” Another left the church building in tears. Others went straight to the Dean of Trinity College, Dr. Michael Banner. One wrote a letter to Banner:

I am contemptuous of the idea that by cutting a hole in a man, through which he can be penetrated, he can become a woman.

I am especially contemptuous of such imagery when it is applied to our Lord, from the pulpit, at Evensong. I am contemptuous of the notion that we should be invited to contemplate the martyrdom of a “trans Christ”, a new heresy for our age.

But instead of condemning the sermon, Banner actually spoke out in defense of his young apprentice. In a letter obtained by the Telegraph, Dr. Banner gave this response:

For myself, I think that speculation was legitimate, whether or not you or I or anyone else disagrees with the interpretation, says something else about that artistic tradition, or resists its application to contemporary questions around transsexualism.

Since the sermon was aired, Trinity College has tried to distance itself from Heath’s woke sermon, issuing a further statement:

Neither the Dean of Trinity College nor the researcher giving the sermon suggested Jesus was transgender.

The sermon addressed the image of Christ depicted in art and various interpretations of those artistic portrayals.

The sermon’s exploration of the nature of religious art, in the spirit of thought-provoking academic inquiry, was in keeping with open debate and dialogue at the University of Cambridge.

Gnostic Influences?

Heath’s egregious linking of obscure Medieval religious art with the transgender movement is just another expression of the Church of England departing from sound biblical principles and replacing them with wishy-washy woke psychology that has no basis in truth. Even a cursory examination of Scripture informs us that Jesus himself, when asked about marriage and divorce, unambiguously affirmed the original created order:

Haven’t you read,” he replied, “that at the beginning the Creator ‘made them male and female?’ (Matthew 19:4).

Or how about this assertion by St. Paul?

For there is one God and one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus, who gave himself a ransom for all, to be testified in due time. (1 Timothy 2:5-6).

Intriguingly, Heath’s attempt to portray Jesus as neither male nor female but something “in between” is nothing new. Indeed, such teachings hearken back to the 2nd century in the writings of some of the Gnostic Gospels, which were roundly rejected by the early Church. One such gender-confusing passage appears in the Gospel of Thomas (saying 22);

Jesus said to them,
When you make the two into one,
when you make the inner like the outer,
and the outer like the inner,
and the upper like the lower,
when you make male and female into a single one,
so that the male will not be male
and the female will not be female…….
Then you will enter the kingdom.¹

Or consider this other passage from the same Gnostic Gospel (saying 113):

Simon Peter said to them, “Let Mary leave us, because women are not worthy of life.”

Jesus said, “Behold, I will guide her so as to make her male, that she too may become a living spirit like you men. For every woman who makes herself male will enter the kingdom of heaven.”

Heretical teachings such as this appear to be creeping back into many churches, not just the Church of England. Small wonder their congregations are dwindling by the week.

True Christians need to reject this transgender Jesus nonsense as pure wickedness, yet another outworking of the reprobate mindset St. Paul described in Romans, chapter 1.

And if it were me sitting in that Church in Cambridge, I’d run a mile!

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