Cambridge dean: Jesus may have been trans

Trinity College chapel sermon uses art to show that Christ’s wound has ‘vaginal appearance’

JESUS could have been transgender, a University of Cambridge dean has said.

Dr Michael Banner, dean of Trinity College, said such a view was “legitimate” after a row over a sermon by a Cambridge research student which claimed Christ had a “trans body”, The Sunday Telegraph can disclose.

The address at last Sunday’s evensong at Trinity College chapel saw Joshua Heath, a junior research fellow who was the guest preacher, display Renaissance and Medieval paintings of the crucifixion which depicted a side wound he likened to a vagina.

Worshippers told The Telegraph they were left “in tears” and felt excluded from the church, with one shouting “heresy” at the dean upon leaving.

The sermon displayed three paintings, including Jean Malouel’s 1400 work Pietà, with the sermon pointing out Jesus’s side wound and blood flowing to the groin. The order of service also showed French artist Henri Maccheroni’s 1990 work Christs. The research fellow, whose PhD was supervised by the former Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams, said in the 14th-century Prayer Book of Bonne of Luxembourg, this wound “takes on a decidedly vaginal appearance”.

The sermon drew on non-erotic depictions of Christ’s penis in historical art, which “urge a welcoming rather than hostile response towards the raised voices of trans people”. “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 sermon said.

A congregation member who wished to remain anonymous told Dr Banner in a complaint letter: “I left the service in tears. You offered to speak with me afterwards, but I was too distressed. 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.”

The worshipper said the audience and choir were “visibly uncomfortable” at the “truly shocking” sermon which “made me feel unwelcome”. Dr Banner’s response, seen by The Telegraph, said the sermon “suggested that we might think about these images of Christ’s male/female body as providing us with ways of thinking about issues around transgender questions today”.

He added: “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.”

A Trinity College spokesman said: “The sermon explored the nature of religious art in the spirit of thoughtprovoking academic inquiry and in keeping with open debate and dialogue at the University of Cambridge.”