It’s all sex, sex, sex, even at . . . the Jesuit-run College of the Holy Cross?
Tat-Siong Benny Liew was appointed in 2013 to fill the Chair of New Testament Studies for the college in Worcester, Massachusetts. Ever since, he’s brought what student Elinor Reilly said in a college newspaper piece are “unconventional readings of Scripture” and “a new theological perspective to Holy Cross.”
Writing for the Fenwick Review, Reilly says “the centrality of sex and gender to his way of thinking about the New Testament” informs the professor on how to teach Jesus Christ to students.
Reilly refers to a book co-written by Liew, “Queering Closets and Perverting Desires: Cross-Examining John’s Engendering and Transgendering Word across Different Worlds,” which she writes “demonstrates the centrality of sex and gender to his way of thinking about the New Testament.”
… Professor Liew explains that he believes Christ could be considered a “drag king” or cross-dresser. “If one follows the trajectory of the Wisdom/Word or Sophia/Jesus (con)figuration, what we have in John’s Jesus is not only a “king of Israel” (1:49; 12:13– 15) or “king of the Ioudaioi” (18:33, 39; 19:3, 14– 15, 19– 22), but also a drag king (6:15; 18:37; 19:12),” he claims. He later argues that “[Christ] ends up appearing as a drag-kingly bride in his passion.”
Professor Liew continues:
In addition, we find Jesus disrobing and rerobing in the episode that marks Jesus’ focus on the disciples with the coming of his “hour” (13:3– 5, 12). This disrobing, as [Colleen] Conway points out, does not disclose anything about Jesus’ anatomy. Instead, it describes Jesus washing his disciples’ feet. As more than one commentator has pointed out, foot-washing was generally only done by Jewish women or non-Jewish slaves. 12 John is clear that Jesus is an Ioudaios (4:9, 22; 18:33– 35; 19:40); what John is less clear about is whether Jesus is a biological male. Like a literary striptease, this episode is suggestive, even seductive; it shows and withholds at the same time.
Professor Liew asserts that Jesus’s “excessive” and “deceptive” speech would be considered “feminine” in the culture of the time. In defense of this claim, he states that in Greco-Roman culture:
Women pollute since their moist and soft nature is also more susceptible to the assaults of wanton desires, erotic or otherwise. In short, women are wet and (thus) wild. I am suggesting that John’s constant references to Jesus wanting water (4:7; 19:28), giving water (6:35), and leaking water (19:34) speak to Jesus’ gender indeterminacy and hence his cross-dressing and other queer desires. …
He clarifies that he is not suggesting that Christ is actually a woman, but that he is neither male nor female. “I want to suggest that John’s crossdressing Jesus shows that a so-called ‘core’ is but a(n significant) effect of bodily acts,” he writes.
That interpretation, in turn, leads to an odd view of the Holy Trinity — and let’s just say it goes off the rails after that.
Liew isn’t just one flaky professor at the school. He teaches the primary New Testament class at the college and his “position and prestige which accompany an endowed chair in Religious Studies testify to the esteem in which his work is held by the College’s administration and academic community.”
“He continues to be held up as an example and a bold successor to the learned and discerning tradition of our Catholic and Jesuit College of the Holy Cross,” Reilly write.