In the old days, Michael Banner and Joshua Heath would have suffered a greater consequence than tears, cries of “heresy,” and sternly worded letters. In 2022, though, that’s all that Church of England worshippers have got when a research fellow and the Dean of Trinity College at Cambridge both contend that Christ was “transgender” and offer as evidence medieval paintings that they claim show vaginal images of the wound in Christ’s side from the soldier’s spear. This claim is Biblically idiotic, as well as being stupid about the medieval mind and actual stab wounds.

Here’s the story from the Daily Mail:

[T]he view of a transgender Jesus is ‘legitimate’, according to Dr Michael Banner, the Dean who stepped in to defend the claim made at a Sermon last Sunday that Christ had a ‘trans body’.

Dr Michael Banner, the Dean of Trinity College, was backing up junior research fellow Joshua Heath, who displayed Renaissance and Medieval paintings of the crucifixion depicting a side wound that he likened to a vagina in front of the congregation.

The side wound ‘takes on a decidedly vaginal appearance’, said Heath, whose PhD was supervised by the former Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams.

‘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,’ claimed the researcher.

Heath used the 1400th-century [sic] painting Pietà with the Holy Trinity by Jean Malouel, on display in the Louvre, to illustrate his point, according to The Daily Telegraph.

As far as the Bible goes, the text is explicit. In Genesis, we learn that God made two sexes. He did not make blurred sexes or multiple sexes, just two: Man and woman. The Gospels are equally explicit about the nature of Christ. He is not the son and daughter of God. He is repeatedly referred to solely as “the Son of God.” I defy anyone to find a passage in Hebrew or Aramaic that refers to Jesus as “They” or “Them,” as “The Daughter of God,” as “The Son and Daughter of God,” or as “The It of God.” It’s pure nonsense to argue otherwise. The text does not support it.

Moreover, Heath’s and Banner’s contention that Medieval paintings show the stab wound in Jesus’s side as a vagina-like image, thereby proving Christ’s alleged transgenderism, is equal nonsense. First, no medieval painter would ever hold, let alone paint, the heretical idea that Christ had a vaginal wound on his side, making him transgender. That kind of thing led to torture and an ugly, fiery death.

Second, it’s a good bet that Heath and Banner have never seen an actual stab wound and an equally good bet that a medieval painter, living as he did in a violent and bloody world, had seen such a wound. That’s why the stab wounds in their paintings look remarkably like…not vaginas…but stab wounds.

Here’s Jean Malouel’s beautiful, 14th-century Holy Trinity:

And here’s The Wound of Christ from The Prayer Book of Bonne of Luxembourg:

Admittedly, if you keep in mind that, to a hammer, everything is a nail, and to a leftist, everything is about sex, the more culture-smashing, the better, you can sort of see why these two products of post-modernist academia would look at these pictures and think of vaginas.

However, if you take your mind out of the gutter and think about actual stab wounds, what you realize is that these medieval renderings look exactly like…stab wounds. I’m not going to include such images here but, if you go to this link (gory content warning), you can see lots of pictures of stab wounds that are oval in shape and rimmed inside, but there’s not a vagina among them.

Of course, when it comes to Henri Maccheroni’s Christs, that painting does indeed look remarkably like a grim version of a vagina. That, though, reflects on Maccheroni, a painter obsessed with erotic images of women, not on the Jesus Christ of the Gospels.

The Church of England is a sad remnant of a once robust religion, and it just became sadder when two academics, one of whom is the dean of an institution named after the Holy Trinity, peddles this kind of post-modernist, sleazy garbage. Because I don’t see the Church being reformed any time soon—I believe it’s a dying institution—I strongly recommend that those who were rightly offended by this “transgender Christ” argument leave the C of E in favor of a denomination that actually believes in the Bible.