Jesus never mentioned homosexuals, masturbation or the role of women in social, let alone sacred, life. Yet that hasn’t stopped millennia of godly scholars and lay Christians acting as if he had. According to these finger-waggers, extrapolating from biblical apocrypha, exegesis and their own personal fantasies, women are either morally superior or corrupt whores. Likewise, same-sex love is at one moment the emotional glue that binds celibate monastic communities and at another a sin that requires participants to be stoned.
In this masterly book, the ecclesiastical historian Diarmaid MacCulloch sets out to show that the source for Christianity’s confused teachings on sex, sexuality and gender is its own untidy DNA. Woven lumpily from two distinct traditions, Greek and Judaic, each crafted in distinct ways for at least a century before Jesus’s putative arrival on Earth, the Christian church remains an essentially heterogenous affair. MacCulloch conceives it as “a family of identities”, by which he means Roman Catholic, Protestant and Orthodox, as well as a myriad other sects and splinter groups, some of which have long disappeared. And, like all families, there has been tremendous potential for bickering and bad feeling. This is obvious enough when the subject for debate is, say, the precise nature of the Trinity. But introduce human genitalia as the topic under discussion, and the result is slammed doors and sullen silences.
