Worthy Christian News > Christian > Cambridge University Dean defends sermon claiming Jesus had “trans body” with “vaginal” wound in His side

Cambridge University Dean defends sermon claiming Jesus had “trans body” with “vaginal” wound in His side

by Karen Faulkner, Worthy News Correspondent

(Worthy News) – The dean of Trinity College at the University of Cambridge has described as “legitimate” a Sunday sermon in which it was claimed Jesus had a “trans body” and that the piercing of His side had a “vaginal appearance,” Just the News reports.

In a sermon given in the presence of children on Sunday, November 20, Trinity College junior research fellow Josua Heath referred to an illustration in the 14th-century Prayer Book of Bonne of Luxembourg and said that the wound inflicted on Jesus’ side by the Roman soldier ‘takes on a decidedly vaginal appearance,” JN reports.

According to Heath, non-erotic depictions of Jesus’ penis in historical art “urge a welcoming rather than hostile response towards the raised voices of trans people,” JN reports.

Heath concluded his sermon by asserting: “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.”

While a number of worshippers were horrified at the message, Trinity College Dean Michael Banner defended it, saying in a statement that 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… 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.”

Responding to Banner’s defense of the message, one congregant told him: “I left the service in tears. You offered to speak with me afterward, but I was too distressed,” the UK Telegraph reports.

“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,” the congregant attested.