Jesus was born of a virgin, which meant his Y-chromosome came from the Holy Spirit rather than man. According to Lutheran Pastor Clint Schnekloth, this means Jesus could have been intersex, a condition in which there is a discrepancy between the external genitals and the internal genitals.
“Well, we know a few more things about conception than they did back in the day. One thing we know: a woman provides the X chromosome, and the man provides a Y chromosome. In the case of parthenogenesis, an exceedingly rare occurrence among higher life forms, the chromosomal structure would typically be a duplicate of the X, or just a single X. The one thing that would not be present would be a Y,” Schnekloth writes.
The term “intersex” was previously referred to as “hermaphroditism.”
“Since he was crucified naked, and there were many eye-witnesses to this, and his circumcision, and more, I think we can confidently conclude that Jesus was male as regards his phenotype,” Schnekloth writes on his blog.
“But in terms of his genotype, frankly, we have no information. The Shroud of Turin notwithstanding, we do not have a DNA sample to work from. We do believe, based on the creeds, that Jesus Christ was fully God and fully human, so we can say confidently that the Word became flesh, took on a human genome, and lived among us,” he writes.
The pastor proposes people are afraid to ponder the ramifications of such an idea because they live in fear of the word “trans.”
Ultimately, Schnekloth says it doesn’t matter theologically or doctrinally if Jesus was the “I” in the LGBTQIA+ acronym.
“This Jesus, rather than the rigid Jesus of binaries and dominance and control, is the Jesus I think it is worth contemplating whenever the topic of minority communities come up. One could only wish that more people who get their shorts in a knot over gender identity would first teach themselves a bit more about the gendered experience of intersex people, and not reify their own personal experience as the only or pure one,” Schnekloth writes.
“This same Jesus who was aware of and sensitive to the existence of intersex people, deeply sympathetic to them, had a heart for the vulnerable,” he says.
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