Jesus and gender in Revelation
At the Society of Biblical Literature annual conference in Atlanta last week, I attended several papers on the Book of Revelation. The ane that I have connected to think virtually—and which provoked near merriment when I reported it on Facebook—looked at the question of whether Jesus has breasts in Revelation 1.xiii (given by Sarah Shier from Trinity College, Dublin). In case you have already switched off, please bear with me. Exploring this issue raises some central questions about what kind of text Revelation is, what it is doing, and how we read it. (I should say from the beginning that the title of this slice is wrong; the question is non and then much Jesus 'gender' as masculine or feminine, simply his 'sexual practice' as male or female. But if I had 'sex activity' in the title it would be fifty-fifty more disruptive.)
The verse in question is translated thus in English (TNIV):
…and among the lampstands was someone like a son of human dressed in a robe reaching downwardly to his feet and with a gilded sash around his chest.
But the Greek for the terminal phrase is 'periezosmenon pros tois mastois zonen chrusan', 'wrapped-around atthe breasts a-belt gold.'
The question is: how should we interpret the wordmastoi, (from which we go the word 'mastitis' and 'mastectomy') significant breasts or chest.
There are several places to look to explore this.
i. The etymology of the word comes from the verbmasaomai which ways 'to gnaw' or 'to chew'.
2. Louw and Nida, the lexicon based on semantic domains of words (in contrast to traditional lexicons) comments:
the breast of both humans and animals, with special reference to the mammary glands — 'chest.'
3. This is supported by the two other occurrences in the NT elsewhere:
'Blessed is the womb that bore you lot and blessed are the breasts (mastoi) which you sucked' (Luke 11.27; most ETs are rather more circumspect in their language).
For the time will come when y'all will say, 'Blest are the childless women, the wombs that never bore and the breasts (mastoi) that never nursed!' (Luke 23.29)
4. BDAG Lexicon does give examples of the use of 'breast' in relation to men and women, but 1 of the prominent examples is in fact Rev 1.13, then at that place is a danger here of circular reasoning.
5. Of the 37 occurrences of the give-and-take in the Greek OT (the Septuagint, LXX), all are used to refer to the breasts of women. This is important because word usage in the Lxx is likely to accept affected discussion usage in the NT.
6. The more mutual word for 'breast' isstethos from which we go 'stethoscope' and (in a roundabout way) 'sternum'.
All this is fairly compelling show on the meaning of the give-and-take. Information technology appears to have a similar semantic range to the English 'breast' which we can discover used archaically to refer to men's chests, but which predominantly refers to women. But there are further problems to consider.
First is the contrast with Rev fifteen.6, where vii angels sally from the temple similarly clad, merely in this instance with the gold belts effectually theirstephos and not theirmastoi.
Second is to consider the origin of the vision in Rev 1. The meaning of Revelation is frequently highly contested, because the imagery comes from at least 3 different sources—the OT, offset century culture, and John'due south understanding of Jesus—and these are often intertwined and in some tension. In this case, the vision of Jesus in Rev 1 combines features of the vision of the Ancient of Days in Daniel 7 and the vision of the encouraging angel in Daniel ten. In this way, John appears to be communicating that Jesus is both the messenger of God but the presence of God himself at the same time.
You tin can see how closely Rev 1 follows Dan 10 in particular:
| Daniel's vision (10:five-vi) | John's vision (1:12-18) | |
| Clothing | linen with a belt of gold | long robe with a belt of gold |
| Confront | like lightening | like the sun |
| Eyes | similar flaming torches | like a flame of fire |
| Legs/feet | like glassy bronze | like burnished bronze |
| Vocalization | like the sound of a multitude | like the audio of many waters |
| Seer'southward reaction | fell into a trance, face to the basis | fell at his feet equally though dead |
| Divine response | hand touched him and told him not to fear | hand touched him and told him not to fright |
But at Rev i.13, the golden belt from Dan 10.v has moved from the waist to themastoi. In other words, this looks like a deliberate change and so a deliberate choice of word.
There is some fence about the significance of the use of the imagery from Daniel. Greg Beale argues that it portrays Jesus as both king and priest, but David Aune argues that the imagery is non at all that of a priest. In her paper, Shier notes (as Aune did some years ago) that Jesus in Revelation uses the language of pagan goddesses to depict himself; 'I am coming quickly' (Rev 2.xvi, three.11, 22.7, 22.12) and 'I have the keys to death and Hades' (Rev i.18) have been stolen from the cult of Hecate. Aune in fact notices in passing that Mithras is depicted in a similar style, but he does not make much of information technology. In other words, this is god/goddess imagery, and not priestly. If Jesus has breasts, then it is considering role of the vision is that he takes the place of pagan goddesses, challenge to do what they do.
We shouldn't actually exist as well worried about this flexibility of sex activity identity in Revelation. Afterwards all, the 144,000 obviously male person martyr-warriors in chapter 14 (who were counted in chapter 7) are in fact (female) 'virgins' in Rev fourteen.four. More than widely, we should recollect that the NT is rather less bothered nearly the sex of Jesus than we often are. When Paul talks of Jesus as the commencement Adam in Romans 5 and 1 Cor 15, he must exist referring to Jesus as the first human being andnot every bit the kickoff male, since he conspicuously includes women amongst those who die because of sin and shall exist made alive because of redemption. Similarly, in 2 Cor 11.3, Eve is an classic for men as much as women of people who are deceived. (And, once more, the men as well as women are to be presented to husband Christ as a (female) virgin.) The depiction of Jesus as the personification of the woman wisdom from Proverbs 8 underlies much of the language of John 1, and we probably take an allusion to that in Rev three.fourteen ('the origin of creation', compare Prov 8.22).
Peradventure the near striking example of female imagery for Jesus comes in 1 Peter two.ii-3:
Like newborn babies, crave pure spiritual milk, and so that past information technology you lot may grow upwardly in your salvation, now that you lot have tasted that the Lord is good.
Peter here is making a pun on Ps 34.8, 'Taste and see that the LORD is good.' Instead of calling God 'good'agathos, he calls him 'kind',chrestos, evoking the championship of JesusChristos. Be like babies at the chest of God, since the milk you take tasted from his breasts is the kindness we find in Jesus.
What practice we learn from this in our reading of Revelation?
First, information technology is worth noting the importance of conscientious attending to the text itself, and what it really says (mastoi) rather than what we think it says or what it ought to say (stethos). In that regard, feminist readings are especially helpful, since they look again at things that we might have overlooked, peculiarly if nosotros are reading through male spectacles. Shier went on in her paper to suggest that, in some sense or other, the Jesus of chapter ane 'steals' the breasts from frustrated female parent goddess in ch 12, who now has no child to feed—which I constitute rather less convincing. Here the reading has moved from attention to the text to an ideological critique of the text from the perspective of the reader, which I notice usually tells me more than virtually the reader than anything else.
But noting the language here reminds us that John does not appear but to be writing down something he saw as if it was similar a picture before him. The linguistic communication of 'seeing' has very broad connotations—'I meet what y'all mean', 'I was bullheaded but at present I come across', or from Avatar 'I see you'—and it is sometimes hard to pin down what is going on. What does it mean to 'see' something in a dream or vision? How does that compare with the mundane 'seeing' of everyday life? To imagine that John is describing to united states of america an acoustic presentation that passes before him is unnecessarily naive. Every term in his vision is laden with theological meaning. When he 'sees' one 'like a son of homo', he is not seeing a human effigy but is theologically understanding Jesus as the Son of Human being from Daniel 7 who was handed over, crucified, and raised in vindication, at present come up on the clouds to the Ancient of Days and seated at his right hand (Acts vii.29). This vision of Jesus is a blended symbolic theology—a compelling picture using the rhetorical device of ekphrasis, the description of a real or imagined work of art.
Revelation is indeed a 'strange' book—but as we expect closely and encounter its strangeness, we find new levels of significant and significance. As we lean on these ancient doors of knowledge, we notice they slowly ease open to reveal a sparkling treasury of wisdom.
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