God's Gym

Divine Male Bodies of the Bible

Stephen Moore

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781136672484
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Popular Culture in Art

In this strikingly original work, Stephen Moore considers God's male bodies--the body of Yahweh in the Hebrew Bible, and the Father of Jesus Christ, and Jesus himself in the New Testament--and our obsessive earthly quest for a perfect human form. God's Gym is about divinity, physical pain, and the visions of male perfectability. Weaving together his obsession with human anatomy and dissection, an interest in the technologies of torture, the cult of physical culture, and an expert knowledge of biblical criticism, Moore explains the male narcissism at the heart of the biblical God. God's Gym is an intensely personal book, brimming with our culture's phobias and fascinations about male perfectability.

torture

The Divine Butcher

This is my body which is broken for you.

— 1 CORINTHIANS 11:24 (textual variant)

Figure 1: Dismembered martyr from 2 Maccabees 7 as represented in an Italian Bible of 1525.

Opening Confession "My Father Was a Butcher"

"Father, save me from this hour. . . ."

—JOHN 12:27

"Father,...remove this cup from me. . . ."

—MARK 14:36

"Father, don't you see I'm burning?"

—SIGMUND FREUD, The Interpretation of Dreams¹

1 This question forms the climax of a dream that was reported third-hand to Freud, a dream that seems to have affected him deeply, as it does me (see The Interpretation of Dreams, 5:509-11; cf. 533-34, 542, 550, 571).

I begin with a confession, although it is not yet my own. "Now my soul is troubled [nun hē psychē mou tetaraktai]," confesses the Johannine Jesus in an uncharacteristic moment of uncertainty as the hour of his flogging and crucifixion draws near. "And what shall I say? 'Father, save me from this hour?'" All too quickly he collects himself: "No, it is for this reason that I have come to this hour. Father, glorify your name" (John 12:27-28). As it happens, the Father has something quite exquisite up his sleeve. He will arrange for his Son to be condemned to death around noon on the day of preparation for the Passover (19:13-16)—the precise hour when the slaughter of the passover lambs will begin in the temple precincts nearby (cf. 19:29, 36; Exod. 12:22, 46; Num. 9:12; 1 Cor. 5:7).² In truth, however, Jesus' throat was cut from the moment that he first strayed, bleating, into this Gospel: "Here is the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world!" exclaims John the Baptist upon first spotting him (1:29). The next day, Jesus staggers by again, still bleeding profusely (cf. Rev. 5:6). "Look, here is the Lamb of God!" John again exclaims (1:36; cf. Acts 8:32ff.; 1 Pet. 1:18–19; Rev. 5:6-13). Two of the Baptist's disciples set off hungrily after Jesus (1:37), following a trail of blood. The trail leads straight to the cross, which is also a spit, for it is as roast lamb that Jesus must fulfill his destiny (cf. 6:52-57: '"How can this man give us his flesh to eat?'..."), Justin Martyr saw this more clearly than most: "[T]hat [passover] lamb which was commanded to be wholly roasted [Exod. 12:8-9] was a symbol of the suffering of the cross which Christ would undergo. For the lamb, which is roasted, is roasted and dressed up in the form of the cross. For one spit is transfixed right through the lower parts up to the head, and one across the back, to which are attached the legs of the lamb."³

2 Colossal quantities of passover lambs, if Philo is to be believed (On the Special Laws 2.27145). Most of the major commentators on the Fourth Gospel note in passing the connection between the commencement of the slaughter and Jesus' sentencing. Raymond E. Brown is more loquacious than most; see The Gospel According to John XII-XXI, 883, and The Death of the Messiah, 1:847-48.

3 Justin Martyr, Dialogue with Trypho 40.5 (trans, from Roberts and Donaldson, eds., The Ante-Nicene Fathers).

My own father too was a butcher, and a lover of lamb with mint sauce. As a child, the inner geographical boundaries of my world extended from the massive granite bulk of the Redemptorist church squatting at one end of our street to the butcher shop guarding the other end. Redemption, expiation, sacrifice, slaughter.... There was no city abattoir in Limerick in those days; each butcher did his own slaughtering. I recall the hooks, the knives, the cleavers; the terror in the eyes of the victim; my own fear that I was afraid to show; the crude stun-gun slick with grease; the stunned victim collapsing to its knees; the slitting of the throat; the filling of the basins with blood; the skinning and evisceration of the carcass; the wooden barrels overflowing with entrails; the crimson floor littered with hooves.

I also recall a Good Friday sermon by a Redemptorist preacher that recounted at remarkable length the atrocious agony felt by our sensitive Saviour as the spikes were driven through his wrists and feet. Crucifixion, crucifixation, crucasphyxiation.... Strange to say, it was this somber recital, and not the other spectacle, that finally caused me to faint. Helped outside by my father, I vomited gratefully on the steps of the church.

Mors turpissima crucis

Then they will hand you over to be tortured. . . .

—MATTHEW 24:9

The central symbol of Christianity is the figure of a tortured man. Attending an exhibition of instruments of torture in Rome, Page duBois reports: "I gazed uneasily at the others visiting this spot.... I tried to imagine what brought them there. Was it a historical curiosity about the Middle Ages, or the same desire that brings people to horror movies, or sexual desire invested in bondage and discipline? I was there too."⁴ Such unease would be almost unimaginable in a Sunday service, and yet the central spectacle is not altogether dissimilar. The Gospels do nothing to disturb the bland equanimity with which the average Christian views this grisly spectacle. The evangelists seem smitten with verbal conspitation as they describe the scourging and crucifixion of Jesus.⁵ Tersely John tells us that "Pilate took Jesus and flogged him [elabon ho Pilatos ton lēsoun kai emastigōsen]" (19:1). Mark and Matthew relegate the scourging to a subordinate clause: "and after flogging Jesus, he handed him over to be crucified [kai paredōken ton Iēsoun phragellōsas hina staurōthē]" (Mark 15:15; cf. Matt. 27:26). Luke has Jesus publicize his flogging well in advance (18:33), but passes over the event itself in silence (although see 23:16, 22). What none of the evangelists find it necessary to say is that the scourging would almost certainly have been administered with a short flagrum composed of several single or braided leather thongs, each adorned with jagged fragments of bone, or weighted with metal balls, or both (see Figure 2); or that the severity of the flogging, when it was a prelude to crucifixion, was commonly calculated to bring the condemned to the forecourt, if not the threshold, of the grave, thereby shortening his sojourn on the cross (cf. Mark 15:44; John 19:33).⁶ Contrast Josephus, who telling of the flogging of a different Jesus before a different Roman procurator, cannot resist throwing in a graphic detail: "he was scourged till his bones were laid bare [mastixi mechri osteōn xainomenos]"⁷ This pales, however, beside Josephus's earlier claim that he himself had certain of his Galilean enemies "scourged until the entrails of all of them were exposed [...emastigōsen, mechri pantōn ta splagchna gymnosai]."⁸

4 DuBois, Torture and Truth, 2.

5 Scourging was a frequent, prelude to crucifixion in the Roman world; see, most, recently, Crossan, Who Killed Jesus?, 118-19.

6 Complete details can be found in Leclercq, "Flagellation (Supplice de la)," and Blinzler, The Trial of Jesus, 222-55 passim.

7 Josephus, Jewish War 6.5.5 §504 (my trans.). The Jesus in question is Jesus son of Ananias, and the procurator is Albinus.

8 Ibid. 2.21.5 §612 (my trans.). We find a rather different, but even more gruesome, account of the incident in Josephus's Life (30.147).

Figure 2: A Roman flogging as reconstructed by W .D. Edwards, W.J. Gabel, and F. E. Hosmer (Journal of the American Medical Association, 1986).

The restraint exercised by the evangelists in their accounts of Jesus' flagellation is only matched by the restraint exercised in their accounts of his crucifixion. "They crucify him [staurousin auton]" is all that Mark will say (15:24). Luke is no less tight-lipped—"they crucified him [estaurōsan auton]" is all he tells us (23:53)—while Matthew and John actually bundle the event into a subordinate clause: "And when they had crucified him [staurōsantes de auton], they divided his clothes..." (Malt. 27:35); "and carrying the cross by himself, he went out to what is called The Place of the Skull,...where they crucified him [hopou auton estaurōsan]..." (John 19:18). The noncanonical Gospel of Peter drains the scene still further of its horror: "And they brought two criminals and crucified the Lord between them. But he himself remained silent, as if in no pain" (4.1)⁹.

9 Translation from Miller, ed., The Complete Gospels. This statement is often said to express a gnostic or docetic christology. The Apocalypse of Peter (incontestably gnostic) goes one bett...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Preface: A Phobia and Two Fascinations
• Torture: The Divine Butcher
• Resurrection: Horrible Pain, Glorious Gain
• Epilogue: Good Friday the Thirteenth?
• Works Cited
• General Index
• Index of Ancient Sources